From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Sat Jan 04 2003 - 17:59:00 MST
Lee Corbin wrote:
> What is bad about Dolly's arthritis? Who is it bad for?
> Would it have been better for Dolly if cloning had been
> forbidden? Would Dolly be better off dead?
[shakes head genially] Ahem.
I think the entire arena of creating and bringing up new human or AI lives is,
and always has been, *charged* with issues of almost intolerable complexity.
I prefer that we do our best to be nice. I never promoted "forbidd[ing]".
I expressed a preference.
Edward de Bono has famously said "Critical thinking is cheap thinking."
Lots of rhetoric, including pop-up Socratic dialogs, seems cheap to me, too.
You use the word "tradeoff" in a breezy way, and then claim there are none.
You ask for consistency. This suggests that you find my consistency lacking.
If so, it might not be for the reason you think (see below). I am unsure what
any consequence of a lack of consistency would be, in your view, beyond your
disapproval or deprecation. Not that I think that's especially in evidence here.
Many aspects of human thought are inconsistent; "society of mind" and all that.
Some people even claim that a recognition of contradiction is the primary sign
of human maturity. I am not positive that it is, or that maturity is a purely good thing--
and I don't mean to bring that up in a deprecatory way. There's the other lovely saying,
"There is nothing 'mature wisdom' resembles more than 'being too tired'." I bring this up
to reflect on the seeming fact that the more [many] people look at it, "reality"
seems to not always admit of tidy concise consistency that is also correct--that
we (humanity) sometimes [[think we] have to] settle for hacks, patches or splines
rather than a unified explicable no-holes theory of ethics. Feel free to call that wrong.
But wrong, compared to what?
The "cash value" of many simple, claimed-"consistent" philosophies seems low to me.
I think it would be prudent to do a lot more cloning work with other animals /
models before splashing off into cloning people. Evidently, you do not think that.
I think it would be a good idea to treat all living beings with kindness.
Yet I eat meat on a regular basis. Evidently, I don't think what I think.
I am aware of the contradiction. "Well, sue me, I'm not mechanical."
MMB
I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization.
Sometimes I forget.
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