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Notes -
How about a pallet cleanser?
In the other thread a few people brought up surrogacy, and maybe I've spent too much time with TERFs, but am I the only one that overwhelmed with the feeling of Lovecraftian horror whenever it's brought up? The feeling is even more uncanny, because it's like I slept through some great societal debate where everybody decided it's actually a lovely thing that should be celebrated. Although maybe it's not all that bad, there's a certain "how it started, how it's going" quality to the NYT headlines. In any case the casual way it's supporters talk about surrogacy freaks me out even more than militant pro-choicers.
Then there's the whole slippery slope thing:
Love is love, we have a right to get married just the same as you! - Yes I agree!
We also have a right to adopt! - Sure! I mean I have my issues with adoption in practice, but in principle if there are kids without parents, and willing gay couples to adopt them I don't see an issue.
We also have a right to biological children! What? Do you expect us to be ok with not having children?
Wait what? Yes I do! I'm all for tolerance, and living and letting live, but you're not going to make me see this as a lovely family moment, and anyway I don't remember signing on to turning a fundamental human experience into an industry when I supported the gay rights movement. Accept the limits of your biology, and move on.
Which brings me to Dase's idea "postrat «don't mean-spiritedly dunk on a rationalist» challenge (impossible)". Indeed, I can't help myself, and even though I used to be rat/rat-adjacent, I find myself having growing disdain for the entire philosophy. There's a meme that's slowly gathering momentum, that all the trans stuff, and 72 genders is just a foot in the door for transhumanism, and after I heard the idea for the first time, I can't seem to unsee it. This twisted ideology will drive us to throw away our humanity, turn us into a cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg, or trick us into committing suicide, because there's a subroutine running on some GPU somewhere, that's somewhat similar to the processes in our brains. Given the utter dominance of the trans ideology, the vindication of the slippery slope argument, and the extrapolated trajectory of these ideas, I believe we have no other choice - Transhumanism must be destroyed!
I'm curious about how this relates to biblical institutions with similar qualities. There appear to be at least two things of that sort: levirate marriage, and maidservants, who would have children in the place of the other wife.
So something like this has been around for a while. That does not, of course, mean that it is great.
Levirate marriage doesn't seem related to me. The brother isn't buying anything, he's being forced to take care of the dead husband's family. Extreme, but at first glance rates the same as arranged marriages.
The maidservents thing is more on point. Might be less cruel to the child if the mother gets to raise the child as the mother, but in that case it's cruel to the wife. One of the cases where I'd also say take the L, and accept the limits of your biology.
The fact that the child counts as the offspring of the dead brother, though, seemed analogous—people having sex with the intention of having children but not intending the children to be considered theirs.
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Oh Them's fighting words. And-
Oh hey, I've even posted that meme on The Motte before. I'm in full agreement. Let's pry that door open.
look. I agree that that picture is creepy. Why is the pregnant woman in the background? Isn't this a maternity shoot? The person growing the baby is out of focus... It feels belittling even if it's not meant to be. Actually making the baby is a crucial Job here.
That said,
This whole fear that we'll lose our humanity... What parts do you want to keep?
Most of the transhumanists I am aware of agree that Love, Ambition, Pleasure, and even Pain are things they'd enjoy keeping around. At least in some of their forks.
We don't want less. We want more and more variety with it.
Our ideological vision mostly amounts to immortality, complete morphic freedom (I wonder how many of us grew reading Animorphs?), dyson spheres, forking ourselves... I know more than a few who dream of Living as spaceships as we soar across the stars, soaking in the starlight and interstellar medium. Maybe even populating a neutron star or two if Dragon's Egg pans out to physically possible. We get confused when someone tries to belittle someone with the Attack Helicopter meme. (I mean. Have you tried being an attack helicopter? Don't knock it till you've tried it man. And are you saying you wouldn't want to be friends with a human mind in the body of a badass attack helicopter? I sure would! Too many things that talk share the same bipedal phenotype. It's like eating the same meal every day.)
But an authoritarian singleton hive mind is typically considered a failure state by basically everyone I know. The only tragedy I fear more is humanity remaining basically unchanged for the next 40 millennia.
Although...
'Lovecraftian'. Lovecraft's work has its basis in the fear of the other. We bay area rat transhumanists tend to be high openness individuals. We are less likely to flinch away from the other.
Thus, it's not rare to find transhumanist Rats who are followers of Cthugha
And I know of more than one of us that dreams of life as a squid.
Eclipse Phase gets weird, man.
Funny you should mention- One of those same squids showed off her copy of the eclipse phase artbook to me the last time we were together.
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I refuse to believe that Thomas the Tank Engine in space is the telos of humanity.
I'd be perfectly fine just living for a few thousand years.
But space trains are cool, as per Galaxy Express 999.
(Granted, I guess you could argue that that movie was anti-transhumanism.)
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The occultists speak of change and death and personal alchemy of the soul. Their project is to transcend their limits.
The technologists see the limits of what we are and can be, and their first thought is to wonder how to transcend them.
Every student seeks to learn, to transcend the skills and abilities they presently have.
Every athlete aims to break the human limit.
When someone lacks ambition, we call them depressed.
When someone lacks their tools, we call them unprepared.
When someone lacks their vaccinations, we call them unvaccinated.
If we want to go full Natural Law. Sure. I won't argue Tomas the tank engine in space is the sole telos of humanity. And I certainly wont tell you that you have to like the aesthetic. If we ever reach my future. I promise to do my best to make sure your neo-amish aspirations are respected.
But my point is. If humanity has a telos, it is to become more that what they are.
I would argue that, throughout history and the lives of every human, the human telos has been to transcend, and to integrate the products of that ascension into the self, to prepare for the next ascension.
No, that's BigPharma-centered language.
In people-centered language they call themselves People of pure-blood or pure-bloods.
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Embrace your inner Clan warrior and send the trueborn to a sibko (sibling company where the strong become warriors and the weak wash out to civilian life).
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There are many examples of technology coming before its time. The Puckle Gun was an attempt to make machine-guns during the 1720s, the era of flintlocks. People mostly sneered at it: "they're only wounded who hold shares therein" went one satirical pamphlet. There were also the Kalthoff Repeaters in the 1630s, they had a good rate of fire but were difficult to maintain since they hadn't figured out interchangeable parts yet. If there were any problems with the powder fouling, if a single part breaks, you had to take the whole thing back to a master gunsmith to be fixed. For over 200 years attempts to make rapid-firing firearms all failed!
But then people figured out interchangeable parts, rifling and smokeless powder. There were improvements in machining and metallurgy. Unlike all its predecessors, the Gatling Gun was pretty decent. Another few decades of refinement and we got the Maxim Gun. Machine guns became practical and extremely lethal. They dominate infantry combat to this day, every infantryman has some kind of automatic weapon. If you go out on the battlefield with a flintlock musket, you'll be sneered at as it's totally pathetic, totally impractical (imagine spending at least 30 seconds reloading and you can't even go prone, you have to stand up!)
Transhumanism is the same. Right now it's dominated by weirdoes and a very impractical, forceful approach. Its full potential has not been seen. We're talking about people doing pretty primitive surgical procedures. We're talking about people doing weird roundabout manipulations of existing biology. We're not talking about emulating the brain progressively, neuron-by-neuron, ensuring continuity of consciousness. We're not talking about the speed, strength and power machinery can give you. At this stage it all seems like science-fiction, airy abstract words thrown around by people who have no proof to back it up, no concrete knowledge of all the myriad problems...
At some point, we'll hit the Gatling Gun stage where the future becomes visible and concrete. Maybe that'll be if or when Neuralink fulfills its promise. Neuralink's bogged down with the FDA over safety concerns before they can start human testing. We could imagine a more ruthless country like China whisking off a 1,000 political dissidents to rapidly iterate testing. They might choose not to do that but it's only getting easier. If not Neuralink then its successors.
But certainly, eventually we'll be forced to throw away our humanity as we perceive it now. Can you imagine walking onto a battlefield with a flintlock musket today? What about walking onto a battlefield in the future at all? Can you fly at Mach 20, withstand 30 G acceleration, react in machine-time, track thousands of objects simultaneously, brave the cold of deep space for months on end? Can you clone yourself 50 times in a month, such that you're all aligned with eachother? Can you design an automated factory, an automated mine, an automated power plant, manage an entire robotic supply chain such that it's durable to full-scale nuclear war?
Maybe there are limits to replication or whatever. Maybe we all get wiped out by machines or a few monopolistic posthumans.
But if you're just a base-human in the future, your life will be decided by others forever. You won't have the brainpower to understand what's happening, the speed to react in time, you won't have the firepower to resist, you'll be completely surpassed in every aspect. And this trend cannot be stopped. Everyone wants to be smarter, richer and more capable. Everyone wants more ______ whatever that might be. Those with better technology will overcome those with lesser technology. Just look at what happened to the pastoral nomads! They might have had great fun, their lifestyle might be more 'human' (out in nature, authentic skills, having fun around the campfire, personally inflicting violence) than industrial city-slickers but industrial armies wiped the floor with them. They have no control over their own destiny but what modern, urban, sedentary civilization gives them. Genghis could never win, no matter what he did. Even if he conquered the whole world, his successors would get moulded and slowly turned by degrees into urbanites and lose their nomadic skills (as they did in China).
Even rifling was invented back in like the 1500's! It just took a lot of other technological developments (such as interchangeable parts, industrial machining, and probably also metallic cartridges) to finally get to breechloaders.
Good point. I recall elite units were using rifles in the Napoleonic wars but they weren't quite practical yet, they were very slow to reload since they were still muzzle-loaders.
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Until the urbanites turn gay and they're too busy bio-engineering innovative STDs to breed and keep civilization going.
Who won in Afghanistan?
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Keep in mind, the main users of surrogacy aren't gay couples, but infertile straight couples.
As for transhumanism - surely video games, phones, and AI are doing a thousand times more than 'surrogacy for gay couples' ever would? When half of your day-to-day activity is on a computer, does surrogacy makes you any more transhuman?
Why is that relevant?
I didn't criticize surrogacy for gay couples, I criticized surrogacy. As to other forms of technology, I'm also against their excesses, but surrogacy takes the cake for now. Childbirth is a fundamental human experience, screwing around with it, turning it into a for profit industry impacts our nature way more than spending too much time on Twitter.
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Surrogacy for gay couples is transhumanism in the sense of "Redefining the limits of what humans can be and do and how they can interact."
The word is sometimes used like this, but in this broad sense it applies to a vast variety of cultural changes.
Gender transition is vastly more Transhuman than surrogacy.
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I want you to know that I read the whole first of your post thinking it was Lovecraftian horror that had been proclaimed lovely and worthy of celebration. That you were getting existential dread every time the NYT treated Lovecraft as an aesthetic touchstone rather than a cause for gibbering horror. It wasn’t until I got to the bullet points that I realized what I was missing.
Anyway.
Why isn’t surrogacy compatible with tolerance, with live-and-let-live? A woman should be able to consent to bearing children. So long as she’s not forced into it, not losing her rights to life and liberty, she can have children with whomever she pleases. The men don’t have a right to have children. But I don’t see what woman’s right is violated by an agreement to have them.
Consider the converse. Is it acceptable for a lesbian couple to voluntarily bear an outside man’s children? (I think so, though I am probably biased; my parents are godparents to two such kids.) The same goes for a straight couple hiring a surrogate due to infertility. If she’s willing, and they’re unable, it is a win-win.
The other nice part is that you aren’t forced to see that photo as a nice family moment. It’s kind of unsettling to me, too. Something about the implication that the woman is subservient triggers my chauvinist instincts, perhaps? But I don’t have any reason to believe that it’s actually harmful, except for a bit of secondhand embarrassment for the participants of this awkward photo.
One final note. Transhumanism seems obviously correct to me in the same way as using tools or building personal relationships. I believe we should strive to surpass our mortal limits, and that the fleshy layout of the human body is māyā rather than an essential component of Humanity. Luminous beings are we, not this…crude matter. You may disagree, but I believe that will hold your children back from the stars.
I'd say bodily autonomy is a secondary argument to fetal personhood. But, more importantly, it doesn't keep the mother from choosing pregnancy. She is allowed to accept that imposition and risk. Bodily autonomy is about ensuring she is allowed and not required to do so.
