Re: Moo/Boo! Was: Agricultural Skyscrapers

Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Tue, 10 Feb 1998 18:51:58 -0800


dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu (dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu) writes:
>I thought that extropy in its classical formulation was precisely a
>measure of intelligence, information, energy, vitality, experience,
>diversity, and opportunity for growth, and so that the
>broadening and complicating of ethical perception would pretty
>self-evidently be extropian. It's an ethical analog to pancritical
>rationalism. It is an embracing of the moral richness of the
>world. To say that you "accept" complexity when its "unavoidable"
>suggests that it is scarcely a value at all. I agree that it is possible

Random numbers are complex. The tit-for-tat strategy is simple.
Increasing those other features you mentioned may tend to cause an increase
in complexity, but that doesn't make complexity valuable in and of itself,
nor a good indicator of the others.
This is particularly true of moral systems. A moral system, if it is to
be more than a personal set of habits, must be something that a community
can agree to follow. Simplicity is valuable in a moral system because
the easier it is to follow a moral system, the easier it is to keep it
effective by drawing a clear dividing line between those who follow it
and those who reject it. Also, the more rules a system has, the harder it
is to achieve a consensus about it.

Vegetarianism, unless accompanied by a clear principle for dividing
nonhuman lifeforms into those whose rights we respect and those we don't,
risks blurring the boundaries in a way that makes it seem easier to
for people to decide that that boundary is just a matter of personal
choice.

-- 
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