I think it's less "will never be possible" and more "the processes necessary to get there are so rife with ethical issues and so unnecessary that why would we bother?"
Again, artificial wombs are probably going to be a necessary tool for advanced bioengineering anyway. There are no ethical issues involved in developing them, at least none that I consider legitimate.
The most interesting thing about this thread is failure of imagination on the behalf of people saying artificial wombs will "never be possible". Just like those who say that genetic engineering will never make people with superhuman properties - as astonishing a statement as I have ever heard, especially when you consider that there are animals with superhuman properties.
I think it's less "will never be possible" and more "the processes necessary to get there are so rife with ethical issues and so unnecessary that why would we bother?"
I mean, we could probably invent a giant robotic fully articulated banana that shot laser beams, but why the hell would we? Just because something is theoretically possible to invent doesn't mean anyone will (or should) bother inventing it.
Yeah, I totally agree.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I think it's less "will never be possible" and more "the processes necessary to get there are so rife with ethical issues and so unnecessary that why would we bother?"
Again, artificial wombs are probably going to be a necessary tool for advanced bioengineering anyway. There are no ethical issues involved in developing them, at least none that I consider legitimate.
Sure, if by "advanced bioengineering" you mean "artificial lifeforms with very little resemblance to humans."
I imagine that if we're growing just slightly-modified humans, we'll have professional surrogate motherhood long before we'll have artificial wombs.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
We currently have genetic diversity in our populations. Some people, for instance, look better than others. They are, research shows, generally treated better. Higher salaries, lower sentences when they committ crimes etcetc. If this happends more or less randomly, while we might not like it, there appears to be a lack of skies falling down. So why would it fall down if we did it on purpose? If John wasn't good looking and tall because of accident of birth, but because an engineer made it thus?
For that matter, what about plastic surgery? Should we subject that to restrictions because being more attractive makes you more competitive? If not, then why would we do it for genetic engineering of your own offspring? If I want my child to have a better selection of potential spouses by increasing her good looks, why is this worse than what we already have by design - plastic surgery - or by accident of birth?
We currently have genetic diversity in our populations. Some people, for instance, look better than others. They are, research shows, generally treated better. Higher salaries, lower sentences when they committ crimes etcetc. If this happends more or less randomly, while we might not like it, there appears to be a lack of skies falling down. So why would it fall down if we did it on purpose? If John wasn't good looking and tall because of accident of birth, but because an engineer made it thus?
For that matter, what about plastic surgery? Should we subject that to restrictions because being more attractive makes you more competitive? If not, then why would we do it for genetic engineering of your own offspring? If I want my child to have a better selection of potential spouses by increasing her good looks, why is this worse than what we already have by design - plastic surgery - or by accident of birth?
I am all for subsidizing plastic surgery.
Medical subsidies in any non-scarcity society are going to be subject to prioritization; right now reconstructive cosmetic surgery after an injury or cancer might be the only ones reasonably eligible, but it's not unimaginable that some hypothetical future society might be interested in helping people fix less dramatic imperfections, given a reduction in costs or an elevation in standards of attractiveness.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
We currently have genetic diversity in our populations. Some people, for instance, look better than others. They are, research shows, generally treated better. Higher salaries, lower sentences when they committ crimes etcetc. If this happends more or less randomly, while we might not like it, there appears to be a lack of skies falling down. So why would it fall down if we did it on purpose? If John wasn't good looking and tall because of accident of birth, but because an engineer made it thus?
For that matter, what about plastic surgery? Should we subject that to restrictions because being more attractive makes you more competitive? If not, then why would we do it for genetic engineering of your own offspring? If I want my child to have a better selection of potential spouses by increasing her good looks, why is this worse than what we already have by design - plastic surgery - or by accident of birth?
I am all for subsidizing plastic surgery.
Medical subsidies in any non-scarcity society are going to be subject to prioritization; right now reconstructive cosmetic surgery after an injury or cancer might be the only ones reasonably eligible, but it's not unimaginable that some hypothetical future society might be interested in helping people fix less dramatic imperfections, given a reduction in costs or an elevation in standards of attractiveness.
Doubtful, mainly because of what allowing that says socially.
Doubtful, mainly because of what allowing that says socially.
What does it say socially?
You know the NHS covers Roaccutane for acne, right? Public hospitals in Brazil offer reduced-cost cosmetic surgery to low-income citizens. And there are a lot of gray areas where a surgery might be performed under public coverage even without clear medical necessity because of the cosmetic benefits - for example, the removal of an ugly mole without a biopsy, justified as a preventative measure but driven really by the appearance.
I'm not saying that in the foreseeable future we're going to end up doing boob jobs on the public dime, but what constitutes a disfiguring imperfection might change. It's not unimaginable that the NHS might cover acne scar removal in addition to simple prevention, or that a country may decide to (partially or completely) subsidize orthodontic work.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
There was a BMJ article a couple of years back about plastic surgeries done under NHS funding with flimsy justifications. I can't seem to find it now, though.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Who determines what is or isn't "relevant"? What is truly worth doing? Why is doing things we enjoy bad? It seems that the only justification the creator of that comic can find is by giving the people watching TV and playing video games expressions of misery for no good reason.
I can understand why this can be a problem in our modern society; it distracts us from realizing what is wrong with the world and what we can do to fix it. I honestly didn't see anything wrong with the world as portrayed in "Brave New World"; if there were any major problem with the world in the novel, we were never told what they were.
Suppose humanity does solve all its problems sometime in the future: Will it still be bad to indulge in feelies, orgy porgies, and centrifugal bumblepuppies (was that last one even in the book?) then?
EDIT: I'm just going to go ahead and make a new thread for this.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I think it's less "will never be possible" and more "the processes necessary to get there are so rife with ethical issues and so unnecessary that why would we bother?"
Again, artificial wombs are probably going to be a necessary tool for advanced bioengineering anyway. There are no ethical issues involved in developing them, at least none that I consider legitimate.