I don't feel like slavery is a very good comparison. It is indefinite, rather than temporary, and it represents a much broader concept of "ownership." Plus it's hard to separate from the much more prevalent nonconsensual slavery. Indentured servitude is a better fit, and my objections against it are weaker. Both slavery and indentured servitude involved further acquisition of rights over the worker, such as allowing transfer or extension of contract, than surrogacy.
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It is worse than disgust and lovecraftian horror. It's cringe. I am talking about that specific picture.
I am fine with surrogacy as long the surrogate mother and the mother providing the egg cell are different persons.
But the way the new kids on the block caricature the spaces they have been allowed in is cringy. Also true for the new-ish breed of MtF (the ones that put videos on tiktok for periods and breast pains)
On the other hand probably this new cringe is pervading everywhere - everything now is not about the end result, it's about the performance.
Cringe is in the eye of the beholder. I find this comment cringe.
My favorite take on cringe is JrEg's schitzopost on it.
"'Cringe!' they choke out at the TikTok kids. Do they care that they are cringe? No! they share the cringe they like the cringe they comment on the cringe and then only then do they replicate the cringe themselves. And if no one's cringing then is it cringe?"
Cringe, JrEg goes on to explain, amounts to an emotional box erected by societal norms. Placing yourself subservient to the cringe of others, he argues, leaves you unable to remain consistently based in your own ideals.
I think I made a similar point a while ago.
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I’m trying to parse why I have such a strong reaction towards gay men using surrogates.
I mean, obviously there’s the ‘if you want kids, there is an obvious way to do that’ factor where going for a lifestyle that excludes having children then gets corrected back. But I don’t react in the same visceral way to gay adoption, or lesbians getting pregnant through whatever method(Craigslist rando, IVF, sperm donor).
I think it’s the buying people. Child trafficking in adoption is a serious problem that all sorts of people put effort into avoiding, albeit not particularly successfully. On the other hand, the homosexual men using surrogates are blatantly buying a child.
The linked photograph doesn't do anything to dispel that notion either — the woman is shot to be functionally anonymous, an interchangeable rent-a-womb in the background. You get the feeling that as soon as she gives birth, she'd be shoved out of the picture entirely, possibly before she's fully recovered. But she's the most important part of the whole thing! None of this happens without her, and so instead I see a celebration of two men's narcissism, and have the uneasy feeling that the impending new life is going to be treated like a teacup dog or other fashionable accessory.
And there are enough examples of pairs of gay paedophiles adopting children to abuse them or rent them back out that it pattern-matches in unfortunate ways. Example 1, example 2. This is culture war red meat and Chinese Cardiologist stuff, so it's hard to draw well-founded conclusions in either direction. However, it is interesting that the couple in the second example were written up by Australia's national public broadcaster in a very flattering article on gay parenthood-by-surrogacy and "can you believe it's this hard for them to be parents"? (The author of the Quadrant article in example 2 was unaware of the wayback machine — archived ABC link.) When the "happy dads" who get the fawning news article turn out to be child abusers, you can see why some people jump to conclusions.
Well duh. Do these people not know how babies are made? Compensating for biological impossibility is difficult and expensive.
It’s the fit-throwing about that aspect, which there really isn’t a solution to other than government subsidies, that rings alarm bells, and the ‘buying a child’ thing that justifies them.
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What? This gay couple compensated a woman for use of her womb, why are you comparing that to child trafficking, which involves a child already born and taken for typically immoral purposes (sex, forced labor, etc.)
Oh, this is a bit old already, but since you expressed genuine confusion, I figured I'd address it. Trafficking is engaging in trade of other humans, and surrogacy fits that definition perfectly.
This sounds like one of Stevenson's Persuasive Definitions i.e changing the meaning of a word without changing its elicited feelings. If this is trafficking, then trafficking is now not inherently immoral, as is typically implied (no one talks about traffickers as ethical people). For you to get to that point, you would have to demonstrate that surrogacy was immoral. Which is your view, I realize, but no one in this thread has put forward a convincing argument for that.
I was under the impression that it always was defined as the trade in human beings. My objection to it is that buying and selling other people is inherently immoral. Asking what's wrong with it is like asking "what's wrong with sexual exploitation?".
No, I don't think that the common usage of the term.
From DHS:
Wikipedia:
and Merriam-Webster:
So no, human trafficking by common usage is not considered to include any and all instance of people buying other people. The key point is the coercion by various means and intention to use the purchased human in forced labor or prostitution.
In my defense, in my language "human trafficking" would literally translate to "human trade".
Anyway, you're really ok with people just purchasing children? If Bill Gates started buying up kids of all ages by the thousands, it would be fine as long as he just wants to become their legal guardian, and not to force them to do anything that's not expected of kids?
I reject the use of "purchase" in both the surrogacy context and this example. It strikes me as the non-central fallacy.
In any case, if Bill Gates were to pay for surrogacy or adopt kids until he had 1000, I would be skeptical that he could provide the kind of fatherly relationship I think many people expect a father to have with his children, adopted or otherwise. More likely, he just pays for their schooling and housing and lets them grow up as if he just had one kid. Does giving 1000 kids a great shot in life negate the probably less-than-ideal fatherly relationship he may have with them? That might be an interesting conversation, but it certainly would not make sense to try and apply the negative connotation of "human trafficking" to such a situation. Not to me anyways.
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A counterpoint: Westerners
trafficpurchase children from far poorer countries all the time, as in Western countries the demand for kids to adopt far exceeds the supply (whereas the opposite is true in the host country).This is done openly and their activities are usually portrayed positively, even though children are generally considered possessions (their involuntary labor is your right as a parent or guardian) in the West for the first 18 years of their life.
What's the difference between this kind of remote adoption, enslaving workers from foreign countries (for labor or prostitution, which is what people usually mean by "trafficking"), and domestic surrogacy? Because I don't think there's a difference at all, and the argument against those things can be made, but is not defensible on strictly utilitarian grounds (because if it was, human history wouldn't contain the amount of slavery that it currently does).
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Even as a lefty ass lefty I find the idea of paying someone to have your kids ickky. Thing is, you can't argue with it without nibbling out another little caveat in the market and in free association.
In our current framework, a woman's labor vis. babby being formed obviously is quite and imposition, and you can't just ask someone to do something for nothing.
The existential proposition of the market: if it exists, it has a value. If it has a value, it can be bought. If it cannot be bought, it has no value. If it has no value, it doesn't exist.
I'd possibly add onto the market proposition the clause "if it can be bought, the price can be driven down" to represent commoditization. Digression aside, good comment.
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You yourself commented a few months back about doing a 'double-take' when reading some of my recent writing, suggesting (in different language) that I was becoming 'radicalized' on a few topics. One area you've counter-radicalized me is the conversation around falling birthrates in the west, and frankly, I'm coming to align more with the TwoXChromosome worldview that it's just a trojan horse for social control.
Don't get me wrong, I'm more concerned about the birthrate than I was. I'll even grant that surrogacy makes me uncomfortable, though more because I dislike the idea of disempowered people (surrogates in the third world are even more gross) being exploited in yet another way.
However, in the last 24 hours, we've had two comments explicitly shaming people who want to have children, specifically because the way they're trying to have children is aesthetically displeasing to you.
The limits of our biology are changing by the year. Will you make your children accept the limits of their biology and watch them be crippled by polio, or something? As Doglatine put it when seeing the reflexive support amongst locals for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, your position is boiling down to a reactionary rejection of anything the left and/or mainstream like, rather than a prospective, constructive worldview. So with that in mind, I have to ask: If, tomorrow, I invented a way to boost the birthrate comfortably above replacement (or to whatever arbitrary value you want), it's eugenic, it's whatever you want it to be - but it doesn't involve traditional, cis-het men repeatedly sticking their penises inside conventionally attractive cis-het stay-at-home tradwives followed by 9 months of pregnancy discomfort and childbirth - are you going to be joyful that we solved our demographic problem and charted a course towards our brave new future of eugenic John Von Neumanns? Or are you going to be upset that we didn't do it the way you wanted and those nasty degenerates are still having buttsex and dying xir hair blue?
If your answer is the latter (and I suspect for many of the Katja Grace haters it is), then yeah, I have to say TwoX are probably right about you.
Still reactionary. Have you ever laid out a positive vision for what you want the future to be, since you don't like mine? I'm curious to hear what you actually want as opposed to talking about those awful people doing things that you don't like.
There are two ways to read this, which are endlessly and intentionally confused in popular politics (not that you are). One is like "conservatives are having a moral panic about birth rates because they're confused, and it'll result in more social control, which is bad". Two is "conservatives don't really care about birth rates, but they do want to impose social controls, so they're lying / posturing about birth rates to achieve that" (and maybe that posturing is structural or unconscious).
The former is arguable, but doesn't fit the "trojan horse" metaphor. The latter seems less likely, population declining is a facially reasonable worry, one can come to it via "human lives are good so decline means fewer happy lives", "CHINA will win if our population declines", "in 1000 years there won't be anyone left!!!", etc. It can still primarily, as a concern, function to impose social controls, maybe even ones that don't solve the original problem, but there isn't really any deceptiveness that 'trojan horse' would imply, imo.
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You two seem to have an underlying philosophical difference that is causing this confusion. I would hazard a guess that Arjin, whether explicitly or not, has a Natural Law understanding of humanity. Curing children of polio is good, because humans are supposed to be healthy. Giving children tentacles and an extra set of eyes that can see infrared is bad, because humans aren't supposed to have tentacles or infrared eyes. If you give them tentacles and infrared eyes, are they still human?
Those who don't understand things in terms of Natural Law don't see the problem. To them there is no way humans are "supposed to be" so we can do whatever we want and be just as human as ever. Curing polio is the same kind of thing as transforming someone's body shape radically, or whatever. To someone with a Natural Law understanding, it is not at all the same kind of thing. One is fixing something that is wrong with someone, the other is creating things that are wrong with someone, insofar as wrong is deviation from what it means to be a human. Polio is a deviation; transhumanism is a deviation.
Similarly, humans naturally form families where a child has a mother and a father, because both sexes are needed to procreate and humans are the kind of creatures that care about their kids. If you don't care about your kids, then somethings wrong with you. If a kid doesn't have a mother or a father, then something's wrong with that family. Similarly, mothers are supposed to get pregnant, carry their child, and then care for it and raise it and be part of its life. If for some reason she can't (if she died in childbirth, if she's an unfit mother, if she is unwilling to care for the child) then adoption can happen, but adoption is not ideal. It's a deviation from how it should be. So deliberately creating situations where mothers bear children that aren't their own, for the purpose of giving them to someone else, is pretty "un-Natural" in the Natural Law sense.
Your primary disagreement is philosophical, that's where the debate would be most fruitful.
Are they? Assuming Natural Law then Polio existing in its natural state and infecting humans is part of it right? Humans either surviving or not based upon their fitness is what is natural. Interfering with that is unnatural.
Your interpretation only makes sense in a version of Natural Law where humanity is special for some reason. That us not being infected by X is the natural thing and therefore us wiping out X is natural.
The other argument is that our brains are natural, our inventiveness is natural, our ability to transcend what "should" be by using our brains is natural. Outside of a supernatural descriptor (this is how humans should be because God says so) what things should be and what is natural is very hazy.
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Are humans supposed to want to defy their nature?
If not-
then clearly I'm already not human. So I'm free to follow my nature.
If so-
then excuse me while I go follow my nature.
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... are infrared goggles anti-nature? If they are, computers and agriculture are too, and much moreso.
This "natural law" approach dissolves into nothingness when it touches evolution - species are always adapting to their environments, evolving, and "nature" is that. So to say something that hasn't happened yet is unnatural, and therefore circularly, bad, rules out every existing adaptation. Single cells weren't supposed to come together into multicellular organisms and throw their genetic lot in with their clones, until they did. Multicellular organisms weren't "supposed" to have light-sensitive cells, until one randomly gained slightly-functional light sensitivity. Baby animals weren't supposed to develop inside their mothers' bodies and drink fluid secretions ... until they did. And monkeys weren't supposed to talk to each other, until, slowly, it developed ...
