Tuesday, May 20, 2008

The View From Hell

I've added a significant new link, The View From Hell, which addresses the subject of coerced existence from a more formally ethical perspective. Give it a read!

5 comments:

Sister Y said...

Hey thanks! Yeah, I'm still working on the "more formal" part, as I'm a lawyer by training and not a professional philosopher, but it's coming along. Keep in touch.

TGGP said...

Off topic, but Hopefully Anonymous claims it is imperative to start mass-producing kiddies in the hopes that one of them will be able to save us all here. He appears to be an egoist like myself, so I don't think many of your arguments would matter much to him, but I found it an interesting bit of pro-natalism.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, tggp. Coincidentally, I was just over reading your latest post when I got the comment notification here. I see several problems with Hopefully's 'solution'. I'll try to get over there and address them when I have the time. Cheers!

Sister Y said...

I saw that - yeah, that's an example of a value other than suffering (continued existence of humanity, transcendence, whatever) being taken as ipso facto more important than preventing suffering. To be cute, it's making more Ripleys and ignoring their suffering, focusing on all the good the cloned Ripleys might do.

It makes lots of assumptions: (a) a cloning procedure could be perfected which accurately reproduces the intelligence of the subject; (b) the clones will work for the goals the cloners want them to; (c) the goals the cloners have are reasonable; (d) making more people, in this case cloned people, is an acceptable response to the problem the would-be-cloners have identified.

Anonymous said...

Smack on, curator; I just posted over there along those same lines of reasoning.