Yeah, well, you're obviously not thinking of the not-too-crazy scenario of a child sharing DNA with 3-or-more parents and being birthed out of a synthetic uterus placed inside a male-to-female transsexual.
Just that sentence alone probably set Jerry Falwell's hair on fire.
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Tiger BurningDig if you will, the pictureRegistered User, SolidSaints Tuberegular
The thing is, in order to be an oppressed society, there needs to be oppressors who benefit from oppressing the people. 1984 had that, obviously: the government benefited from keeping the status quo going with themselves in the privileged top and everyone else suffering below.
BNW though? Not so much. There was again a government who was keeping the status quo. But did it benefit from it? From the description in the book, when they meet the World Controller Mond, it seems quite the opposite. Mond states that World Controllers actually sacrifice their own happiness to manage the world to maximize the happiness of the population (and it seems they are doing a good and responsible job). He does not seem to have access to resources or luxuries that are deprived from the rest of the population (the way the government does in 1984). He does have access to information - both more accurate information on the current state of the world and past information like banned books - but a government having access to confidential information restricted from the population isn't novel or shocking or in itself oppressive.
Really, from the book's descriptions, the government of BNW seems more like dedicated public servants in a benevolent dictatorship, rather than a tyrannical oppressive dystopian regime.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
edited May 2011
I think the overarching themes of BNW make more sense in the context that we're being continually flooded with irrelevance, but instead of from a shadowy government seeking a docile public, it's from a conglomerate of corporate interests who have realized that demand can be motivated through economic and social self-interest than actual need or utility.
Take for instance, the agricultural companies who develop our impossibly cheap corn. Thanks to them, everyone has diabetes now, even little kids. Why? Because they've incorporated their product into purchaseable foodstuffs and driven the price to where no one outside of the factory-farming complex can reasonably compete.
I think an artificial uterus will most likely come from the Obstetrics dept of research. Think of a premature baby. How early can one come out and still be viable? Eventually we will be able to move that time closer and closer to conception. And when that happens? Abortion would be a non issue. Pregnant? Drop the kid in a artifical womb and move on. Genetic engineering would probably be a low priority, with massive divides like abortion has now. Once you start that stuff, defining "human" actually would need to happen.
But genetic engineering also has the possibility of making "humanity" irrevelent. If we start uplifting other species (or running into aliens), we're going to have to give them full rights as well, so defining ethics based on how human something is is going to end up being incredibly bigoted.
Ultimately, we could end up with some other species becoming dominant, and humanity either becoming irrevelent or going completely extinct. And that will be fine, as long as the new species inherits our values.
I think an artificial uterus will most likely come from the Obstetrics dept of research. Think of a premature baby. How early can one come out and still be viable? Eventually we will be able to move that time closer and closer to conception. And when that happens? Abortion would be a non issue. Pregnant? Drop the kid in a artifical womb and move on. Genetic engineering would probably be a low priority, with massive divides like abortion has now. Once you start that stuff, defining "human" actually would need to happen.
I agree with Jothki on the whole "human" definition "issue":
But genetic engineering also has the possibility of making "humanity" irrevelent. If we start uplifting other species (or running into aliens), we're going to have to give them full rights as well, so defining ethics based on how human something is is going to end up being incredibly bigoted.
Ultimately, we could end up with some other species becoming dominant, and humanity either becoming irrevelent or going completely extinct. And that will be fine, as long as the new species inherits our values.
It's fine to conflate humans with the good qualities we associate with ourselves while we're the only beings doing it - but that'll change in the future and unless we prepare for it we'll end up with a lot of bigotedness as uplifts, artificial lifeforms and more deserve rights.
Regarding the artificial wombs ability to solve the abortion problem I'd say that it's fairly low.
Dropping a kid in an artificial womb and moving on would be a bad move economically unless the whole notion of children being entitled to financial support from their genetic parents is done with (which I made a thread about) and as long as fetuses aren't recognized to have any rights the only reason to drop one into a womb would be to satisfy people who consider them to have rights - which an invasive surgery might be too high of a price to pay for that.
Why undergo an invasive surgery in order to remove a fetus when you can just have a non-invasive abortion at an early stage?
It would certainly remove the need of late-term abortions as I could see the two procedures being equal in terms of danger but late-term abortions are fringe cases.
The thing is, in order to be an oppressed society, there needs to be oppressors who benefit from oppressing the people.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of examples of oppressive ideas being perpetuated by people who are themselves part of the oppressed - closeted gay men who gay-bash and women who push unrealistic beauty standards on other women are two that come to mind off-hand. I'd argue that straight people do not benefit in any tangible way from homophobia, yet it persists. Oppression can be sustained by nonrational processes of fear and stereotyping. It doesn't necessarily require a benefiting oppressor class.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I think an artificial uterus will most likely come from the Obstetrics dept of research. Think of a premature baby. How early can one come out and still be viable? Eventually we will be able to move that time closer and closer to conception. And when that happens? Abortion would be a non issue. Pregnant? Drop the kid in a artifical womb and move on. Genetic engineering would probably be a low priority, with massive divides like abortion has now. Once you start that stuff, defining "human" actually would need to happen.
And as a treatment for infertility. An artificial womb would eliminate the physical structure of the uterus and hormonal problems as causes of infertility.
Kistra on
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I think an artificial uterus will most likely come from the Obstetrics dept of research. Think of a premature baby. How early can one come out and still be viable? Eventually we will be able to move that time closer and closer to conception. And when that happens? Abortion would be a non issue. Pregnant? Drop the kid in a artifical womb and move on. Genetic engineering would probably be a low priority, with massive divides like abortion has now. Once you start that stuff, defining "human" actually would need to happen.
And as a treatment for infertility. An artificial womb would eliminate the physical structure of the uterus and hormonal problems as causes of infertility.
Yep.
Even if you disagree with the use of artificial wombs as I've outlined it in my OP, it is still a monumental piece of technology that will change mankind.