Even from your perspective, what are the natural laws? Is it natural law that all humans should live happily and peacefully? Or that they should fight and die in war for their nation/kin/religion? Attitudes on this have changed over the past few centuries - as they've simultaneously changed for those with other moral theories.
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I think you've hit the crux of the problem.
But this is a weird example of "against Natural Law" to use, isn't it? The polio virus isn't artificial. It's been infecting people for thousands of years. It doesn't even seem to have a zoonotic reservoir (one of the reasons why eradicating it is possible, ironically), so Mother Earth or Nature's God or whatever specifically pointed that bomb at millions of human targets. This is all about as far from "unnatural" as it gets.
In fact, for decades polio could have been used as a cautionary tale against trying to fight Natural Law! Historically most poliovirus infections were in infants and toddlers who had better odds of recovery, but we started being much more careful (dare I say unnaturally so?) with our sewage and cleaning up our drinking water, so we lost our early exposure and our population immunity, and then we started seeing epidemics in older age groups with much higher risks of paralysis. It would have been a clear case of hubris and nemesis, except we were able to follow up the sanitation improvements with vaccinations not too long afterward.
You don't really understand what Natural Law is, if you think that just because something happens in nature it is Natural, in the Natural Law sense.
It's an understandable mistake to make. English is a terrible language for these things. Natural used to mean according to something's nature, but now it also means "not artificial" or a vague "animals and plants and stuff".
I explained this once already over on ACX, so if you don't mind I'll just copy over my comments from there:
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What does Natural Law have to say about population-specific human traits, or individual mutations, which are adaptive in one environment but maladaptive in another. For example: dark-skinned descendants of American slaves, after moving to the northern half of the United States en masse during the Great Migration, found that they and their children and grandchildren were suffering high rates of Vitamin D deficiency and related debilitating conditions such as rickets; their highly-melanated skin, optimized by thousands of years of evolution to block out the oppressive and omnipresent African sunlight, could not effectively absorb the far more limited sunlight available in the cloudy and dark Northern winters. What had been an extremely advantageous trait in one context became an equally disadvantageous trait in a different context. And in the mirror-image counterpart to this scenario, Israel, until very recently, had the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, as a result of a largely Ashkenazi Jewish population - genetically mostly descended from pasty-skinned Central/Eastern Europeans - being transplanted to a very sunny climate. To this day, Australia does have the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, for very similar reasons.
Another example is something like the cluster of mutations that make someone like Yao Ming, or Giannis Antetokounmpo, two very abnormally-tall NBA players. Yao Ming’s extreme height, and Giannis’ massively long arms and enormous hands, make them ideally-suited to play modern NBA basketball. However, these same mutations would come with debilitating drawbacks in a different environment; firstly, the massive caloric load needed to feed them would make them extreme burdens in a harsh environment where food is scarce; their height would also be a massive disadvantage in, say, the Amazonian jungle, where they would constantly be smacking into trees, alerting predators and prey alike. In Yao Ming’s case, he also suffered from a number of injuries to his feet and ankles due to the extreme pressure out on his lower body by his height, significantly shortening his career. These men are very fortunate that they live in a period of human history wherein their atypical qualities could be harnessed into blessings, instead of being life-threatening curses. And on the flip side, the vast majority of Yao’s countrymen in China evolved to be significantly shorter than the global average, since they evolved in the frigid climates of Siberia, where a short and compact body allows for the optimal distribution of body heat. (The “yellow” complexion we associate with East Asians is also a result of the evolutionary pressure created by this same environmental history; it’s due to a thin layer of subcutaneous fat optimized similarly for preserving body heat.)
So, is it “natural” for humans to be dark-skinned, or to be light-skinned? And is it “natural” for them to be tall, or to be short? These questions are unlike questions of the type “is it natural for humans to be healthy, or to be sick?” While some human traits/conditions are purely negative - it is strictly worse to have a flu than it is to not have a flu, and it is strictly worse to have no legs than it is to have two legs - many traits and conditions provide complex sets of tradeoffs, and sometimes whether or not a trait is good or not is entirely context-dependent. Autism, at least of the high-functioning “Asperger’s” variety, is another extreme example of a particular way that some humans are, which provides both massive benefits and significant penalties, both at the same time. I don’t really have a good idea about what Natural Law has to say about those sorts of things. Maybe the sorts of traits and mutations that would be extremely advantageous for human beings trying to survive the ravages of long-distant space travel would be horrendously disadvantageous - even monstrous - here on earth.
I also think it’s amusing that you brought up dogs in the context of Natural Law, given that *nearly every extant dog breed in existence is the profoundly unnatural result of a millennia-long project of directed/molded evolution orchestrated by humans, which has produced bizarre chimeras which could never have emerged in Nature, and which bear essentially no resemblance to their ancestors of even a century ago in some cases. There are no wild pugs or lhasa apsos. The bulldog and the chihuahua are nothing remotely like wolves, nor are they all that much like each other. Do advocates of natural law look at a dachsund and feel existential Lovecraftian horror at the blatant perversion of the natural order which such a creature represents? Think what had to happen to turn a wolf into that!
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You're hitting another of English's terrible ambiguities here - do you mean "abnormality" in the positive or normative sense? If the former then it's easy to think of counterexamples (again, including polio exposure!). I'd guess from
that you take a normative meaning, which lets us escape from nature red in tooth and claw, but then that other commenter's "Anyone can claim Natural Law is whatever they want" criticism suddenly sounds quite fair. Infrared vision doesn't sound better than Mark 1 eyeballs to you, but it does to me. I'd need technological help to get it myself, but I also needed that help to escape thousands of years of polio. Which of us is right?
Whether we think of "best" or
the question jumps out: in whose judgement? Perhaps this made immediate sense in a polytheistic world, where a God of Humans might intend them to be healthy while a God of Disease intends polio to spread, and "naturally" we humans want to side with the first guy? But a monotheistic God made that poliovirus too, and in that world "He must have intended it" would seem to be a far safer assumption than "He might not have been paying attention that day". In an atheistic world we could almost get back to the polytheistic case, but not quite - we might try to anthropomorphize evolution, but we still don't end up with an Evolution of Humans that we can side with vs Evolution of Disease; we only have an Evolution of Particular Currently-In-Some-Humans Genes, which isn't universal enough or, ironically, human enough, to form a basis for a Natural Law. Even if Darwin won the argument in one sense, that only suggests that we were asking the wrong question.
Even the "Currently-In-Some-Humans" category gets fuzzy when you look through prehistory. I'm may only be a few dozen trivial mutations from a selection of my parents' genes, and so on with each stage of their ancestors, but do that a million times and we're looking at tree-hopping monkeys. The nature of my ancestors at that point was that they were four-legged animals! At what point did their increasingly-bipedal descendants become "unnatural", and then "natural" again?
Yeah, you're still not grokking Natural Law.
Set aside whether God intended humans to get polio. Lets focus down to ground level here. What does it mean for a human to be sick? How do we know if someone is sick?
Well, we know someone is sick because we have an idea of how healthy humans are supposed to be, and sick humans differ from that. Healthy humans breath easily, humans sick with a chest cold hack and cough and wheeze. Healthy humans are about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit: if you're much hotter or colder than that, you're sick. If you found someone whose leg is black and putrid with necrosis you say to yourself "That doesn't look right. This person is sick."
Yet all of these judgements require us to have an idea of how a human is supposed to be. What a "natural" human is like. When we compare sick humans to the "natural" human, we can see something is wrong. What's more, we believe that it a bad thing to differ from the "natural" human. We don't consider having a leg that is black with necrosis to be just as good as having two legs that are operating normally. Without our conception of a "natural" human, distinguishing sick from healthy is impossible. They're just different kinds of humans that have different ways of being.
Yet it doesn't seem that our idea of healthy and sick is arbitrary. Our concept of the "natural" healthy human seems to correspond to something real. It does seem that humans are "supposed" to have two legs, and that our digestive system is "supposed" to provide us with nutrients, and that our heart is "supposed" to pump blood through our body. It doesn't seem that a heart that stops pumping is just as good a heart as one that keeps pumping. Regardless of whether the heart was created by a mind or by blind evolution, it isn't arbitrary to say that the heart's "purpose" is to pump blood. Or that human's have two legs. Or that eyes that see are better than eyes that are blind.
So in that sense, regardless of whether God intended humans to get polio or not, we can say that a human sick with polio has something wrong with them: to be sick with polio is not "natural" to humans.
I hope that helped.
You've glossed over the question of "how do we define 'humans'" - even repeating "human's have two legs" after my questions about bipedalism. "Humans have two legs" sounds right from my point of view, just like "neohumans have infrared vision" would from theirs, but an Ardipithecus ancestor might think I was just an unnatural change, hopelessly bad at palm walking on my dwindling forelegs. From my ancestors' point of view, am I a natural human, or a deviation from Australopithecus? This question is isomorphic to "will any transhuman descendants of mine be natural transhumans, or deviant humans", save for special pleading.
If we're going to focus on the ground level, look at what we literally find in the ground. Fossils, of a connected web of species, none of which exist except as a series of changes to their ancestors. "Don't make biological improvements" is positively false, and normatively it isn't a "Law" that would preserve some definition of human, it is a rule under which humans would never have existed. Setting aside God(s) doesn't make this idea of Natural Law more defensible, because even just setting aside Young-Earth Creationism begins to make it incoherent. "What is natural for humans" is a dissolved question once you realize that the implicit presupposition of a well-defined "humans" category in space-time is a false premise. Anthropocentrism might have been a reasonable null hypothesis, before we knew any better, but at this point "why are nearly-human creatures so unnatural" makes about as much sense as "why are the stars so tiny". The stars aren't tiny, but realizing that for all but one of them requires perceiving things so far away in space that it requires careful thought for us to realize the exception is just another star rather than a special singleton category of "sun". Non-homo-sapiens hominids aren't unnatural, but realizing that for all but one of them requires perceiving things so far away in time that it requires more careful thought for us to realize the exception is a single link in a chain rather than a special singleton category of "human".
Even "how do we define 'healthy'" isn't a trivial question either.
Do we? Not a rhetorical question - has the Hygiene Hypothesis been definitively refuted? Last I heard, there was evidence that "never get an infectious illness", even aside from increasing the dangers of any later infection, might also increase the risk of asthma and other autoimmune disorders.
And that's just counting the microorganisms which generally cause illness - breeding completely "germ-free organisms", with no microbiome at all, is even more fraught. For some for the very same microorganisms which cause illnesses in rare excess, the absence of those microorganisms seems to cause autoimmune inflammatory disorders if they're removed. Animals have evolved with asymptomatic infections of dangerous bacteria for so long that we don't actually have the capability of remaining healthy while uninfected! Are pathobionts' presence mandated by Natural Law? Is the answer immutable, or contingent on whether we can discover a safer artificial substitute to expose our immune systems to, like we did with polio?
I strongly agree, and since human hearts have a distressing tendency to stop pumping before the rest of the human is ready, I hope neohuman hearts are more capable. By your definition, that would make them more "natural" than us, right? Similarly, it also doesn't seem that an eye whose sensitivity stops at 750nm is just as good as one that can see to 800nm or 850nm. We might thus conclude "neohuman eyes and hearts are more natural than human ones", or at our most justifiably parochial we might say "neohuman eyes are natural to neohumans, human eyes are natural to humans", but for us to say "neohuman eyes are unnatural" would make about as much sense as a non-primate mammal saying "primate eyes are unnatural" (does anyone really need a third visual opsin?) and less sense than a typical bird or fish saying so (wouldn't you agree that losing two independent dimensions of color vision wasn't just as good as keeping them, even if we eventually reevolved one dimension back?).
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Maybe a pithy way would be to say "it's natural law, in the sense that it's in the scorpion's nature to sting frogs".
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I sometimes see "Natural Law" brought up, the problem is that it's not a consistent framework. Anyone can claim Natural Law is whatever they want - and indeed the entire idea of what's in and out constantly changes!
I'm sure women being outside of the kitchen would've been against "Natural Law" a couple of centuries ago.
Can you provide a reason why I should consider Natural Law as anything other than a justification for arbitrary aesthetic preferences?
The people claiming "Natural Law" is a thing explicitly reject the idea that they are merely "claiming that Natural Law is whatever they want." You can claim they're wrong, but assuming that their construction is mere whim is assuming the conclusion.
