[ExI] evolution of ethics, was ...didn't know he was at the party... was: RE: Wrath of the Old Ones

spike spike66 at att.net
Mon May 4 04:37:15 UTC 2015


 

 

>… On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Subject: Re: [ExI] didn't know he was at the party... was: RE: Wrath of the Old Ones

 

>…Speaking of not using the intelligence of your population, how about the Muslims, who deny so many roles to their women?  As we all know, in the good ol USA we have used women for a long time.  Even the grossly underpaid secretaries functioned more as office managers and many offices could not run without them.

>…I have read that the backwardness of Muslim society can be attributed to in part by the lack of inclusion of women in their society.  I just have to wonder if they are basically afraid of women.  Afraid that some women will be better than the men are.  I don't know much about Muslims, so maybe another member can fill us in here.  I don't want to make any prejudicial statements.  Maybe they are limited by what the Koran says.  bill w

 

 

Any society which collectively decides the ancient ones knew best will have the kinds of trouble you reference.

 

At some point after science and technology came along, any society should have collectively concluded that it needed a completely new basis for morality and ethics.  It must throw out the ancient texts, every word of it, and start fresh with a clean sheet of paper, to form a completely new basis for behavior based on new, science-compatible notions.  The Extropian Principles and the more recent Proactionary Principle would be good examples of that.

 

http://www.extropy.org/proactionaryprinciple.htm

 

Conservative societies fear throwing out everything and starting fresh, but I can assure them, many notions survive such as the golden rule.  

 

We must recognize that even the golden rule sometimes lets us down.  BillW, you know of an area which is full of cases where I myself have and regularly do violate the golden rule: genetics.  One sends away a spit sample and a 100 bucks, a few weeks later one is given a list of a few thousand people who are your genetic relatives who have also done the test.  The list is sorted by closest first.

 

OK cool!  Most of the time cool.  But what if… you discover your second cousin is not genetically related to your shared great grandparents?  What if your second cousin doesn’t know how to meta-interpret DNA results, but you do, so you know and he doesn’t.  What do you do?  If I follow the golden rule, it is easy: I am a ravenous infovore, a pacman for information; I want to know everything, even the negative.  If I have genetic disease which will kill me soon, I want to know.  So if I treat my own second cousin the way I would be treated, I would tell.  But I am not everyone.  If my father is illegitimate, I want to know that.  But I am not everyone.  

 

So… I decided to violate the golden rule and not tell my own second cousin that either he, his father or his grandfather are illegitimate.  He apparently thinks I or my mother are the illegitimates (if he knows, he also chose to not mention that to me) but I have developed some advanced techniques which let me prove that the illegitimacy is on his side.  So… I chose to not tell.  

 

What would you do?  I violated the golden rule and chose to let him continue to think whatever brings him comfort.

 

Any of the rest of you who do DNA tests, be ready for this one.  

 

Suggestions please, anyone?   Anders wan Kenobi, Max, Natasha, any other ethics hipsters, what do I do now, coach?  

 

spike

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