People who for one reason or another cannot carry a child will be able to use one and people who'd rather not experience the sometimes disfiguring effects of a pregnancy would be able to opt for one as well.
The thing is, in order to be an oppressed society, there needs to be oppressors who benefit from oppressing the people.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of examples of oppressive ideas being perpetuated by people who are themselves part of the oppressed - closeted gay men who gay-bash and women who push unrealistic beauty standards on other women are two that come to mind off-hand. I'd argue that straight people do not benefit in any tangible way from homophobia, yet it persists. Oppression can be sustained by nonrational processes of fear and stereotyping. It doesn't necessarily require a benefiting oppressor class.
Also, the people in charge can simply be wrong. They may truly believe that banning books, or lettuce is whats best for society and must be enforced with an iron fist. They may believe the rules they make themselves, and follow them to the letter. The may have even persuaded society to agree with them too.
But none of these things make them right. You can work hard all day in your torture chamber torturing lettuce eaters and go home exhausted at the end of the day to a tiny house which is all you can afford with all the money you spend torturing and tracking those who eat lettuce, but the simple act of gaining no personal benefit doesn't make the decision correct.
Sigh. Anyone who supports some sort of government control over human reproduction is really, really ignorant of history.
It's never ended well, and there's no reason to believe that it ever will.
Though at the other end of the we're talking fertility treatments on the NHS. It's also not like the cases you're referring to somehow slid into tyranny, they pretty much did what they set out to do, it's just now those goals aren't something we'd approve of.
But then again it depends how far we're talking - the method BNW uses is ment to be 'tyranny', or at least a strong form of social control over the individual. And required pretty much building the society from the ground up after a catastrophic war that more or less ended civilisation as it was know.
The thing is, in order to be an oppressed society, there needs to be oppressors who benefit from oppressing the people.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of examples of oppressive ideas being perpetuated by people who are themselves part of the oppressed - closeted gay men who gay-bash and women who push unrealistic beauty standards on other women are two that come to mind off-hand. I'd argue that straight people do not benefit in any tangible way from homophobia, yet it persists. Oppression can be sustained by nonrational processes of fear and stereotyping. It doesn't necessarily require a benefiting oppressor class.
Also, the people in charge can simply be wrong. They may truly believe that banning books, or lettuce is whats best for society and must be enforced with an iron fist. They may believe the rules they make themselves, and follow them to the letter. The may have even persuaded society to agree with them too.
But none of these things make them right. You can work hard all day in your torture chamber torturing lettuce eaters and go home exhausted at the end of the day to a tiny house which is all you can afford with all the money you spend torturing and tracking those who eat lettuce, but the simple act of gaining no personal benefit doesn't make the decision correct.
Along those lines, read this part of the OP:
If we were to take this whole concept to the edge we would make it so that all children would be raised by the IID then I believe we could gain a whole lot more than merely raising a small part of our population through it. For one, we would raise all children in accordance with scientific principles so that we ensure the most optimal physiological and psychological development of the next generation. New individuals would also be raised with a support system much more wider than the current family models and benefit from looking at themselves in only two different planes - as an individual and as a valuable member of society with no intermittent plane such as family that might detract from their existence as an individual or from their existence as a citizen (with the individual viewpoint being on equal grounds with the citizen viewpoint in order for the system to be stable enough to continue without individualism-propelled society upheaval and collapse)
Not to Godwin this thread, but other than the few words about individualism, that's a passage that could have been written by the members of some of the most horrible ideologies of the last century.
I shudder to think just how horrible it would be to live in a society where no one has a family and everyone is raised by the state.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
If we were to take this whole concept to the edge we would make it so that all children would be raised by the IID then I believe we could gain a whole lot more than merely raising a small part of our population through it. For one, we would raise all children in accordance with scientific principles so that we ensure the most optimal physiological and psychological development of the next generation. New individuals would also be raised with a support system much more wider than the current family models and benefit from looking at themselves in only two different planes - as an individual and as a valuable member of society with no intermittent plane such as family that might detract from their existence as an individual or from their existence as a citizen (with the individual viewpoint being on equal grounds with the citizen viewpoint in order for the system to be stable enough to continue without individualism-propelled society upheaval and collapse)
Not to Godwin this thread, but other than the few words about individualism, that's a passage that could have been written by the members of some of the most horrible ideologies of the last century.
I shudder to think just how horrible it would be to live in a society where no one has a family and everyone is raised by the state.
It strikes me as more naive than anything else. Someone hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about how exactly science is supposed to tell us what sort of physiological and psychological development is 'optimal' for the next generation; it's also unclear what notion of the 'stability' we are supposed to be valuing, and why we are supposed to be valuing it, such that we are willing to eliminate the family in order to promote it.
If we were to take this whole concept to the edge we would make it so that all children would be raised by the IID then I believe we could gain a whole lot more than merely raising a small part of our population through it. For one, we would raise all children in accordance with scientific principles so that we ensure the most optimal physiological and psychological development of the next generation. New individuals would also be raised with a support system much more wider than the current family models and benefit from looking at themselves in only two different planes - as an individual and as a valuable member of society with no intermittent plane such as family that might detract from their existence as an individual or from their existence as a citizen (with the individual viewpoint being on equal grounds with the citizen viewpoint in order for the system to be stable enough to continue without individualism-propelled society upheaval and collapse)
Not to Godwin this thread, but other than the few words about individualism, that's a passage that could have been written by the members of some of the most horrible ideologies of the last century.
I shudder to think just how horrible it would be to live in a society where no one has a family and everyone is raised by the state.
It strikes me as more naive than anything else. Someone hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about how exactly science is supposed to tell us what sort of physiological and psychological development is 'optimal' for the next generation; it's also unclear what notion of the 'stability' we are supposed to be valuing, and why we are supposed to be valuing it, such that we are willing to eliminate the family in order to promote it.
I'd be willing to bet that "optimal" would end up meaning whatever was most in the interests of those in power.