Would you agree that if "Natural Law" is, in fact, just "whatever people want", that our historical record of the formal conception of Natural Law should look like a random walk as peoples' desires shift and change over time?
If the historical record does not look like that, is it a problem for your thesis?
Because if followed, it delivers superior outcomes, presumably.
Clearly I misunderstood what Natural Law is - my experience is mostly idiots on reddit invoking it like some sort of catch-all argument-winning technique.
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Well, for one, Natural Law is the philosophical setting out of which all modern Western societies came. It has a profound impact on our current institutions and cultural values, even if you reject it as being truthful. In that particular sense it is not arbitrary but conservative: not just anything can be considered Natural, there is a long tradition that is drawn on. You may think the tradition is arbitrary, but understanding what that tradition in is very useful to understanding where a great many people in the West are coming from, whether they know it or not.
Beyond that practical consideration, Natural Law seeks, at least, to be the opposite of arbitrary. The whole point is that things have a real nature, one that they can conform with or deviate from. That nature is rooted in what they are as a thing, and things are not arbitrary. For instance, Natural Law would say that humans have two legs. If someone is born with one leg, they have something wrong with them. Is the standard "humans have two legs" arbitrary? Did someone just decide it one day? Clearly not. Saying that humans have any number of legs would be far more arbitrary than that.
Most people, likely yourself included, have a lot of Natural Law built into your thinking already. If you say a bicycle is broken, it is because you have an understanding of what a bicycle is supposed to be, and comparing the broken bicycle to the Natural bicycle is how you know that the broken bicycle is broken. The same for a broken leg. If someone asked you whether we should vaccinate a child against polio, you likely wouldn't say "Why? Kids with polio are just as valid as kids without polio." Similarly, if your cat gave birth to a fish you would be surprised and dismayed: if someone told you "Why shouldn't a cat give birth to a fish if it wants?" you would think they were crazy.
Where disagreement occurs is outside the realm of the concrete. We can agree that kids aren't supposed to have polio, and that humans have two eyes, but when it comes to how a society should be we likely come into sharp disagreement. Natural Law comes from the perspective that since humans have a specific nature, human societies have a limited number of ways they can be structured for humans to flourish in them. Just as a human can't flourish if you stab it in the guts, because of the nature of the human body and digestive system, so to it can't flourish if society metaphorically stabs them in the guts. You are not free to structure society, or your life, any way you want to because the reality of what it means to be a human means that some choices are unavailable to you and some choices are really bad ideas (just as it's a bad idea to stab yourself in the guts: saying you shouldn't stab yourself in the guts may be trying to limit your freedom, but its good advice nonetheless).
Now people can disagree on how society should be structured, given the nature of what it is to be a human. That doesn't make those disagreements arbitrary. If someone is working from a Natural Law background then their arguments should be grounded in what it means to be a human. If you disagree with them you can use that grounding in human nature as support. You may be able to defend a great many positions on Natural Law grounds, but you cannot defend any position you like. You can't say that blindness is as good as seeing, or that humans by nature love to be tortured, or that if we pass this specific law people will suddenly start working together without incentive.
Without Natural Law at your back things get more arbitrary, not less. You might argue that transhumanism will prevent disease; without Natural Law I can retort "What's wrong with disease? Why should we value being healthy over sick? Sickness is just an arbitrary category that society puts on those who do not conform to it's expectations." If you argue that transhumanism will increase human ability I might respond "Why should humans have more power? If we have more power we will destroy the Earth, and every living thing on it. We should de-industrialize instead, and fade away until none of us are left." If you argue that transhumanism is a great step forward in human progress, I could respond "Progress is a meta-narrative designed to hide the crimes of industrialists and tyrants, and has no meaning beyond that."
Yet, as a follower of the Natural Law, if you argue to me that transhumanism will prevent disease I may be swayed, for humans are supposed to be healthy. If you argue that transhumanism will increase human ability I might support you, for it is the nature of humans to improve themselves and seek excellency. If you argue that transhumanism is human progress I may or may not disagree, but I would at least agree that there is something to progress towards. You might convince me that transhumanism will allow us to be more fully human than before.
TL,DR: You should take Natural Law seriously because deep down almost everyone in the West, including you, believes in Natural Law, and if you don't then there's nothing left but arbitrary narratives and you become the kind of ghoul who is mad the people are curing the blind because blindness is just as valid as seeing.
And we arrive at the bonkers ideology of fat acceptance.
I think a compounding (and also, maybe somehow, complementing?) factor here is that Natural Law is implications in the direction of morality and moral absolutism. In the same way that arbitrariness creates more chaos and leads to negative outcomes for society, moral relativism creates far more pain, chaos, and evil than it "defeats" through its message of radical acceptance. A dirty trick that a lot of intellectually dishonest folks play is to intentionally conflate something amoral with something definitely moral(istic). Take for example the fat acceptance movement...he/she isn't a bad person for being fat! Of course. No one is disagreeing here. But a doctor will tell you you are an unhealthy person for being obese. Unhealthy? How dare you.
But excessive moralism has always been a favorite safety blanket of folks of all stripes. People have always traded social status for anything and everything else for more than they ought to for all of time. Being "right" may, in fact, feel a million times better than being independent and self-sufficient.
But, to quote the noted bard, Tyga, "I don't want to be famous / I just want to be rich."
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It sounds like Aristotle’s telos and Plato’s Forms repackaged into a different system. I absolutely respect those ideas I just hadn’t seen that sort of framework before.
I’d argue it might better suit you to go back to the arguments of Aristotle and Plato for the sake of aesthetics and avoiding the No True Scotsman problem at the least. I appreciate the write up and agree with what you’ve spelled out as Natural Law, but I’ve seen so many others use it to arbitrarily justify what they like I honestly have trouble taking it seriously.
Are there any significant differences from Aristotle and Plato’s thought that are unique to Natural Law?
That's an excellent question, and one I'm not fit to answer. All I can tell you is a potted history of Natural Law. Aristotle and Plato are considered some of the first writers to expound on Natural Law, and the Romans (particularly Cicero) expanded on their ideas, particularly as they apply to society. Natural Law got refined further through the Middle Ages and beyond, particularly by Aquinas. A lot of Enlightenment thought was explicitly based in in Natural Law. I'd skim the Wikipedia article on it for more details. Beyond that, you'd have to ask a philosopher.
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I have never felt so misunderstood in my entire time in this community. Are you mixing me up with someone else? I did mention doing a double take on your opinions in a past conversation, but when have I ever expressed anything positive about eugenics?
Are you an anarchist? If not, can you explain to me how to lay out a positive vision for a society without resorting to any social control? If you are an anarchist, don't you see how it's a purely negative vision of rejecting any sort of structure?
I've seen this "you guys don't have a positive vision at all, you're just reacting to our glorious progressive revolution" going around, but I don't get how you can say it with a straight face. Remind me again who came up with the whole concept of "deconstruction" and was madly applying it to every positively created social institution we had over the past 50 years?
What's that bit about conventional attractiveness supposed to imply? Do I still win if we keep our current sexual dimorphism, 9 month pregnancy and childbirth discomfort, but everybody's really really ugly? How is this supposed to be any kind of dilemma to me anyway? When have I ever expressed a preferences for a race of Von Neumanns running around? Yes, I side with dysgenic trads fucking themselves back to the stone age, and it's not even a contest! But it's not really a test of my principles, whether or not I have positive vision, or whether I'm just reacting to you. If you wanted to set one up, you'd make me chose between blue-haired neo-agrarians reproducing exclusively via butt-sex, and a traditionalist Borg Collective. Setting aside that I don't even know what a "traditionalist" Borg Collective means, and uncomfortable questions about how the neo-agrarians got to reproducing via butt-sex, I will always side with the group that rates lower on the trans-humanist scale.
I know you noticed, and I know it surprised you, so why didn't you stop and reassess your view of us, and the implications of our beliefs, when you saw that the people actually expressing any kind of discomfort with the whole Katja Grace thread were Dase, Hlynka, FCfromSSC, SouthKraut, and me? You didn't even say a bloody thing yourself, until you saw Dase speak up!
Oh god, why am I the only one that has to answer reductio ad absurdums around here? Sure! Fuck it, I'll take one for the team!
Are you going to let a giant cyber-blob assimilate the planet because you don't want to stand in the way of progress, or something? Do you have a positive vision, or are you rejecting the blob just because you're such a reactionary?
Finally, back to the main topic - yes, let's pull that thread a little bit. Like I said, we now know for a fact that the slope is slippery, and as one of the people who made ruthless fun of conservatives for even bringing up the idea in the past, and someone who's horrified by the world around me, I would very much like to know what makes you think this whole thing is going to stop here? You don't like exploiting third world women? How about brain dead surrogates? They can't get any more disempowered than they already are. Please you give me the positive principle that is supposed to stop this insanity.
What am I, chopped cabbage?
Contemporary standards of consent cover this pretty handily.
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I was trying to head off anyone who might be upset about X so we could focus on what I think is salient for the discussion. I don't know what your views on eugenics are, but my base assumption is that most people here believe in HBD and most of those people support some form of eugenics.
Nope. I'm just here for the music.
I'd suggest you go on the internet, join a community (it could even be this one!) and just write. Try and convince your fellow (wo)man of your vision for the world without being a hater. You could also start a substack, write op-eds for legacy media, be one of those youtube influencers, talk to people in meatspace. Tell me about your tradwife utopia in good faith, how you want to get there, and engage in a respectful dialogue.
'No u' isn't a particularly convincing rebuttal. Moreover, it papers over the fact that your specific contribution is at least 90% complaining about 'bad thing my outgroup did this week.' Your idea of a palate cleanser, because the previous conversation was too toxic, is 'look at these gay fucks trying to be happy in a way I dislike. Major Cthulhu/body horror vibes here guys amirite?'
But alright. Come on, arjin. Whip out that meaty, utopian vision of yours and slap my dirty deconstructionist face with it. I'm ready for it.
Because you turn around and write the exact same thing as yesterday about a different group and are somehow blind to the fact that you're doing it! It's frankly hilarious that you think you're somehow morally superior to the trolls who were shitting on Katja for trying to be happy yesterday, even as you're turning around to shit on gay people trying to be happy today!
It doesn't surprise me at all that there's discord between the Rights who are sympathetic to rationalists and the Rights who aren't, and of course there are plenty of people here who I believe do have good moral character. In fact, I believe most people here probably are perfectly fine (almost certainly far above the median) in real life. The beliefs expressed here are just a small facet of everyone's personality.
But man, they do suck sometimes.
Why don't you, @aqouta and gattsuru get together and tell me when and what I'm allowed to write and get back to me. You complain if I say something, complain if I don't and I'm pretty sure the actual operative principle here is that you just don't like what I say.
Because you carelessly toss bombs like:
without making an argument beyond gay people trying to have children is icky, transhumanists are icky, transhumanists must be destroyed! Which leads 'accept the limits of your biology and move on' to be the closest thing to a principle I can distill from your post. Okay...can you elaborate on how I should apply that principle to the rest of my life? Or if that's not your actual principle, what is?
Brain-dead surrogates don't bother me any more than organ donation does. Put another box to tick next to the organ donation one for womb donation and problem solved. But moving on:
I don't have any objection to a woman choosing to use her body as a surrogate. I get uncomfortable when a woman is forced to choose between abject poverty, slightly less abject poverty flipping burgers or being a piece of womb-meat for ivy-league educated Chad and Jake who live across town. Even more uncomfortable when the woman is in the third world and faces even worse choices. We don't allow pharma companies to entice homeless people into super risky clinical trials with million dollar payouts, and I think the same principle applies here. On the flip side, we also need to incentivize people to work, so the economic carrots need to have at least some bite.
So...maybe utopia is some form of UBI that allows basic needs to be met while still allowing incentives for people to work if they can? Followed by a world where we could grow babies on command without physically incapacitating women for 9 months? Followed by a range of worlds enabled by speculative technology I can't imagine at the moment. I suppose if you boiled it down to principles, bodily autonomy, consent, general freedom in how you decide to pursue happiness balanced with the Greater Good? And, dare I say it, intersectional analysis when it comes to the dynamics between surrogates and couples trying to impregnate them?
Alright, now how about you tell me your vision?
