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Don't be so dramatic. Baylife has always been terrible, but it was affordable in the past, so people put up with it. If you care too much about what other people think of you, then you possibly aren't spending enough time thinking about things that aren't people.
Isn't this just asking for your ideas to not be criticized? Me: let's extend life Someone else: If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical Isn't this exactly how it's supposed to work? Why would Sam complain about an encounter like this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn't the critique of ideas, most people are happy to have an intellectually honest debate about their merits and shortcomings. The issue is instantly accusing someone of serious moral failings and painting them as a social pariah to be ostracized, the instant they put forward a locally unorthodox view. One group is constantly expanding the area of topics that are taboo, the other believes that having tab…
Maybe Sam just has serious moral failings? If everywhere he goes people have a visceral reaction to what he's saying maybe there is some ethical shortcoming there. He's the common denominator in all the situations.
Isn't this just asking for your ideas to not be criticized? Me: let's extend life Someone else: If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical Isn't this exactly how it's supposed to work? Why would Sam complain about an encounter like this?
No, he's asking for ideas to be criticised, and for the people presenting the ideas not to be ostracised. You can say "it's a bad idea to work on extending life", but following on from there to cast the person presenting the idea as unethical is doing more harm than good.
"I think black people are genetically inferior." ...followed by... "Why can't we have a free exchange of ideas?"
What if the ideas are unethical? There is a lot of that going around these days.
Life extension is one that comes up quite a bit, because the question doesn't seem to involve life extension for all, but life extension for a few who can afford it. Or, if it is being presented as a public good, the owner of the tech gets to become a new robber baron.
Maybe we need to decide if being ultra-wealthy is moral when people are in need and there is a system in place that generates people in need.
Downvotes away!
I think this is a radical simplification of what is a complex problem. Genetic engineering as a whole is known to be an area strewn with moral hazards, and not least harks back to some of the darkest days of 20th century science. Having an ethical outlook isn't a form of heresy, it's a form of societal safety. We need to accept that some of these ideas (probably not all - it's always difficult to get on the right sid…
Both technology and ethics can progress and regress across a huge range of concepts. Too much unexamined progress (of either tech or ethics) in one area can lead to terrible outcomes.
Being able to debate and have these conversations is essential to finding the balance.
I'm reading this as complaint about opinions condemning discussion of certain concepts, which is fair. But to ignore that other concepts face the same type of condemnation in China is... amazing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn't the critique of ideas, most people are happy to have an intellectually honest debate about their merits and shortcomings. The issue is instantly accusing someone of serious moral failings and painting them as a social pariah to be ostracized, the instant they put forward a locally unorthodox view. One group is constantly expanding the area of topics that are taboo, the other believes that having tab…
Maybe Sam just has serious moral failings? If everywhere he goes people have a visceral reaction to what he's saying maybe there is some ethical shortcoming there. He's the common denominator in all the situations.
I wonder how much of this is an outgrowth of the current university campus climate where opinions that don't fit into the predominant liberal worldview can't be voiced. I don't mean this as a criticism of liberals or liberalism specifically here, since I realize many conservatives would do the same about issues they care about if they had the power and numbers to.
At the meta level this is a symptom of the fact that the polarization of our culture is extremely deep. We are polarized on epistemology , metaphysics , and what it means to be human , with the left favoring various forms of scientific or empirical epistemology and a mutable model of human nature and the right favoring revelatory or traditionalist epistemology and an immutable model of human nature. The latter is tru…
What is scientific or empirical about safe spaces and identity politics?