Category: Science, Physics, and Philosophy of Science

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/science/biologists-call-for-halt-to-gene-editing-technique-in-humans.htmlPROPERTARIAN POSITION ON GENETIC MODIFICATION

(good read)(from elsewhere)

Hiroshi: We are opening Pandora’s Box.

Curt: Or are we achieving our potential?

Hiroshi: Yes, but potential for good or evil?

Curt: Good and evil are technical terms in my universe. And this technology, like violence, is neutral.

The question is whether the ends produce risk to the genome. But since at all times when we suppress the reproduction of the underclasses, or when upper classes migrate to new areas, mankind evolves rapidly; and because morality increases and impulsivity decreases and time preference lengthens with intelligence, our only choice between Brazil on one end and Star Trek on the other in a populated planet is this one.( Superior intelligence does not breed superior ambition or aggression. )

As far as I know aggression defeats intelligence and Huntington missed that observation.

Hegel was wrong as well – heroism and by consequence, sovereignty, jury and truth telling are the cause of western rates of development.

Hiroshi: In my universe, good and evil are not technical terms. Imagine a universe in which no human beings exist. In that universe there is neither good nor evil: everything is technical and neutral. Good and evil can exist only when human beings exist. Good and evil become important terms when human beings decides their mode of being or make “judgment” in the sense of Hannah Arendt. (See my short essay above on Arendt’s conception of judging)

7 hrs · Like

Curt: Sorry, I meant ‘technical’ in the sense of objective. And objective in the sense of independent of introspection. I also use the term ‘decidable’, appropriated from mathematics, to avoid the loading on the term ‘judgement’. The difference being that introspection and therefore subjectivity is present in judgement, and not present in decidability. So good and evil are decidable propositions.

In this sequence: One can be lax. One an err. One can privatize. One can engage in predation. One can engage in destruction without benefit to the self. One can engage in destruction that produces a chain of destructive externalities. The last is my definition of ‘evil’ and immoral.

If on the other hand, one warrants defense against externalities (takes all possible known precautions), in order to create a chain of beneficial externalities – then this is ‘good’ and moral.

The concepts of good and evil, judgement, justice, and morality, have been inherited from our ancient past and remain loaded with introspective demands, because of our failure to articulate the necessary and sufficient properties of cooperation. But the necessary and sufficient properties of cooperation are no longer unknown but trivial.

What remains is the analysis of strategies. Western (scientific) Truth, Anglo-Jewish Political Correctness, Russian-Jewish Postmodernism, Chinese Delay-Deceit, Hindu Avoidance, and Muslim Denial and rebellion. Each is a strategy for group persistence.

In the context of this question, the positive externalities of improving the genome, and creating supermen – or at least, highly intelligent, attractive (symmetrical) and with a moral bias, is hard to argue with.

This technology exists already. We do it by assortative mating. We call it ‘castes’ or ‘classes’. A race to the top (selective breeding) has always produced better ends than a race to the bottom (through excess reproduction of the lower classes).

So my question is instead the non-intuitive: we are now engaged in an experiment called ‘redistribution’ which increases the rates of the lower classes, and suppresses the rates of the middle classes, and has isolated our upper classes. This experiment has evolved (through advocacy of democracy under the ‘enlightenmemt’) into a dysgenic disaster that one can easily call ‘evil’, and it’s promotors ‘evil’ as well, by the very technical criterion I proposed above. Society has become ordered to value a negative by use of a ‘judgement’ that democracy is a good, when the consequences are an evil.

So why is it not beneficial to reorder society around a judgement that improves man, rather than devolves him?

I would much rather have a public debate, and a ‘judgement’ about how to handle the improvement of man, than the current debate about how to degenerate him.

So in this sense, suppressing this technology is to persist an evil.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

( Eli Harman: add this to the weapons cache)