You want to stop the insanity? Stop being a hater on the internet. Politely tell other people to stop being haters on the internet. Go grill some burgers.
Oh, they're here, but they tend to be on your side of this particular spat.
Cool, that's exactly what I'm doing. So I guess arguing against surrogacy isn't social control.
It wasn't meant to be convincing as much as it was setting boundaries. I'm not going to smile and nod as I'm being accused of something your entire movement is based on.
Oh, it's fair enough as a personal criticism, just not an ideological one. Also I think 10% is a pretty good result!
Fun fact: that's not what I said. I was criticizing surrogacy, and as curious_straight_CA helpfully informs us most of those are done by straight couples. The reason I brought up how we went from gay marriage to surrogacy for gay couples was to criticize the progressive ideology, and how it gets you to sign on to unobjectionable things in the name of tolerance, only to pull you down to agree to practices that are, frankly, horrifying. The best part - which you are currently engaging in - is when it tries to frame your objection to the horrifying practice as attack on an entire group of people, most of who have nothing to do with the practice.
I'm not blind to anything, and I'm fully aware of what I'm doing, and yes it is morally superior to criticize a practice not attached to any particular person or group, then it is to generate drama around particular person that - at worst - made some poor decisions in the past.
But that's my point - this isn't what's happening. I didn't not attack Katja because I'm sympathetic to rationalists, this whole thread is a swipe at their ideas.
I suppose it could be as simple as "good moral character", but I also have to feeling you're fundamentally misunderstanding us.
Now "transhumanists are icky" is something I said, and that is where the major Cthulhu vibes are coming from, and I'll defend every word of it. I take it you're not a fan of the bombastic style, and you'd prefer something more contemplative and precise, but cut me some slack, I was having some fun, and I didn't think you of all people would get so upset about some humor at rationalists' expense.
As to how the principle would impact your life, that's a fair question. Sorry for being flippant before, but sometimes it's hard to tell whether someone is setting you up for a dunk, or asking an honest question. Broadly speaking I think there's a relatively defined line around repair and enhancement, where repair would be completely fine, and enhancement would not. There might be some tricky areas at the boundaries, but there always are some with any principle. There are folks going around saying how that's what Catholics and Natural Law philsophers were advocating for. I heard these arguments when I was young, but I only half-remember them now so I don't know if I can sign under them 100%. Still, that might be something to look up if you want these arguments elaborated on.
On the other hand I think it's a fair question to ask about the other side of the boundary. If enhancement is ok, when does it stop? Is everything ok as long as it's voluntary? A lot of enhancements would probably quickly spread through the human population, because they make things more convenient, but are things that give us convenience always good for us? When I bring up my Luddism people sometimes ask me things like "what, so you would get rid of the Internet? You really don't see any benefit from it?" Sure I do! My career, and a lot of my hobbies are directly connected to it. I met interesting people that I would have never met otherwise... but it's hard to miss the downsides. My attention span got shot. I have way too little patience for normies, when people on the same wavelength are so easy to reach. I'm way less connected to local communities than I used to be before the Internet took off. Even Internet communities themselves went from a relatively flat distribution of many small groups, to an extreme Pareto distribution where a handful of influencers on a handful of platforms command the overwhelming majority of the attention. All of this happened voluntarily, and is now opening the door to tools of surveillance that could only be conceived by crazy mofos like Jeremy Bentham. And protections against state surveillance don't cut it either, if all this power is located at Google or Amazon, it's just as scary, even when it's completely voluntary, even when it's more convenient, even when it resulted from people pursuing happiness.
I could go on, I could bring up the rates of depression and mental illness and ask what if cutting everyone loose to pursue their own happiness just makes them miserable, I could ask what if we end up chasing petty amusements and as a result forget the basic skills required to keep the lights on, but let's bring it back to surrogacy and crazier transhumanist ideas like Neuralink, CRISPR, and whatnot - you really cannot see how any of this could go horribly wrong? Do we have no right to stop it, just because people agree to it? Even if it results in the replacement of the human species with some horror beyond my comprehension?
On a whim, I recently rewatched all the 90's Star Trek shows, the go-to reference for optimistic SciFi. A thought that struck me, was that virtually all of the optimism actually comes from what you'd describe as a reactionary rejection of progress, rather than "we abolished hunger", equality, rationality, post-scarcity and other reasons people commonly reach for. After all the Borg have all of those things as well.
With all the tech they have, it's a miracle that they're still recognizably human. The crew had encounters with aliens that were rewriting their DNA on the fly, and they only used their technology for a cure, even though the fact they could concoct a cure means they could turn themselves into whatever they wanted. Cybernetic implants and prosthetics exist, but are absurdly benign for their level of technology. Some of the most iconic episodes are about the crew being tempted by some technology or some advanced alien, and them rejecting that temptation. Their society is devoted to a variety of edifying pursuits: science, exploration, art, craftsmanship, and cultivating traditions. A charming thing about it is the rejection of hyper-specialization, it seems like all the crew members make a point to dabble in various arts even when they suck at them.
Then on top of that, a few words on relationships. TNG aside, my utopian society would encourage stable long-term (ideally for-life) monogamous relationships, strong family and community relations, a love as a higher value that goes beyond the warm fuzzy feelings.
Sounds pretty good to me.
So... how does that stop things like going from gay marriage to being demanded to clap for 14 year old girls getting mastectomies?
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Neither a dedicated HBD'er nor eugenicist, though I would suggest one can be the former without being the latter. Just for your files. There was a raise-your-hand thread in HBD support a while back but apparently this site's search function is failing me.
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I'm confused why I was invoked here, I did not think I would have left such an impression on you. I have never and would never tell someone not to write something especially if they believe in it. That does not mean I won't criticize what I see as poor arguments like that idea that conservatives need some positive vision to oppose what they see as corrosive ideas. I'm not even really properly a rightist.
Read the post linked before your name, and the comment of yours I replied to.
Ah, well yeah, I quite dislike the shaming tactic of "is this what we've come to?", I disliked it when Dase did it in this thread too despite recognizing the same low quality discourse that inspired it. It is, at the very least, consensus building - which is against our rules here for good reason. If you want to make a criticism I'd rather it be more narrowly tailored to the actual offenders, I think this is a value you'd find useful in other contexts. I've pushed back against Arjin in this very thread, something you don't seem inclined to give me credit for by whatever aggregation method you use to lump all us witches together. It's not even a matter of rudeness so much as a clear sign you are falling prey to Out-group homogeneity bias. I'm sure you are off-put by this same bias in the other direction quite frequently and quite justifiably in this place.
All the interesting discussions that have been had here and you decide that the proper measure that we should be paying attention to are the lowest quality threads you can find. The kind of gossipy nonsense I barely even resisted the urge to collapse and only returned to from a ping. I'm not even saying if you don't like it don't read it or don't criticize it. Definitely do that. But don't attack this place for giving you the opportunity to.
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Keep fighting the good fight Chris. Don't have much to add, but I enjoy your comments and your consistency.
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Here's a question that I have about that handmaid's tale maternity photo shoot that you linked. Is this gay couple going to include that woman in the child's life as the child's mother? If not, is this weird picture going to be something that the child gets to look at in their lonely moments wondering who the woman was who gave birth to them, and what it would have been like to have her as a mother? Did this couple think any of these things at all themselves?
My biggest problem with surrogacy, as I stated in another comment, is that the child is left being forced to embrace parents who paid their biological mother and gestating mother to go away forever so that they could assume a full parental role.
It seems like that child is sort of compelled from birth to ignore the psychological and emotional implications of having two male parents who paid their mom to go away because they wanted to feel normal. That's why it's not the same as adoption, because the new family that you're supposed to embrace did not contractually obligate your biological parents to give you up.
The surrogate came up with and posted the photo shoot idea (and also isn't the genetic mother?). Her name is public (at least through TikTok) and self-describes as a 'surrogacy advocate', and other photos from the set naming her are in fairly mainstream media. According to this piece, "The Dlugosz family [two men and the kid] still plans Capital Region visits. Zwicker [the surrogate] expects the relationship to wane over time. For her, that’s OK."
Zwicker seems to very strongly object to being identified as the child's mother, and probably not solely for the legal or genetic reasons, but neither does it look like the fathers paying her to go away the second the c-section was over. It's hard for me to read if it's to prevent herself from getting too attached, or because she just doesn't feel it's the same as with her first child and doesn't want to get in the way of the people who are, and she might not be entirely sure herself. Surrogacy clinics claim to do significant prematch screening, and there's a lot of media discussion (and, uh, horror stories with legal snafus) enough that I'd expect any prospective surrogate-seekers to have at least considered it.
More generally, attitudes vary. I'd personally consider it healthier if there's some longer-term relationship, historically this has been favored, and there's some evolving norms around 'surrogate aunts' or similar more euphemistic references. But there are parents (sometimes feeling that they'd be treated as non-parents, sometimes worried about legal trouble if a surrogate mother has regrets) or surrogates (since there can sometimes be financial or legal issues that way!) who prefer a more immediate or direct break afterward.
((And, in practice, as many surrogacies look to involve infertile het (or XY/XX trans-gender-weird) couples as gay ones. Zwicker's photoshoot here was her second surrogacy, with her first going to Zwicker's cousin and that cousin's husband.))
To me it looks like the woman acting as s surrogate here gets a lot of social support and validation from being a surrogate. However, so do many prostitutes, and so would people paid to donate a lobe of their liver or a kidney. I think it should be the same thing. You can have sex for free, you can donate an organ, and you should be able to donate the act of surrogacy, but you shouldn't be able to do any of these things as a paid service because that's bad for society. And yes, for me that does include pornography where the actors are paid to have sex with each other on camera. Commercial pornography is causing a lot of problems. Labor laws (no pun intended) exist to prevent the rich from exploiting the working class beyond what is tolerable or humane, and requires society to create non-exploitive forms of work to continue functioning.
Many jurisdictions place surrogacy in a similar space to prostitution and organ donation, where ostensibly paying for it is illegal. In practice, this largely just converts into a gray market, so just as 'escorts' or 'companions' (who are only being paid for their company, and if sex happens, whoops), 'unpaid surrogates' that are compensated for lodging or lost work opportunity usually sneak through. Zwicker's first surrogacy (for a cousin) was somewhat unusually in being completely unpaid, but it was also unpleasant enough juggling that and her own child she wouldn't have done it for family again.
I'm not convinced that's a better model, or that a hard ban would be (prohibiting adoption where there's sign of collaboration beforehand? clawing back funds? I'm not sure how you'd make that work, but let's assume something's possible, since this is a lot more seeable-as-a-state than prostitution). I could see that sort of policy having some impact on the marginal cases, where someone just on the border of affording to buy or being willing to sell doesn't go through with it, but the marginal cases aren't the ones that bring comparisons to axotl tanks or broodmothers.
But I'm... uh, probably going to have some pretty fundamental values differences. And even experience differences: I recognize how a lot of the bigger commercial vendors range from 'merely' scuzzy drug-addict-optimizers or abusing the bounds of informed consent to overtly ignoring rape or trafficking, but it's not clear how much of that is the commercial porn and how much is California and eastern Europe being the core of modern commercial pornography, and on the other extreme 'commercial pornography' in the furry fandom has a widely different set of problems mostly tied to artists needing better wrist support.
I probably don't have a good model of what you consider the "bad for society" bit here.
To give you a quick hit, bad for society is when your therapist can mention surrogacy as a legal way out of your poverty.
Yes, and the correlated bit where your social worker could mention it right before an SSDI/welfare interview. But I don't see this as something specific to the formal recognition; both therapists and social workers shouldn't encourage outright illegal conduct (uh, shouldn't), but both groups are organizationally and foundationally designed around Not Quite Illegal things. They're not always good at it, but they're usually not that bad, either.
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Another example of where it could go bad: where you can be denied welfare because you were offered a job as a surrogate and refused it.
Actually is that a thing? As far as I can tell you cannot currently become a gestational surrogate if you are receiving welfare, so I think it's not. But seeing evidence of that happening at any sort of significant scale would be one of the few things which would turn my opinion against surrogacy as an option.
