Re: SOC: cultural relativism

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Jul 24 2000 - 14:38:55 MDT


Dehede011@aol.com writes:

> In a message dated 7/24/00 12:06:30 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
> QueeneMUSE@aol.com writes:
> << So, the advocates of multi-culturalism seek to include other (useless to
> us)
> traditions, not to somehow morally equalize them. The part that is hard for
> us to get over is that we really DO think our lives are richer, more
> educated, simply BETTER!! The problem is, how to let the people involved
> make their OWN judgements on what THEY want. That way the 'superior' values
> are chosen, not enforced. >>
>
>
> I suggest you do a skim read of M. Csikzsentmihalyi's Flow and The Evolving
> Self. He does a very good critique on this subject using an approach I have
> never seen before.

Yes, I really liked it when I read it. Has anybody actually tried to
use it?

Transhumanism in many ways embodies an extreme relativism, because we
question the very idea that there is a human essence - we can (given
sufficient tech etc) become anything, and there is no fundamental
reason why the current form of homo sapiens should be retained. Even
stronger, the majority position appears to be that it is OK to turn
oneself into *any* form, as long as it is a voluntary operation
etc. Some forms might be better than others, but even the evaluations
we make are amenable to change (although eventually reality will of
course be the ultimate judge - but it is up to us to do the
attributions of how we react to the results).

Transhumanism as species relativism? Multispeciesism?

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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