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. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11460