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My concern is more so a push toward commodified bodies. Seeing the poor as simply a collection of body parts and processes to be purchased at the whim of the better off who can afford to buy access if not the body part in question. Or perhaps as technology improves the creation of axotl tanks from human females who are chemically lobotomized and used simply for breeding purposes.
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Nah; those are the arm in the door. The foot first slipped a toe into the door a hundred thousand years ago.
I wear artificial skins, because otherwise my own skin wouldn't protect me from dying of exposure or being crippled by sunburn.
I wear artificial soles on my feet, because my own can be worn out by too much running on a nice surface or badly injured by one unlucky step on a rocky surface.
I partially predigest most of my food in artificial fires, because my own teeth are too small and my stomach and immune system too weak to handle everything I eat otherwise. My meat is cut up with artificial claws, because my own fingernails are even more pathetic than my teeth.
I wear artificial lenses over my eyes, because my own don't focus well enough at far distances.
In the next decade or two there's a 50/50 chance I'll only be alive due to artificial thyroid hormone; I'm getting close to the age where my father's and grandmother's own natural production went haywire and had to be replaced by pills.
About a third of my countrymen born today came out through artificial incisions rather than their mothers' own vaginas. Within 6 months, three quarters of them get artificial milk in addition to or instead of their mother's own breast milk. About half of them wouldn't have made it past their own birth and childhood if not for post-industrial medical economics and technologies.
Today most of my work time is spent telling silicon artificial brain extensions how to think better, to solve problems much too big for our previous graphite-and-wood-pulp-based extensions, much less our own brains alone. Right now I'm communicating with a silicon "voice", because even if my own voice could shout a hundred times as loudly as humanly possible you'd still never hear it.
On the one hand, I do totally get the appeal of (small-c) conservatism here! In general the proposition "Let's just all try this new X because it's better and it won't have any side effects and we won't change to become dependent on it and it'll never go away" is a train of thought that derailed from "reasonable" to "wait, shouldn't we at least worry about possibly being wrong?" very very quickly. I think we've been pretty lucky with it so far, but even just being a little wrong with each new change is a sobering thought when applied to an unlimited set of possible changes over unbounded time scales. I've certainly abandoned some traditional values that my ancestors held precious, and although I could fairly point out to them "you did the same to your ancestors, who did the same to theirs, so what did you expect?", I can't say I'm happy with all the implications of the expectation that my descendants will do the same to me. At this point I agree that there's even a serious risk of not even having anything I'd recognize as "my descendants", of having everything I value either quickly destroyed or gradually outcompeted by the results of drastic once-unimaginable changes.
But the catch is, for many lifetimes this fact of constantly changing traditions has been a longstanding tradition. It's no longer even logically possible to avoid major changes, because the ability for society to squelch unprecedented changes would itself be an unprecedented change! Trying to use persuasion alone is laudable but just isn't universally effective. How could world culture be so easily imbued with far more overwhelming agreement and totalizing enforcement? (if you think "potential airstrikes against rogue data centers" is hard to popularize, wait until you try "potential police raids of rogue families") But without some mechanism to ensure overwhelming buy-in, even if we were to Retvrn to whatever year N we somehow all agreed had gotten things right, in roughly 2023-minus-N years we'd find ourselves right back here again, because "evolving into N+1" is one of the things that happens in year N. Is there an alternative? Should we come up with some altered revision of older beliefs and traditions, some Neo-N ideology, which preserves the best things about year N while making every change necessary to make Neo-N a stable rather than a constantly evolving environment, maybe even allowing new changes if and only if we're actually sure that they're really long-term changes for the better? It might be a good idea, and we could certainly try. If we're lucky, this new ideology might be better, might not have any side effects, might not change us, and might never go away. Wait...
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Do the TERFs you hang out with have problems with women making such claims? For instance, extending government-provided fertility treatment to single women and lesbians? I suspect not, as feminism and especially radical feminism has long been focused on the destruction of reproduction as a fundamental human experience involving a man and a woman into one solely involving a woman by breaking the ties between sex and reproduction, reducing men to subhuman servitors existing solely to provide resources and genetic material to women. Surrogacy is rejected because it would equate women's role with men's, reducing them to a mere cog in the process of reproduction rather than being in control of it.
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Disgust? Read how disgusting and unnatural people saw IVF, contraception, organ transplants, blood transfusion, anaesthesia, open chest surgery, autopsy of the dead and other medical procedures we now take for granted when they were new.
Nothing is more arbitrary the disgust, and not only in the medical field.
Obligatory obscure anecdote: I remember reading memoir of 19th century German settler in Russia.
Germans arrived on empty land given them by Tsar, and began to cultivate it according to their customs. This included using animal manure to fertilize the fields.
The local Russian peasants were disgusted, revolted and absolutely horrified.
"These furrin devil worshippers spread animal shit on their fields, instead of throwing in to the river to get rid of it as normal people do! Do they want to poison good Orthodox people with shit bread?"
Few years later:
"See the how big harvests do these swine have, while we good Orthodox people can barely feed themselves! Satan is helping them! Burn down their village, now!"
Have you read any primary-source accounts by the actual people purported to be doing the hating? If not, why are you confident that this account of ethnic animosity is objective and reliable enough to illuminate your understanding of human nature?
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I'm not getting what you're concerned about. The maternity shoot is tacky, I agree. But surrogacy seems like a totally fine thing, and your disgust doesn't really make any sense to me.
"When did society change on this" is one thing, "This is morally wrong" is another. I don't see why we need to accept a limit of biology.
If surrogacy is totally fine, what exactly is tacky about the photo?
Being in the back with her head down and her face obscured makes her look like the "before" part of an SSRI commercial. She's supposed to be looking at the baby, but it doesn't work because the baby isn't the focus of the picture. Either the baby should be the focus and all three of them should be looking at it, or the couple should stay as the focus but she should be looking at them and smiling. As it is, she looks unhappy and disconnected.
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I couldn't explain it, probably just a view I have of what makes a good photo which I haven't interrogated. I think one issue is the way in which the surrogate is just hanging around the back. If they had her front and center with them, I think I'd cringe less.
The surrogacy doesn't bother me either, but that photo kind of looks to me like a meme image, maybe you're getting the same vibe. By putting her in the back with her head down, I expect a caption underneath like "I'm having their damn baby and they just keep gazing at each other smdh". It blows my mind that the photo was her idea.
Edit: I mean ffs it's called our "maternity" shoot, inverted commas implying irony and everything, and the pregnant woman is not even in focus, you could even interpret it as saying these two guys don't give a shit about the baby, they only care about themselves and what a baby will give them. Was this chick throwing a master-class in shade?
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As a mild transhumanist, I don't like the perspective of a subroutine that's somewhat similar to the processes in our brains either. It's approximately as valuable to me after I perish as 1+ organisms that have genes somewhat similar to some of the genes I had: i. e. not at all.
I resolve to not upload myself until either I'm terminally ill or old anyway, or the uploading technology demonstrates that it can support continuity and wholeness of thought (such as, for example, Ship-of-Theseusing a willing test subject halfway).
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I find the photograph rather tasteless, with the surrogate mother reduced to a walking womb in the background. Either treat her as a person or keep her out of your family photos altogether.
There's another problem with surrogacy, that of birth defects, something it has in common with all IVF births. As long as the happy gay couple in question won't give any of their defective babies up for adoption, I don't consider surrogacy itself to be morally wrong, for more or less the same reasons @Astranagant gives.
Seems to me like the photograph, like videos of abattoirs, is tasteless mainly in how honest it is about the dynamic that underpins the service.
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Looks like we have gone from this to this...
Credit to the great @Dramarama for making these....
Low effort, you've been told before to lay off the rdrama memes.
Sure, low effort on my part. But the Marsey's themselves are so amazing they just have to be shared. Doing so brings joy to the world. There is a reason they got over 400 upvotes on Drama.
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"The slippery slope is a fallacy!" they say, as they strap on their skis.
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I find surrogacy morally absurd, in pretty much the same reaction you do. I have gone back and forth on it with @TracingWoodgrains (respectfully) before, and it is (sadly) one of the best examples of why I can't adopt a 'live and let live' perspective, although I am dispositionally inclined toward that. I think it is a a sister moral issue to abortion, involving the commoditization of children and subordinating the natural family to liquid modernistic relativism.
Where I will push back, is that I don't think it's so much a transhuman issue as another slip of the sexual liberation + LGBT slope and repudiation that gay rights had much more social effect than, people doing their thing in the bedroom. Much like Grindr-> Tinder, this is another social-sexual transformation of norms that really matured in the gay community before being adopted by elite, then PMC straights.
Of course, straight surrogacy has been in the public consciousness for a long time (Phoebe from friends had a plotline around this in the 90s). But it really became trendy in the last decade through wealthy DINKy gay couples using this as an equal access avenue to 'biological children.
You will probably be mocked here and elsewhere for the Lovecraftian horror descriptor, but it fully resonates with me. But let me back it up, and roll back my anti-LGBT perspective here. This is ALL DOWNSTREAM from contraception, socially acceptable divorce and casual sex. I have become less and less patient with people who try to propose some limiting factor to sexual liberation that stops exactly where they want it.
The Catholic view is really the only one that provides a complete and coherent counter framework against this that isn't a bunch of special pleading.
I 100% agree. The choice is between Alphonsus Ligouri and Sam Brinton, and functionally there isn’t a stable middle ground even though everyone wants one- it’s a parabolic slippery slope where if you hit the middle ground you have too much momentum not to launch straight at the other position.
I mean, technically there’s also the position of sheikh al-Wahhab. But the Dar-Al-Islam isn’t exactly compatible with western civilization.
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I don't disagree, like I mentioned in the other comments, I've found myself quite receptive to Catholic moral teachings, it's just that I'm still atheist. So whereas you might say "no sex before marriage, no divorce, no abortions, and no condoms, because that's what God commanded", I would say "no sex before marriage, no divorce, no abortions, and no condoms, because if you allow it, the next thing you know some smartass is going to stick Neuralink up your earhole and turn you into one of Jeff Bezos' automatons".
Well Catholicism has the additional advantage of a sub-philosophy that suggests all these morals expressed within Natural Law, which doesn't necessarily have to be founded on "God".
But you're going to run into the pushback you find in the relativism across your other responses. You're framework is dismissed as an aesthetic complain because the moral relativist, the materialist, and the moral liberalist are married in gnawing at an object morality as arbitrary.
A Natural Law view offers a complete and coherent opposite view (while other conservative or Protestant viewpoints don't imho), but it doesn't and can't address why this not that. I suggest biting the bullet and deriving a religious foundation for your moral intuition or accept being homeless in a neighborhood of transhumanists.
Natural law has nothing to do with christianity. It was invented by greek pagans hundreds of years before christianity began, and only became part of catholic doctrine in the 13th century when Aquinas brought it in, and never got baked into the other branches of christianity like it somehow did with catholicism.
In other words, it doesn't have nothing to do with it.
Which is why I explicitly said that was an advantage of Catholicism over Protestantism, in this sense.
Christianity is fundamentally about God, right? So given that natural law came into one branch of christianity in the way that it did, the fact that there is no compelling indication that God cares about natural law is an argument against that branch of christianity moreso than it is against my point, unless you think Thomas Aquinas is the second coming of jesus or something.
It is an advantage in what sense? Its not like it makes catholicism more likely to be true than protestantism, or the coptic church, greek orthodox church, armenian apostolic church etc.
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I don't mind biting the bullet, but accepting a religious foundation requires faith, and that's something I'm lacking at the moment. Maybe the day will come, but it hasn't yet.
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People often defend surrogacy with the idea that people have the right to do what they want with their bodies. I appreciate and respect those willing to stand in a libertarian defense of something I value, but for my part, I strongly prefer a more affirmative case.
For context, my husband and I are currently talking with a potential surrogate and working out some of the many, many logistical challenges on the road to parenthood. We're in early stages, and there is a great deal to be worked out, but we fully intend on becoming parents as soon as realistically possible. Given that, none of this debate is abstract for me, and I am as far from a neutral party as one can get.
While there are cases in which I respect the value of libertarian frameworks legally and I lean far towards "live and let live" from a metacultural standpoint, there is nothing libertarian about my moral approach to life. I do not believe all choices are equally valid or that there is nothing wrong with hedonism. I do not see things like parenthood as neutral choices that people can take or leave. Rather, what is perhaps my most fundamental philosophical conviction is this: life is Good, human life especially so. The most natural things in the universe are death, decay, and emptiness. Growth, life, and creation are fragile anomalies. We belong to an eons-long heritage of those who have committed to building and maintaining life in the face of inevitable decay. Our duty is to do the same.
