From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Mar 29 2003 - 08:15:21 MST
Since my previous comments with respect to when war
might be a utilitarian necessity only seemed to draw a few
(useful) offlist comments but Michael's recent comments on
perhaps a fundamental incompatibility between Islam and
[trans]humanity did stir the pot, I'm going to take another
shot at this.
Lets start with Greg's pointing out Shermer's perspective
on cloning. A URL that works for me is:
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00084EAF-2081-1E61-A98A809EC5880105
Now lets take article 3 of his proposed laws of cloning:
3. A human clone is to be accorded the dignity and respect due any member
of our species.
This is a critical value that must be dealt with in the evolution
of [trans]humanity. Humanity doesn't even come close to providing
other humans with "dignity and respect". We can cite examples
from the Saddam Fedayeen (I would encourage some of the people
on the list to consider whether we can even classify these people
as "human") to simply the average person walking down the street
in any of the more developed countries who is unaware of the large
numbers of people in Bangladesh who are being poisoned by arsenic
in their drinking water.
The question becomes -- how does one deal with people void of
any "dignity and respect" for others of our species?
And then how are we to deal with expansion of the disparities
between what one might consider "members of our species"?
One can see the tip of the iceberg now in terms of wealth disparities
but it is going to become much more significant when that evolves
into intelligence or genetic engineering disparities. The cloning
debate is but a melted drop on the tip of the iceberg compared
with what seems possible.
Robert
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