The OP seems to believe that the people who would end up running his dream society would be a bunch of selfless philosopher-kings. That's almost charmingly naive. More likely, you'd end up with kids being raised to suit the interests of whatever corporations had the most pull with the government.
Does anyone really think that a government entity that had the power to control the physiological and psychological development of all the children in society wouldn't abuse that power in order to serve the interests of that government entity (and its friends and corporate remoras?)
Yeah, there are shitty parents out there who instill painfully stupid ideas in their children's heads. But, those shitty parents can only harm their own kids so at least the damage is limited.
Modern Man on
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If we were to take this whole concept to the edge we would make it so that all children would be raised by the IID then I believe we could gain a whole lot more than merely raising a small part of our population through it. For one, we would raise all children in accordance with scientific principles so that we ensure the most optimal physiological and psychological development of the next generation. New individuals would also be raised with a support system much more wider than the current family models and benefit from looking at themselves in only two different planes - as an individual and as a valuable member of society with no intermittent plane such as family that might detract from their existence as an individual or from their existence as a citizen (with the individual viewpoint being on equal grounds with the citizen viewpoint in order for the system to be stable enough to continue without individualism-propelled society upheaval and collapse)
Not to Godwin this thread, but other than the few words about individualism, that's a passage that could have been written by the members of some of the most horrible ideologies of the last century.
I shudder to think just how horrible it would be to live in a society where no one has a family and everyone is raised by the state.
It strikes me as more naive than anything else. Someone hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about how exactly science is supposed to tell us what sort of physiological and psychological development is 'optimal' for the next generation; it's also unclear what notion of the 'stability' we are supposed to be valuing, and why we are supposed to be valuing it, such that we are willing to eliminate the family in order to promote it.
I largely agree. This is the way I've stated it in the past.
If we were to presume the following:
1) A hypothetical future society had knowledge of the social sciences (psychology, neurology) so sophisticated that they could accurately predict with very little room for error the best strategy for maximizing every human's well-being
1a) ...BTW, this would imply that such a knowledge is even possible and
1b) ...that there is either a maximum possible level of human well-being or a point at which investing more resources into child-rearing provides significantly diminishing returns
2) This child-raising strategy would be complex, and require the management of experts in the field
3) Parents of other occupations would not have the same expertise in child-rearing as the experts, therefore they are more likely to make mistakes
4) The inherent benefits of a child being raised by a traditional family structure are outweighed by the benefits of a child being raised in a controlled non-familial environment by child-rearing experts
Under these conditions, centralized child-rearing by an authority might be a viable strategy.
These are a lot of ifs, though. Even if (1) were possible, I submit that we have no idea what that would look like. It might look like children being raised in government nurseries, or it might turn out that a nuclear family environment is best, or it might turn out that an extended family environment is best, or it might turn out that having a child be raised by a small tribal-esque community is best. It might turn out that putting a child in suspended animation force-fed knowledge through some Matrixy cyberpunk brain-link until their 18th birthday is best. We have no idea.
It may even turn out that we need a diversity of backgrounds, for similar reasons that we need a diversity of occupations. It may turn out that a child raised in a small community is better at fulfilling certain roles in society than a child raised in a government nursery, and vice versa.
It may also turn out that these social roles go far beyond what we consider today to be occupations or classes. It may be that it is important to society to have the socially awkward introverted nerd, the charismatic extrovert, the authoritarian and the rebel, and so forth, and there's no way of achieving the necessary diversity of personalities through a single child-rearing method.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
1) A hypothetical future society had knowledge of the social sciences (psychology, neurology) so sophisticated that they could accurately predict with very little room for error the best strategy for maximizing every human's well-being
1a) ...BTW, this would imply that such a knowledge is even possible and
1b) ...that there is either a maximum possible level of human well-being or a point at which investing more resources into child-rearing provides significantly diminishing returns
I think I am more skeptical of this possibility than you are. What constitutes every human's well-being is not itself a psychological or neurological question, and it is not amenable to answers from those fields. Psychology and the various empirical sciences can, of course, tell us about things like: exercise leads to such and such health outcomes in these populations and etc.; playing minecraft all day develops these sets of puzzle skills, etc.; but they do not tell us whether puzzling or playing soccer is a better expression of a person's well-being, let alone answer questions about whether being a happy housewife is better or worse than being a brilliant but lonely scientist, or whether freedom itself is intrinsically a human good.
Furthermore, I think that it's reasonable to assume that what Rawls called "reasonable pluralism" is going to be a fact of human social organization for the foreseeable future: different people are going to have reasonably differing ideas on what the best way to live is. So not only will science not settle that on its own, but it seems unlikely that we'll reach a consensus on our own any time soon. But this is incompatible with a society that scientifically engineers its children to fit the perfect mold: not only is there nothing scientific about deciding what perfection is, but there's also no actual agreement in sight. So the whole thing seems like a moot exercise. We're never going to go in for that sort of centralized child-rearing because we'll never agree on how it should be done.
I think I am more skeptical of this possibility than you are. What constitutes every human's well-being is not itself a psychological or neurological question, and it is not amenable to answers from those fields. Psychology and the various empirical sciences can, of course, tell us about things like: exercise leads to such and such health outcomes in these populations and etc.; playing minecraft all day develops these sets of puzzle skills, etc.; but they do not tell us whether puzzling or playing soccer is a better expression of a person's well-being, let alone answer questions about whether being a happy housewife is better or worse than being a brilliant but lonely scientist, or whether freedom itself is intrinsically a human good.
Well, I'm not sure that my first premise is possible. I bring it up not because I think it is, but more of a thought exercise. I'm also very skeptical that we can ever have such nigh-perfect knowledge of the human condition in the way that, say, we might be able to predict Newtonian motion of everyday-scale objects. Simply letting a person know that you're measuring their behavior alters it; attempting to predict that behavior alters it further. As my girlfriend observed this weekend, there's a poetic similarity between the Hawthorne Effect and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The very endeavor of trying to understand ourselves changes us, which turns all social sciences into the study of moving targets.