Becoming a parent and raising children well is, put simply, the most good almost anyone in the world can do. It is a force multiplier: the good an individual can do is necessarily constrained compared to what their descendants can accomplish. People try to dodge around this, and even longtermists like Will MacAskill who intellectually understand the value of parenthood make excuses for it in their own lives. But it seems incontrovertibly true to me. People, particularly if they are in a position to provide well for children, should become parents. It is not a neutral action among many neutral actions. It is a moral ideal that people should pursue.
All of this takes us to adoption and surrogacy. I accept as a given that the ideal situation for a child is to be raised by their biological parents in a stable home. Inasmuch as social science is worthwhile to note, it has mostly backed this idea up. But for the most part, when people pursue other outcomes, the choice is not between "have biological parents raise a given child in a stable home" and "pursue other family structures for that child". For adoption, the value is obvious and non-controversial given the choice: "bring a child into a loving, stable home without its biological parents" or "send the child to an orphanage, toss it to the wolves, or pursue one of many other tragic outcomes for unwanted children". For most cases of surrogacy, the choice is a bit different: "create a child that will be raised by one or both biological parents in a stable home, but whose birth mother is not their genetic mother or caretaker" or "create no child".
Some people's moral intuitions are that nonexistence is preferable to, or not obviously worse than, existence in a less-than-ideal setting. I wholly reject this intuition, and looking at the record of the persistence of life in the face of adversity, belong to a heritage of those who have, time and time again, rejected it. Life is Good.
As for surrogate mothers? There is nobility, dignity, and grace in parenthood. Bringing a child into the world is an act of hope. To do so on behalf of another, even when provided financial compensation, is not a neutral or profit-focused choice. It's certainly not something that could or should ever be demanded of someone. It's a selfless choice both on behalf of the child who would otherwise not be born and the prospective parents who would otherwise have no children. The woman I've been talking a bit about it with is a young mother who feels she is not in a spot to responsibly raise more children of her own, but strongly wants to keep having children on behalf of others. That's a standard profile for a surrogate, and it's one I see as deeply admirable.
On my own behalf, I claim no fundamental right to have children, because I claim no rights that require others to act. But I absolutely claim that a society in which those who are equipped to raise children, and want to do so, can work alongside those who want to give birth to others' children is in a better spot than one that keeps children with potential to lead meaningful lives from being born. For my own part, while I won't claim to any extraordinary personal ability in terms of parenting, I have no doubt whatsoever that my husband is someone who should be a father, and I am grateful to live in a world where that's a possibility.
There are margins at which some of these arguments shift. There are absolutely exploitative and tragic environments that should be understood and called out. There are settings into which it's not appropriate to bring a child, and edge cases to analyze and discuss. My aim here is not to address all edge cases, but to examine the central case, and in particular, the case for an educated, well-off prospective parent in a society with lower-than-replacement fertility and increasing dismissiveness towards the value of parenthood. Life is worth pursuing and preserving to such a degree that you can get very far from the true ideal case before nonexistence is better than existence, or choosing not to become a parent is better than choosing to become one.
Is this all a foot in the door for transhumanism? I won't speak for others, but on my own behalf I eagerly answer: yes. In a universe where the most natural things are death, decay, and emptiness and all of life is in rebellion against that natural state, it is not just acceptable to prioritize what is Good over what is natural, it is correct. While we all must come to peace with limitations we cannot change, the high points of human history have been our collective work to push back against that creeping entropy and the arbitrary, often cruel limits it imposes. We have already become much more than we once were, and we can and should become much more than we are now.
This does not resemble my read on the impulse of libertarianism. Or at least no the strong version that I respect and in some ways identify with. Libertarians are not(necessarily) moral relativists. They do not believe that all other ways of being are equally good but they have the humility to realize that imposing morality on others is an arms race for which the victor is not at all guaranteed to be the group that actually has the superior morality, in fact defection and bad morality are likely a competitive advantage in the imposing your morality on others game.
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Oh man, this was supposed to be a fun abstract culture war spat. The vintage type, before wokeness, like when we used to hate each other about abortion. I don't know if I can do this when real stakes are involved.
I don't suppose there's anything I can do to change your mind? Any alternatives I can get you to consider? How about one of those dating sites for people who want to have kids? I heard they're popular with gay peolple. Anything where you wouldn't literally be purchasing another human being?
Unfortunately, the alternative to "go with a surrogacy service" isn't "find a dating site with someone who enjoys pregnancy enough to do it for free", for almost anyone. Trivially, while there's not a ton of gay couples looking for surrogates, but there's even fewer women with pregnancy (and turkey baster) kinks, and even of those not all want to go through the full process, and even fewer can absorb the financial and workweek ramifications.
((And I'm not sure the objection specified by @Catsnakes_ of "paying someone else to make a baby and abandon it" 'reals'; people have focused on adoption as a comparison, but there's other metaphors that break things. If I found a lady willing to do the initial part of the baby-making for free, but we went with embryo transfer at six days, is that better? What about vice versa, from a paid genetic surrogate to a gratis gestational one?))
I think an easier way to solve this Gordian knot (if you'll excuse the Solomon metaphor) is just to get rid of the 'abandon it' side. There's nothing in surrogacy that requires the gestational mother to be kicked out; to the minimal extent breaking contact has been favored in the past reflected legal concerns. Paying a mother to let you help raise a kid is a lot less fraught, and has a much longer historical background.
I brought it up because I know for a fact that these sites, and these women do actually exist - although not quite in the way you described it. I saw one in my country, but Google turns up a bunch of American examples (1, 2). The big difference is that these women actually want to have a kid, so you wouldn't get to keep it exclusively, but the whole "commissioning the creation of a child, only to yank them away from their mother's loving breast" is part of the horror of surrogacy to me, so having both parents involved in the child's life is the whole point. I find these "quick, anyone, let's make a baby!" "dating" sites, quite morbid themselves, but they're way better than surrogacy.
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Aye, that's the trouble with culture war spats, isn't it? None of them are abstract for everyone, and the culture war has real stakes. I want to live in a culture where my family and I can live according to our values and build alongside people who share those values. Emphasizing where surrogacy fits within that frame, and carving out space where people won't look at my family with the sort of suspicion and hissing condemnation @Catsnakes_ below illustrates is a real, important part of that.
To opponents of surrogacy, "literally purchasing another human being" and "providing compensation for the complex and demanding circumstances needed to create a human being" are a distinction without a difference; all I can say is that I see a crucial distinction, and see surrogacy as no more purchasing a human being than IVF or, more disputably, paying a hospital for childbirth. We live in a world where money is inextricably tied up in even intimate human interactions, but that doesn't strip them of their humanity or their worth.
As for changing my mind—look, obviously people stake a lot on major life decisions, and I can't pretend I expect my mind to change on this one. If it were to change, though, it would happen the same way it always does: either by convincing me that some of my values are poorly conceived, or working within the frame of my own values to convince me that my plans don't live up to them. That's why I don't really expect a change, of course—I've spent a long while considering my values and finding the right landing spot, and I suspect I'm mostly past the stage of serious, rather than marginal, adjustments. But the pathway to change is straightforward.
There's degrees of it though. I can show more sympathy when discussing trans issues with a trans person, and just focus on the facts of the matter. This is a pure values disagreement and it's hard to get around that. It's fun enough discussing those too, but the fun quickly evaporates when you discover the person you're arguing about Roe vs Wade with is getting an abortion next week.
Yes, everybody does, there's the rub isn't it?
Funnily enough Botonds comment could be interpreted as poking fun at either one of us, but I'm going to use it to support my argument here. Yes, what you want is understandable, again that's what everybody wants for themselves, but your comment is written in a weird way that seems to imply your values are best values. If you found out your next door neighbor is a cannibal - not a murderer mind you, everybody he eats is some weirdo he met online that wants to be eaten, you see stories like that every once in a while. Oh and let's say he doesn't even eat the whole person, just their hand or something, and the other guy is completely happy about it afterwards - wouldn't you let out the least bit of a hissing condemnation? Would you want the practice to be against the law? Would you want him to still be your neighbor? What would you make of the cannibal's pleas for wanting to live in a culture where he and his family can live according to their values?
The other thing is, while I find the dead-eyed "yes, I'm for surrogacy" attitude somewhat admirable, I can't help the resentment building up upon hearing the charming gay couple down the street, whose rights I helped fight for, tell me "what did you think was going to happen, bitch?". Thankfully there's plenty of gay people who are against surrogacy, so it's not all that bad, but Jesus, this has been a disturbing experience.
I'm not really a fan of IVF either, but even it doesn't involve taking a child away from their mother, and paying for the hospital bed is in a completely different universe.
Well, of course everybody wants that.
I feel like you're reading my comment as saying "I, uniquely, want a values-driven society, and cruel people like you prevent that."
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the rubber meets the road with values differences at some points, and that's where the culture war becomes most complex and most serious. It goes without saying that I believe my values are correct. They are, after all, my values. Others disagree with them, and the truce of liberalism is the most stable way I've seen to deal with those clashes up to this point, but the culture war stops being an abstract chat when your decisions cross someone else's line in the sand or vice versa. I condemn or criticize some choices. Some condemn or criticize my own. I have strong feelings about who is right and who is wrong in most culture war conflicts, but the stakes are high for everybody. At some point, conflicts or no, people decide what sort of life they want to live and find allies where they can. The value I have chosen to make my own stand on here is that bringing people into the world, becoming a parent, and working to raise children well is a good that should be pursued even as circumstances fall short of the most ideal.
The resentment you describe is understandable but a bit peculiar. There was no slippery slope from gay marriage to surrogacy. Gestational surrogacy has been legal in (most of) the United States since long before gay marriage was allowed. There was no carve-out in the push for legal marriage saying "we want to have all the legal rights straight married couples do, except for the option to pursue already legal surrogacy options". Marriage and surrogacy aren't even directly connected, except for questions like who the parents listed on birth certificates are: single men can pursue surrogacy, just like single women can find sperm donors.
Not to lean too much into the villain role in your story, but... what did you think was going to happen? Did you think all gay men who wanted to get married simply saw marriage in the shallower modern "if two people love each other very much..." light and not as the best option for stable, happy family formation and child-rearing? Did you see the collection of legal rights attached to marriage, routes to adoption and surrogacy that straight couples were already using, and assume gay people were simply uninterested; were you treating the idea as primarily symbolic rather than a specific legal change that would open up specific doors for people?
So part of the misunderstanding probably comes from geographical distance. Things look a bit different worldwide, and even in places where it's currently banned, we still get the western Blob's drumbeat about wonderful surrogacy is. From that perspective, surely it's more understandable how it looks like a slippery slope.
Since you asked the question directly, I've been trying to interrogate if I'm misremembering something. Is it that I was young and kids weren't on my mind? Maybe that was a part of it, but I distinctly remember adoption by gay couples being part of the controversy, and I assumed that that was going to cover the issue of gay people who want to start a family. Especially since gay people I knew were saying adoption isn't even that important to them (they were on the younger side as well though).
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Family benefits were always part of the package. Andrew Sullivan's landmark 1989 argument, to my understanding the first major advocacy article on the topic in the US, is worth reviewing:
Andrew Sullivan, one can point out, is for a gay man unusually conservative in his sensibilities and was making an unabashedly conservative argument in favor of gay marriage. But gay marriage has always been more the purview of the more conservative-minded in the subculture.
You're right that it's comparatively uncommon for gay couples to have kids, but it's more that their kids often don't enter the sphere of Public Discourse. I didn't know Neil Patrick Harris had kids. Looking it up, I see Anderson Cooper, Dan Savage, Jared Polis, and Perez Hilton have kids as well. Dave Rubin is a new father. It's not wildly common, but it's not an anomaly.
