Morality is unsustainable
“Darwin”, of DarwinCatholic, (h/t Gene Expression) writes here about a Business Week piece on the ethics of selective abortion using genetic screening for various disorders.
Scientists are beginning to tell me precisely how much dissident acts like not aborting my son cost society. A study published in 2000 in the American Journal of Medical Genetics concluded that the average lifetime cost of each “new case” of Down syndrome is $451,000. This study differentiated the lifetime costs of various types of prenatally diagnosed disabilities leading to abortions in one hospital in Michigan. For reasons I can’t fathom, Down syndrome turns out to be the most expensive by far. In contrast, the lifetime costs of conditions like spina bifida ($294,000) and cleft lip or palate ($101,000) seem almost negligible.This study was offered to quantify the cost of banning “second trimester elective terminations for prenatally diagnosed abnormalities.” Imagine the public outrage that would greet the publication of a study calculating the cost of not terminating pregnancies if it were broken down into a category such as family income. Although most of our civil rights laws now include “disability” in the litany of prohibited bases for discrimination—along with race, gender, and ethnic origin—our enlightened liberal commitment to diversity appears to go only so far. While we are willing to mandate accommodation to make jobs or public transportation accessible to a person with spina bifida, the social cost of accommodating her birth is increasingly being seen as exceeding her worth.
This emerging public consensus in favor of eugenics is not the product of any sort of reasoned debate. There has been no referendum, no debate in Congress, no move to amend the Constitution. It’s emerging from the collective force of countless decisions by loving and caring mothers and fathers, in consultation with conscientious medical professionals who are using the truly miraculous and astonishing discoveries of brilliant scientists plunging deeper and deeper into the mysteries of life. These people are not intentionally practicing eugenics in order to create a perfect master race. They are simply trying to alleviate potential suffering and protect the quality of the lives they are bringing into the world.
But it is time for us to acknowledge the collective effect of these private decisions. Do we truly endorse the implicit message we are sending to our disabled brothers and sisters—that our commitment to diversity does not extend to genetic diversity? We need to confront the disconnect between how we see ourselves—as an enlightened, liberal society committed to fully integrating people with disabilities in all sectors of life—and how people living with the disabilities we would identify for extinction must see us.
I think what it comes down to is that, ultimately, our moral intuitions about social justice and equality are based in a reality that is quickly becoming outdated. They simply don’t apply, because they don’t make any sense. Human morality evolved in an environment when our control over genetics and brain chemistry and even intelligence itself were not present at all. A hundred years ago, and five hundred thousand years ago, no one had to worry about whether potential people had rights, because no one had any control over the characteristics of potential people (as with genetic screening). And because of this lack of control, the evolutionary purpose served by morality was able to be met by moral values that assume that lack of control. Evolution was not constrained by the requirement to make our moral intuitions coherent in the face of situations like genetic screening. Or, for that matter, uploading, biological enhancement, artificial intelligence, and so on.
Human morality only works when applied to other humans, in a situation where those humans are all very similar to each other. But in the future sentient life will become more and more hetrogenous, and this hetrogeneity will completely defeat the coherency of human morality. It will become worse than useless. Unless we can figure out how to make our values coherent in the face of this hetrogeneity, life forms that aren’t hindered by human morality will have such a huge advantage, that those that are, including unmodified humans themselves, will be completely marginalized, and possibly even disappear.
December 27th, 2006 at 17:46
So … is your analysis that morality will disappear based on an assumption that the singularity will not occur? It seems that the result of the singularity, if things go well, will be that conscious life on earth will get fused into one, resulting in less variety between lifeforms (of which there will be only one of any importance). Or, at the very least, the singularity will eliminate scarcity as we know it, and therefore also eliminate competition as we know it.
December 27th, 2006 at 19:30
There are lots of different singularity scenarios, and I’m going to assume you’re talking about a sysop scenario. Even within that scenario, I don’t think it’s at all obvious whether identity boundaries will become much less distinct, or whether the boundaries will remain relatively hard. In the former case, morality will go away because morality only applies to interpersonal conduct. In the latter case, the ability of people to modify themselves in more dramatic ways than are now possible will cause life’s heterogeneity to increase, which leads to the problems I was talking about in the post.
I don’t think any singularity scenario with hard identity boundaries can eliminate scarcity, because there will always be limited resources (at the limit, solar energy or real estate, a la Accelerando), and as long as sentience is relatively self-determined, some individuals will find some activity that uses enough of a given resource that other individuals will complain. The best a benevolent sysop can do is arbitrate competing claims to those resources so as to avoid warfare and other waste.