I do think (sorry if I sound like a broken record here, I've been talking about this a lot) that as our understanding of humans becomes more sophisticated, we are going to have more power to predict and control behavior and predict and influence experiences. Consequently I like to explore these sort of science-fiction hypotheticals.
That said, I tend to reject the idea that scientific inquiry must be intrinsically value-neutral. More specifically, I don't reject it, but I find that much adherence to the idea from outside scientific circles tends to be dogmatic. You're right, the scientific method on its own can't tell us whether it is better to be dumb and happy or better to be intelligent and dissatisfied. That's an ethical question. I'd draw a loose analogy to questions of life extension - medical research might help us to live to 90 years old, but it doesn't tell us whether it is actually good to live to 90 if your last several years of life are spent frail and weary.
At the same time, scientists need not be agnostic towards ethics. I tend to take the Kuhnian approach that subjective experience is itself a form of knowledge; I think that it's alright for scientists to be biased, to uphold particular value systems, as long as they are aware of this bias and disclose it. I think that's also the most common approach in a lot of fields. The best scientists in any field, but especially in fields directly dealing with human well-being such as medicine and psychology, IMO, are going to have at least a basic background in philosophy and would be able to have dialogues with philosophers of science and philosophers of ethics that are mutually constructive. So when I speculate about a hypothetical utopia where the science of human well-being is 'dialed-in', I don't mean that to the exclusion of ethics.
Furthermore, I think that it's reasonable to assume that what Rawls called "reasonable pluralism" is going to be a fact of human social organization for the foreseeable future: different people are going to have reasonably differing ideas on what the best way to live is. So not only will science not settle that on its own, but it seems unlikely that we'll reach a consensus on our own any time soon. But this is incompatible with a society that scientifically engineers its children to fit the perfect mold: not only is there nothing scientific about deciding what perfection is, but there's also no actual agreement in sight. So the whole thing seems like a moot exercise. We're never going to go in for that sort of centralized child-rearing because we'll never agree on how it should be done.
I largely agree.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited May 2011
I don't disagree that good science can be done by people with strong ethical views on the subject, or even that dialogue between scientists and ethicists isn't a really good idea (I think it certainly is). My objection is just that: normally, in sci-fi scenarios you are allowed to stipulate whatever scientific advance you want, e.g. "suppose we scientifically discovered a material stronger than diamond." But that is fundamentally different from "suppose we scientifically discover the best way to raise a child." It is a category error to think that the facts about best child rearing are going to be discovered in the same was as the facts about material strength.
In other words, in setting up your sci-fi scenario for our consideration, it is illegitimate to treat the subject matter of ethics as just another thing that scientists of the future will one day be able to pronounce with authority. That, I think, is what was done in the OP, and why the scenario is uninteresting.
I don't think we disagree much in the final balance, really.
It is a category error to think that the facts about best child rearing are going to be discovered in the same was as the facts about material strength.
In other words, in setting up your sci-fi scenario for our consideration, it is illegitimate to treat the subject matter of ethics as just another thing that scientists of the future will one day be able to pronounce with authority.
Well, the methods are different, and there is more room to revisit quandaries of the past, but I would like to think that ethics as a field is at least capable of reaching conclusions on difficult issues. That a problem that perplexes us now might be 'solved' (for arbitrarily negligible degrees of uncertainty) in one or two thousand years' time.
I have a question about Rawls for you. When he talked about "reasonable pluralism," was he discussing occupations in particular or did that extend just beyond what people do for a living... into, say, personality traits?
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
It is a category error to think that the facts about best child rearing are going to be discovered in the same was as the facts about material strength.
In other words, in setting up your sci-fi scenario for our consideration, it is illegitimate to treat the subject matter of ethics as just another thing that scientists of the future will one day be able to pronounce with authority.
Well, the methods are different, and there is more room to revisit quandaries of the past, but I would like to think that ethics as a field is at least capable of reaching conclusions on difficult issues. That a problem that perplexes us now might be 'solved' (for arbitrarily negligible degrees of uncertainty) in one or two thousand years' time.
I have a question about Rawls for you. When he talked about "reasonable pluralism," was he discussing occupations in particular or did that extend just beyond what people do for a living... into, say, personality traits?
From my memory, he concentrates on conceptions of the Good. That could conceivably cover either or both of those things as well as some others. It's more that people are going to have different ideas about what the Good life is, or about what is Good. One person might think that it consists of working hard all day, and then coming home to a loving family. Another might think the opposite. There are multiple conceptions of what is Good or what makes a Good life out there, and Rawls thinks that we have to allow for the reasonable differences (that doesn't allow for people who think that torturing random passersby is Good) to exist.
He's certainly right that there is this plurality, and it is something that will likely exist long after we are all dead. I'm not sure it's the best thing for the human race, but we'll have to see.
LoserForHireX on
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
From my memory, he concentrates on conceptions of the Good. That could conceivably cover either or both of those things as well as some others. It's more that people are going to have different ideas about what the Good life is, or about what is Good. One person might think that it consists of working hard all day, and then coming home to a loving family. Another might think the opposite. There are multiple conceptions of what is Good or what makes a Good life out there, and Rawls thinks that we have to allow for the reasonable differences (that doesn't allow for people who think that torturing random passersby is Good) to exist.
Oh, right. I haven't read Rawls directly, I just learned about him in undergrad. I remember the idea about differing conceptions of the good - I just didn't remember the phrase "reasonable pluralism." That makes sense.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I shudder to think just how horrible it would be to live in a society where no one has a family and everyone is raised by the state.
It worked out kinda okay in The Republic
I guess
Sorta
Well, it'd probably be the norm for most of history wouldn't it? You'd be looking at a large extended family structure, which has sort of fallen by the wayside for the most part - it'd be similar to having five or six sets of cousins, plus each of you having older and younger siblings. More trying to recreate an older style of community unit than flat out replacing families with a school class, whilst trying to match social groups together (so a work group of a couple of sib-generations of deltas are born and raised together, likewise with a Beta neighbourhood or an Alpha project team.)
