Re: Better never to have lived?

From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sun Jan 05 2003 - 00:06:35 MST


Maybe it's not necessary to explore those esoteric notions of identity
in order to make my point. Try looking at the cloning issue from the
point of view of maximizing extropy. We want there to be the greatest
number of people with the greatest potential for growing and changing and
improving themselves. Whether cloning advances extropy or not depends
on the specifics.

Suppose something terrible happened to the human race and everyone lost
the ability to reproduce, except for some reason through cloning, even
with the limited cloning technology that we have today. I think virtually
everyone would agree that in that circumstance, cloning would be the right
thing to do. Even though the resulting children might face significant
hardships, they would still have a fighting chance at a worthwhile future.

If I am right and people agree about this, it suggests to me that we
aren't really worried about birth defects and issues of consent per
se; but rather, we object to cloning precisely because there is an
alternative. It's not that giving birth in a manner which is dangerous
to the child is wrong in itself, but that doing so is wrong when there
are less dangerous ways of accomplishing the same thing. It is only
the existence of the alternatives which makes cloning suspect. In my
thought experiment, where there is no alternative, cloning is acceptable.

This fits into the Extropian framework as I described above. We object
to cloning because it gives birth to a child who has less potential for
a satisfying life, less potential extropy, than a child who is born
via other reproductive mechanisms. But if there is no alternative,
then giving birth by cloning is the choice that maximizes extropy.

This line of reasoning leads to the same result I suggested before,
that if cloning allows for the birth of additional "net" babies than if
this technology is not used, it actually increases the total extropy
and should be supported. But if it does not, if the total number of
babies born would be about the same (say, because infertile parents
adopt children, which creates incentives that slightly increase birth
rates among fertile people), then cloning reduces extropy, and we as
Extropians would conclude that it is wrong.

Hal



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