X-Message-Number: 11460
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 11:19:27 -0500
From: <> (Jeffrey Soreff)
Subject: Re: 11454, cryonics and ethics

Leon Dean writes:
>We would have a static population.  No one would be born and no one would
>die.  I am a great believer of humanity and have faith in what we could
>become, but at the moment we suck!  We wage war, we kill each other -
>thousands of times each day.  We rape people, we steal, we waste the vast
>majority of our lives on drinking and fighting, talking about sport and
>sleeping.  We annihilate hundreds of other species and are doing out best
>to destroy the very planet we are on.  As a species we are
>evil....................at the moment.

The way that I resolve the problem is to view ethics not as a good in
themselves, but only as a heuristic that we use as a way to live
together without killing too many of each other.  If some brand of ethics
demands my death, that is sufficient reason for me to discard it.  If
some brand of ethics condemns everyone, then it makes sense for
_everyone_ to scrap it.  If some standard judges our species as evil,
the standard is scrap, since the only use of the standard in the first
place is to make human lives safer and more comfortable.

A somewhat grislier way of viewing this is to drop the approximation of
averaging the costs and benefits of a code of ethics across the whole
population and think about differential gains and losses.  You've
described an abstract judgement on every human alive today.  Now
consider _who_ could actually try to act on such a viewpoint.  It would
have to be someone who intended to _control_ the shape of future
generations, true?  I think that this is typical of abstract ethical
judgements.  They look like abstractions of real human actions all right;
abstractions of the actions of rulers, of kings or priests.  Under this
approximation the typical ethical judgement should be viewed as a con
job, tricking people like us into acting for the benefit of our rulers
rather than of ourselves.  I think a good general corrective is to
always look suspiciously at what ethics calls for, to ensure that they
aren't merely tricking us into doing the work of tyrants for them.

                                             Best wishes,
                                             -Jeffrey Soreff
standard disclaimer: I do not speak for my employer.

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