Focus all your attention on properly conditioning and controlling the Alphas whilst the monkeysphere deals with the other castes.
Do you really think that someone raised to be neutral in their beliefs as a child won't change their minds as an adult once they come into contact with a non-neutral environment?
I shudder to think just how horrible it would be to live in a society where no one has a family and everyone is raised by the state.
It worked out kinda okay in The Republic
I guess
Sorta
Well, it'd probably be the norm for most of history wouldn't it? You'd be looking at a large extended family structure, which has sort of fallen by the wayside for the most part - it'd be similar to having five or six sets of cousins, plus each of you having older and younger siblings. More trying to recreate an older style of community unit than flat out replacing families with a school class, whilst trying to match social groups together (so a work group of a couple of sib-generations of deltas are born and raised together, likewise with a Beta neighbourhood or an Alpha project team.)
Focus all your attention on properly conditioning and controlling the Alphas whilst the monkeysphere deals with the other castes.
Kinda.
Except everyone would be alphas in order not to be limited by their genetics and fetal/child raising but at the same time conditioned not to consider themselves above any particular jobs but hopefully we can leave "undesirable" jobs to robots in this particular future and sidestep that problem.
The Cyprus project in Brave New World would probably have succeeded if there were no Alphas in "inferior" positions - with robots taking up the roles of Deltas, Gammas and Betas (okay, maybe some Alphas could do Beta work - seems close enough to avoid too much social stratification).
I shudder to think just how horrible it would be to live in a society where no one has a family and everyone is raised by the state.
It worked out kinda okay in The Republic
I guess
Sorta
Well, it'd probably be the norm for most of history wouldn't it? You'd be looking at a large extended family structure, which has sort of fallen by the wayside for the most part - it'd be similar to having five or six sets of cousins, plus each of you having older and younger siblings. More trying to recreate an older style of community unit than flat out replacing families with a school class, whilst trying to match social groups together (so a work group of a couple of sib-generations of deltas are born and raised together, likewise with a Beta neighbourhood or an Alpha project team.)
Focus all your attention on properly conditioning and controlling the Alphas whilst the monkeysphere deals with the other castes.
Not really. Granted, the modern nuclear family (mom, dad, kids) is kind of unusual. Kids being raised in the context of a multi-generational familial setting is much more the norm, historically.
But, you and your siblings and cousins being taken care of by various aunts, grandmothers and other family members while the rest of the family is out working in the fields is quite a bit different from what the OP is proposing. He pretty clearly wants to sever all familial bonds and have kids raised by some government agency or corporation. It's been tried before- the Nazis had such a program to raise perfect Aryan recruits for the SS.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
Posts
Again, artificial wombs are probably going to be a necessary tool for advanced bioengineering anyway. There are no ethical issues involved in developing them, at least none that I consider legitimate.
Yeah, I totally agree.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
As would we all, Jeffe. As would we all...
Sure, if by "advanced bioengineering" you mean "artificial lifeforms with very little resemblance to humans."
I imagine that if we're growing just slightly-modified humans, we'll have professional surrogate motherhood long before we'll have artificial wombs.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I am all for subsidizing plastic surgery.
Medical subsidies in any non-scarcity society are going to be subject to prioritization; right now reconstructive cosmetic surgery after an injury or cancer might be the only ones reasonably eligible, but it's not unimaginable that some hypothetical future society might be interested in helping people fix less dramatic imperfections, given a reduction in costs or an elevation in standards of attractiveness.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Doubtful, mainly because of what allowing that says socially.
What does it say socially?
You know the NHS covers Roaccutane for acne, right? Public hospitals in Brazil offer reduced-cost cosmetic surgery to low-income citizens. And there are a lot of gray areas where a surgery might be performed under public coverage even without clear medical necessity because of the cosmetic benefits - for example, the removal of an ugly mole without a biopsy, justified as a preventative measure but driven really by the appearance.
I'm not saying that in the foreseeable future we're going to end up doing boob jobs on the public dime, but what constitutes a disfiguring imperfection might change. It's not unimaginable that the NHS might cover acne scar removal in addition to simple prevention, or that a country may decide to (partially or completely) subsidize orthodontic work.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Who determines what is or isn't "relevant"? What is truly worth doing? Why is doing things we enjoy bad? It seems that the only justification the creator of that comic can find is by giving the people watching TV and playing video games expressions of misery for no good reason.
I can understand why this can be a problem in our modern society; it distracts us from realizing what is wrong with the world and what we can do to fix it. I honestly didn't see anything wrong with the world as portrayed in "Brave New World"; if there were any major problem with the world in the novel, we were never told what they were.
Suppose humanity does solve all its problems sometime in the future: Will it still be bad to indulge in feelies, orgy porgies, and centrifugal bumblepuppies (was that last one even in the book?) then?
EDIT: I'm just going to go ahead and make a new thread for this.
Yeah, well, you're obviously not thinking of the not-too-crazy scenario of a child sharing DNA with 3-or-more parents and being birthed out of a synthetic uterus placed inside a male-to-female transsexual.
Just that sentence alone probably set Jerry Falwell's hair on fire.
That, or light from the sun.
BNW though? Not so much. There was again a government who was keeping the status quo. But did it benefit from it? From the description in the book, when they meet the World Controller Mond, it seems quite the opposite. Mond states that World Controllers actually sacrifice their own happiness to manage the world to maximize the happiness of the population (and it seems they are doing a good and responsible job). He does not seem to have access to resources or luxuries that are deprived from the rest of the population (the way the government does in 1984). He does have access to information - both more accurate information on the current state of the world and past information like banned books - but a government having access to confidential information restricted from the population isn't novel or shocking or in itself oppressive.
Really, from the book's descriptions, the government of BNW seems more like dedicated public servants in a benevolent dictatorship, rather than a tyrannical oppressive dystopian regime.
