[ExI] Moral enhancement

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Wed Oct 7 08:00:41 UTC 2015


On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 1:29 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

>
> We do enforce it on children and insane people, often for their own good.
> Unfortunately we also do do it for other, bad reasons. And as we argued in
> my most controversial paper (
> http://www.smatthewliao.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/HEandClimateChange.pdf
> ) we may want to enforce these things on *ourselves*.
>
> There has been a discussion in bioethics of moral enhancement for a few
> years (centered around Savulescu and Person's book "Unfit for the Future"):
> given that we are moving towards a world of powerful technologies in the
> hands of most people, it might be necessary for our survival to become more
> ethical and sane. So biomedical moral enhancement, improving people's
> ability to make good moral choices, may be something that should be
> enforced even if the exact choices or moral systems are left to people.
>

### Please disregard my empty post of a couple minutes ago.

And yes, I am all for forcible moral enhancement! The evil ones should not
be allowed to run free, they are sometimes expensive to dispose of, usually
horrendously expensive to warehouse, so if the technology existed to make
them all good like us, we should do it pronto.

Now, the exact meaning of "enhancement" in this situation may be a trifle
controversial... I am afraid that enhancement *my way* would have many
folks running around in horror... but, well, only a liar would say progress
is easy.

Eventually, the gods of copybook headings will judge our efforts, harshly.
We will see if diminutive, tree-hugging, grass-eating non-breeders will be
a success when confronted with e.g. cooperative, fast, omnivorous,
hyperspecialized, copy-clan extreme long-term fitness-maximizers.

Rafał
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