Wednesday, April 30, 2008

I'm not smart enough to sound this dumb.

Does this make any sense at all?
[T]he ethical principle behind keeping the human species pure holds that our ethics are human ethics because we are human beings. ‘Naturally’ enough, human ethics includes such principles as ‘don’t torture animals’, but principles like this collapse if torturing animals is bad only, or primarily, from the perspective of the animals being tortured. Torturing animals violates human ethics because it’s bad for the humans doing the torturing. It’s extra-mindbending to think that the people inclined to miss this point might also incline to be the ones who emphasize how torturing humans is wrong from the perspective of the torturer and not just the tortured.
Human ethics are human ethics because we're humans: is this not tautological and irrelevant? Is the point that creation of a humanzee would be torture by humans, even if the entity would not classify the action as torture? For those of us who feel queasy about humans deliberately creating other humans with disabilities, is the creation of a humanzee similarly troubling? Or is it more like granting better-than-chimp abilities to a chimp? (via)
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