Take for instance, the agricultural companies who develop our impossibly cheap corn. Thanks to them, everyone has diabetes now, even little kids. Why? Because they've incorporated their product into purchaseable foodstuffs and driven the price to where no one outside of the factory-farming complex can reasonably compete.
Ultimately, we could end up with some other species becoming dominant, and humanity either becoming irrevelent or going completely extinct. And that will be fine, as long as the new species inherits our values.
I agree with Jothki on the whole "human" definition "issue":
It's fine to conflate humans with the good qualities we associate with ourselves while we're the only beings doing it - but that'll change in the future and unless we prepare for it we'll end up with a lot of bigotedness as uplifts, artificial lifeforms and more deserve rights.
Regarding the artificial wombs ability to solve the abortion problem I'd say that it's fairly low.
Dropping a kid in an artificial womb and moving on would be a bad move economically unless the whole notion of children being entitled to financial support from their genetic parents is done with (which I made a thread about) and as long as fetuses aren't recognized to have any rights the only reason to drop one into a womb would be to satisfy people who consider them to have rights - which an invasive surgery might be too high of a price to pay for that.
Why undergo an invasive surgery in order to remove a fetus when you can just have a non-invasive abortion at an early stage?
It would certainly remove the need of late-term abortions as I could see the two procedures being equal in terms of danger but late-term abortions are fringe cases.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of examples of oppressive ideas being perpetuated by people who are themselves part of the oppressed - closeted gay men who gay-bash and women who push unrealistic beauty standards on other women are two that come to mind off-hand. I'd argue that straight people do not benefit in any tangible way from homophobia, yet it persists. Oppression can be sustained by nonrational processes of fear and stereotyping. It doesn't necessarily require a benefiting oppressor class.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And as a treatment for infertility. An artificial womb would eliminate the physical structure of the uterus and hormonal problems as causes of infertility.
Yep.
Even if you disagree with the use of artificial wombs as I've outlined it in my OP, it is still a monumental piece of technology that will change mankind.
People who for one reason or another cannot carry a child will be able to use one and people who'd rather not experience the sometimes disfiguring effects of a pregnancy would be able to opt for one as well.
It's never ended well, and there's no reason to believe that it ever will.
Rigorous Scholarship
Also, the people in charge can simply be wrong. They may truly believe that banning books, or lettuce is whats best for society and must be enforced with an iron fist. They may believe the rules they make themselves, and follow them to the letter. The may have even persuaded society to agree with them too.
But none of these things make them right. You can work hard all day in your torture chamber torturing lettuce eaters and go home exhausted at the end of the day to a tiny house which is all you can afford with all the money you spend torturing and tracking those who eat lettuce, but the simple act of gaining no personal benefit doesn't make the decision correct.
Though at the other end of the we're talking fertility treatments on the NHS. It's also not like the cases you're referring to somehow slid into tyranny, they pretty much did what they set out to do, it's just now those goals aren't something we'd approve of.
But then again it depends how far we're talking - the method BNW uses is ment to be 'tyranny', or at least a strong form of social control over the individual. And required pretty much building the society from the ground up after a catastrophic war that more or less ended civilisation as it was know.
Along those lines, read this part of the OP:
Not to Godwin this thread, but other than the few words about individualism, that's a passage that could have been written by the members of some of the most horrible ideologies of the last century.
I shudder to think just how horrible it would be to live in a society where no one has a family and everyone is raised by the state.
Rigorous Scholarship
It strikes me as more naive than anything else. Someone hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about how exactly science is supposed to tell us what sort of physiological and psychological development is 'optimal' for the next generation; it's also unclear what notion of the 'stability' we are supposed to be valuing, and why we are supposed to be valuing it, such that we are willing to eliminate the family in order to promote it.
The OP seems to believe that the people who would end up running his dream society would be a bunch of selfless philosopher-kings. That's almost charmingly naive. More likely, you'd end up with kids being raised to suit the interests of whatever corporations had the most pull with the government.
Does anyone really think that a government entity that had the power to control the physiological and psychological development of all the children in society wouldn't abuse that power in order to serve the interests of that government entity (and its friends and corporate remoras?)
Yeah, there are shitty parents out there who instill painfully stupid ideas in their children's heads. But, those shitty parents can only harm their own kids so at least the damage is limited.
Rigorous Scholarship
I largely agree. This is the way I've stated it in the past.
If we were to presume the following:
1) A hypothetical future society had knowledge of the social sciences (psychology, neurology) so sophisticated that they could accurately predict with very little room for error the best strategy for maximizing every human's well-being
2) This child-raising strategy would be complex, and require the management of experts in the field
3) Parents of other occupations would not have the same expertise in child-rearing as the experts, therefore they are more likely to make mistakes
4) The inherent benefits of a child being raised by a traditional family structure are outweighed by the benefits of a child being raised in a controlled non-familial environment by child-rearing experts
Under these conditions, centralized child-rearing by an authority might be a viable strategy.
These are a lot of ifs, though. Even if (1) were possible, I submit that we have no idea what that would look like. It might look like children being raised in government nurseries, or it might turn out that a nuclear family environment is best, or it might turn out that an extended family environment is best, or it might turn out that having a child be raised by a small tribal-esque community is best. It might turn out that putting a child in suspended animation force-fed knowledge through some Matrixy cyberpunk brain-link until their 18th birthday is best. We have no idea.
It may even turn out that we need a diversity of backgrounds, for similar reasons that we need a diversity of occupations. It may turn out that a child raised in a small community is better at fulfilling certain roles in society than a child raised in a government nursery, and vice versa.
It may also turn out that these social roles go far beyond what we consider today to be occupations or classes. It may be that it is important to society to have the socially awkward introverted nerd, the charismatic extrovert, the authoritarian and the rebel, and so forth, and there's no way of achieving the necessary diversity of personalities through a single child-rearing method.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think I am more skeptical of this possibility than you are. What constitutes every human's well-being is not itself a psychological or neurological question, and it is not amenable to answers from those fields. Psychology and the various empirical sciences can, of course, tell us about things like: exercise leads to such and such health outcomes in these populations and etc.; playing minecraft all day develops these sets of puzzle skills, etc.; but they do not tell us whether puzzling or playing soccer is a better expression of a person's well-being, let alone answer questions about whether being a happy housewife is better or worse than being a brilliant but lonely scientist, or whether freedom itself is intrinsically a human good.
