From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Jan 05 2003 - 11:18:21 MST
Lee Corbin says:
> I have always clearly maintained that people are to
> be accorded special status.
*You* were the one who appealed to the happiness or otherwise of `the race
of cows'.
> But suppose we ask of a certain Terrence O'Reilly:
> On the whole, taken as a package, was it good or
> bad for you that this happened?
This is a simply absurd bid. On the whole, taken as a package, was slavery
or genital mutilation good or bad for the slaves and the female victims, was
it good or bad that this happened (given that it might have been avoided)?
This isn't rocket science either, Lee. As Eliezer pointed out:
< If you
terminate an existing mind, the termination event is undesirable.
Declining to create a *new* unhappy mind is not morally equivalent to
*killing* an unhappy mind. Existing is different from not existing. If
this isn't the case, then instantiating a particular mind has no effect;
it already has a Platonic existence [...]. If instantiating a mind
*does* make a moral difference, then among the moral differences it makes
is that *now* the mind has civil rights. >
Damien Broderick
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