Furthermore, I think that it's reasonable to assume that what Rawls called "reasonable pluralism" is going to be a fact of human social organization for the foreseeable future: different people are going to have reasonably differing ideas on what the best way to live is. So not only will science not settle that on its own, but it seems unlikely that we'll reach a consensus on our own any time soon. But this is incompatible with a society that scientifically engineers its children to fit the perfect mold: not only is there nothing scientific about deciding what perfection is, but there's also no actual agreement in sight. So the whole thing seems like a moot exercise. We're never going to go in for that sort of centralized child-rearing because we'll never agree on how it should be done.
Well, I'm not sure that my first premise is possible. I bring it up not because I think it is, but more of a thought exercise. I'm also very skeptical that we can ever have such nigh-perfect knowledge of the human condition in the way that, say, we might be able to predict Newtonian motion of everyday-scale objects. Simply letting a person know that you're measuring their behavior alters it; attempting to predict that behavior alters it further. As my girlfriend observed this weekend, there's a poetic similarity between the Hawthorne Effect and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The very endeavor of trying to understand ourselves changes us, which turns all social sciences into the study of moving targets.
I do think (sorry if I sound like a broken record here, I've been talking about this a lot) that as our understanding of humans becomes more sophisticated, we are going to have more power to predict and control behavior and predict and influence experiences. Consequently I like to explore these sort of science-fiction hypotheticals.
That said, I tend to reject the idea that scientific inquiry must be intrinsically value-neutral. More specifically, I don't reject it, but I find that much adherence to the idea from outside scientific circles tends to be dogmatic. You're right, the scientific method on its own can't tell us whether it is better to be dumb and happy or better to be intelligent and dissatisfied. That's an ethical question. I'd draw a loose analogy to questions of life extension - medical research might help us to live to 90 years old, but it doesn't tell us whether it is actually good to live to 90 if your last several years of life are spent frail and weary.
At the same time, scientists need not be agnostic towards ethics. I tend to take the Kuhnian approach that subjective experience is itself a form of knowledge; I think that it's alright for scientists to be biased, to uphold particular value systems, as long as they are aware of this bias and disclose it. I think that's also the most common approach in a lot of fields. The best scientists in any field, but especially in fields directly dealing with human well-being such as medicine and psychology, IMO, are going to have at least a basic background in philosophy and would be able to have dialogues with philosophers of science and philosophers of ethics that are mutually constructive. So when I speculate about a hypothetical utopia where the science of human well-being is 'dialed-in', I don't mean that to the exclusion of ethics.
I largely agree.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
In other words, in setting up your sci-fi scenario for our consideration, it is illegitimate to treat the subject matter of ethics as just another thing that scientists of the future will one day be able to pronounce with authority. That, I think, is what was done in the OP, and why the scenario is uninteresting.
I don't think we disagree much in the final balance, really.
Well, the methods are different, and there is more room to revisit quandaries of the past, but I would like to think that ethics as a field is at least capable of reaching conclusions on difficult issues. That a problem that perplexes us now might be 'solved' (for arbitrarily negligible degrees of uncertainty) in one or two thousand years' time.
I have a question about Rawls for you. When he talked about "reasonable pluralism," was he discussing occupations in particular or did that extend just beyond what people do for a living... into, say, personality traits?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
From my memory, he concentrates on conceptions of the Good. That could conceivably cover either or both of those things as well as some others. It's more that people are going to have different ideas about what the Good life is, or about what is Good. One person might think that it consists of working hard all day, and then coming home to a loving family. Another might think the opposite. There are multiple conceptions of what is Good or what makes a Good life out there, and Rawls thinks that we have to allow for the reasonable differences (that doesn't allow for people who think that torturing random passersby is Good) to exist.
He's certainly right that there is this plurality, and it is something that will likely exist long after we are all dead. I'm not sure it's the best thing for the human race, but we'll have to see.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Oh, right. I haven't read Rawls directly, I just learned about him in undergrad. I remember the idea about differing conceptions of the good - I just didn't remember the phrase "reasonable pluralism." That makes sense.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It worked out kinda okay in The Republic
I guess
Sorta
Well, it'd probably be the norm for most of history wouldn't it? You'd be looking at a large extended family structure, which has sort of fallen by the wayside for the most part - it'd be similar to having five or six sets of cousins, plus each of you having older and younger siblings. More trying to recreate an older style of community unit than flat out replacing families with a school class, whilst trying to match social groups together (so a work group of a couple of sib-generations of deltas are born and raised together, likewise with a Beta neighbourhood or an Alpha project team.)
Focus all your attention on properly conditioning and controlling the Alphas whilst the monkeysphere deals with the other castes.
Do they go out into the rest of the world?
Do you really think that someone raised to be neutral in their beliefs as a child won't change their minds as an adult once they come into contact with a non-neutral environment?
PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
Kinda.
Except everyone would be alphas in order not to be limited by their genetics and fetal/child raising but at the same time conditioned not to consider themselves above any particular jobs but hopefully we can leave "undesirable" jobs to robots in this particular future and sidestep that problem.
The Cyprus project in Brave New World would probably have succeeded if there were no Alphas in "inferior" positions - with robots taking up the roles of Deltas, Gammas and Betas (okay, maybe some Alphas could do Beta work - seems close enough to avoid too much social stratification).
But, you and your siblings and cousins being taken care of by various aunts, grandmothers and other family members while the rest of the family is out working in the fields is quite a bit different from what the OP is proposing. He pretty clearly wants to sever all familial bonds and have kids raised by some government agency or corporation. It's been tried before- the Nazis had such a program to raise perfect Aryan recruits for the SS.
Rigorous Scholarship