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Back before the SSC-Motte split happened on Reddit, among the resident disaffected leftists on SSC was some guy with an Arabic-sounding username. I forgot what it was, and he deleted the account a long time ago, or it got suspended. Anyway, one time he posted the usual and frankly boring leftist complaint of SSCer quasi-incel garbage humans tolerating the online presence of literal Nazis and even getting into discussions with them. He based his complaint on the argument that ‘if this side wins in the culture war, many of my buds will get executed as degenerate gays, so for me this all is deeply personal, I’m not just here to hang out etc.’
Needless to say, it seemingly never occurred to him (at least there was no sign of this) that if the OTHER side wins, then, according to the same logic, many people will get executed/gulaged for being landlords, venture capitalists, GOP officials, for supporting Proposition 8 or whatever it was, for opposing the toppling of Confederate monuments, for denying that gas chambers were used in Majdanek etc. It just didn’t register on his radar. Weird.
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Neither IVF nor paying the hospital for delivering the baby involves paying someone else to make a baby and abandon it. Helping a woman give birth to her own child does not permanently deprive that child of their mother. Surrogacy does. Have you grappled with that?
Wait, why does surrogacy amount to depriving a child of their mother? If a hetero couple did surrogacy but raised that child as their own, there's a mother as far as the child is concerned. What exactly is the child losing if brought into the world via surrogacy that is irreplaceable?
Hetero surrogacy is just as bad. There is an important bond which is lost. A child carried in the womb for 9 months knows its mother. It already knows her voice and is familiar with her. This is not insignificant.
To go somewhat off topic for a moment: I am disgusted by the transhumanist fascination with artificial wombs for the same reason. A mother's womb is more than a growing medium. Nothing we can construct is going to be able to replicate it-- the entire thing is a wire monkey with extra steps.
Gonna have to call bullshit on that one unless you have evidence. Children don't remember stuff that early, and certainly not from before they were born. To be clear, the evidence needs to be that it's typical for unborn babies to remember this stuff, not that it happened once in an exceptional case. I don't believe such evidence exists but if you have it I'll concede the point.
I wasn't talking about long term memories. There seems to be a consensus amongst experts that the fetus recognizes the mother's voice and heartbeat sounds, and recognizes her scent via exposure to amniotic fluid. This recognition continues when the baby is born, and it is believed that these familiar senses calm the newborn among other things. I'd prefer to give you links to research, but you'll have to settle for the deluge of popsci articles I can find on google, and knowing that this is what we were told by doctors as well. Here's one link [1], it's not an isolated example and there are tons more. Most of them seem to have at least some kind of citation at least. That said, expert consensus and common wisdom via experience is a kind of evidence of its own, even if there's not bulletproof research papers on the topic.
There's also evidence that skin to skin contact with their mother immediately after delivery results in lower stress, better ability to regulate body temperature, and other improved outcomes. I sincerely doubt that this suddenly stops being important after a week. This is easier to find research on, as well as a wealth of consensus online and it's standard practice in hospitals. [2]
It's also known that while obviously the mother goes through hormonal changes, even the expectant father in a pregnant couple goes through pre-partum hormonal changes that have an impact on parenting outcomes. [2] I can't find research on the topic, but it seems reasonable to assume that this is due to chemical signalling between mother and father and requires proximity, and not something that is likely to materialize spontaneously in the couple waiting to be handed a baby.
Frankly, I don't even think the burden of proof is on me. You want to deviate from a state of nature and the common wisdom, so you prove there's no harm. What do you think is more likely: the mother's womb is a sterile vessel, bonding with the mother that birthed it has absolutely no impact on life outcomes, and the hormonal changes that mothers and fathers go through are just for laughs? Or that the complex auditory, chemical, and physical signaling and bonding between newborn and mother throughout early infancy have a purpose of some kind that has a relevant impact?
[1] https://www.romper.com/parenting/how-does-a-baby-know-its-mother-it-comes-down-to-the-senses-25678
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6860199/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5313241/
ed: fixed links
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I think (without initially opining on whether or not it's true that unborn babies recognise their mother's voice) that the evidence demanded sets too high a bar. It's not necessary for the child to remember their mother's voice at a later age for it to have an impact on their development, as Catsnakes is implying. It just needs to have an impact on their early life and then the effects can snowball from there.
For example, if the baby post-birth is less likely to settle when held by its not-mother (versus a hypothetical alternative where it was held by its mother) because it didn't recognise the not-mother's voice, this in turn goes on to impact how it relates to the not-mother at later ages, and so on into its broader relationships with other humans. Early development is important, and personality emerges at an early age, with newborns being different from birth.
To the object-level point: unborn babies respond differently to recordings of their mother's voice versus a stranger's- implying recognition. There's no reason why this recognition would cease post-birth. Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12741744/
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How do you go about proving that this has material consequences for the child? What is your proof that this is causing them harm?
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A child needs its mother. A baby knows its mother from the time it is sensate. It knows her sounds, her voice, how she moves. She is safety and comfort and everything else to that child. Physical contact with the skin of the baby's mother, especially immediately after birth but throughout its early infancy is known to be important to the baby's well being. It's already an agonizing tragedy that there are so many orphans that already have to grow up without theirs, and those who adopt are doing a good thing but something that is a distant second best to the child being with its mother. But to specifically pay to create a child so that you can take it away from its mother is a disgusting evil worse than almost anything I can think of. What you are talking about doing wrongs a child in a way you can never repair. Your husband should not be, does not deserve, and does not need to be a father. The degree of selfishness involved in this entire concept disqualifies both of you permanently.
Orphans, mothers who die in childbirth, abusive mothers, absentee mothers, and so on and so forth.
They pretty obviously don't. All kinds of kids in these situations manage to grow up and have lives of their own.
Your over-emotional assertions are just that and nothing more.
People live and get along with missing limbs, no eyesight, and so on too. That doesn't mean it's just as good as being whole.
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Yes.
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How do you feel about the failures from IVF?
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That seems obviously the case to me.
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Shaming prospective parents is a disgusting evil if you ask me.
For centuries, it was common practice for women to defer their mothering to working women in the form of nannies, midwives, and wet nurses. How disgusting and evil were these practices? Did they forever ruin the lives of those who grew up under them? The child didn't have its mother- can it not lead a fulfilling existence now? Is this really that scary? Countless women have also died in childbirth, leaving children with no mother at all. Unless you can convince me that these situations are most likely to produce children who, due to separation from their mothers, would have been better off unborn, it doesn't really counter TracingWoodgrains's line of thinking at all.
Two well-off parents who want a child are already set up to do a lot better for their kids than most anyone else. You praise these mystical values of motherhood, but it's without substance. It sounds like an aesthetic preference built around an ideal of the gentle and loving mother that just isn't as common as you'd hope. I find it hard to imagine that the legions of drug-addicted single moms saddled with kids they resent are going to offer their children a much better life than a couple of men raising a kid- that they greatly committed to before birth- simply by virtue of their irreplaceable feminine touch, or whatever. If you can't imagine much in the way of disgusting evils beyond surrogacy, I encourage you to broaden the horizons of your imagination.
We'd be doing a lot better if we shamed more prospective parents, frankly.
Stealing a loaf of bread because you have no choice and stealing a loaf of bread because you just can are two different things. Furthermore, nannies, midwives, and wet nurses did not all entirely deprive the child of their mother, and plenty of people have turned out mighty fucked up due to a dead or distant mother.
Horrible tragedies occurring naturally is not an excuse to manufacture them.
Those women shouldn't have had kids. That they did doesn't excuse wrong done by anyone else.
Do we not shame enough prospective parents already? The left shames teenagers who get pregnant and young women who choose to be homemakers as opposed to focusing on their careers. The right shames single mothers and older women who froze their eggs or use IVF. We shame wealthy people who want to have as many children as possible. We shame parents who aren't wealthy enough to live in a good school district. We shame free-range parents who forget that it isn't the 80's anymore and let their kids wander unsupervised around the neighborhood. We shame parents who teach their children what we think are the wrong political or religious values. We shame parents in first world countries for contributing to climate change and we shame parents in third world countries for bringing children into a life with such a low standard of living.
If you shame enough people the only ones left to reproduce will be the shameless, the ignorant, and those who lack impulse control. All those prospective parents who would have been any good at it will have refrained from fear of doing it wrong and harming their potential children. Would that really be a better world?
You forgot to mention the opposite, the helicopter parents.
And yeah, I think all parents are imperfect in some way, but most are probably genuinely trying to be good parents (barring the abusive people who should not be parents).
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The only practical difference between a woman getting pregnant via a random man and giving the kid up for adoption, later being adopted by a gay couple, and surrogacy, is that the woman bearing the child is compensated for her time and efforts in the latter case (and, I guess, that the child's parentage is known). Neither of those seem like anything I would call a detriment compared to the former case.
I see another clear difference between these two situations in regards to the child's experience. If a mother gives her baby up for adoption, for whatever reason, the child must accept that his or her mother was not in a position to raise them, and find solace in the fact that another family was. This is just a sad fact of life that is part of the child's experience.
However, in the case of surrogacy, the child must understand that its parents wanted the position of sole parenthood so much that they compensated the child's actual birth mother in order to make her go away forever. And that is a weird twisted possessive experience that the child is left with in relation to its family that it will be growing up with.
So the child is trapped trying to establish normal familial relations with someone who saw it more as a possession than another human being who has a right to a relationship with a mother. And this is especially the case for gay male couples, who have unilaterally decided that their child can and will be happy enough to grow up without a mother just because they want to feel more normal and like they haven't lost out on any important American suburban experiences by embracing their gay lifestyle.
This is similar for lesbian couples, but not quite, given the number of men who seem happy to donate their sperm for a little bit of cash and don't seem bothered by the idea that they have children out there who they'll never know or care for. That is more analogous to the adoption where the child just understands that their father wasn't interested, but they do have parents who are.
The act of gestating a child and giving birth almost always, if not completely always, changes a woman's body forever, and is traumatic, and takes a lifelong toll, which is supposedly compensated for by a lifelong benefit of having a child to care for. I don't see how any one-time payment can be equivalent. I would be interested in hearing from a surrogate who really felt like it was.
My apologies for mixing up all the pronouns when referring to the child.
Or simply that the child was wanted so much that it was worth thousands of pounds to the parents... Do you think that child feels better or worse than the child of hetero parents who tell him he was an unplanned mistake?
Do you apply this standard to IVF etc? Cruel, selfish parents willing to spend big money to pervert sacred nature so they can have their desired accessory-child? No, probably not, right?
Do you also apply this standard to, say, women who use sperm banks, or single mothers who decide to keep a pregnancy after the would-be father has walked away or vanished?
I see IVF as different because the child isn't denied a mother and the child's mother still gives birth to them, even if she's not the genetic mother. I'm not that worried about the perversion of nature, sacred or not.
I would not apply the same standard to women who use sperm banks or have absentee fathers. I don't see why you would think i would.
Giving up an egg or giving up sperm so a woman can gestate and give birth to a baby she will parent is not similar to being paid to go through the entire birth process and then leave forever.
Other users have made an excellent point as well, which is that every argument you can make for surrogacy can be made for legalizing selling your kidney, or a lobe of your liver, and kidneys aren't sentient, and your liver will eventually grow back. I'd appreciate if you could explain if you think people should be allowed to sell a kidney or a lobe of their liver if you think a woman should be able to rent out her womb.
The simple answer here is to also support legalizing the sale of kidneys.
Those who recoil in disgust at this modernist-transhumanist depravity may be surprised to discover that the one country in the world where kidney sales are legal is the decidedly anti-modernist Islamic Republic of Iran. Their decision to legalize kidney sales was not motivated by some kind of debauched ideology; it was purely pragmatic. And it worked: today, there is no waiting list for kidneys in Iran.
I will admit, I was disgusted when I first saw this idea on the sidebar of /r/neoliberal, but I have since come around.
Iran is not a compelling example for me. In fact, I find it to be the opposite of a compelling example. It is interesting to know that about Iran, however, so thank you for sharing.
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I disagree. Money being involved is important because it creates incentives. It's the reason prostitution is not morally equivalent to casual sex.
i.e.: congratulations you now live in a society where some women will be forced to bear other's children against their will
Doesn't matter if all you wanted was voluntary exchange.
I don't see a problem with financially incentivizing people to have more babies. If the government was doing it rather than gays, most people here would clap and cheer.
as long as they don't use my money for it, I don't care what people choose to spend their money on. the problem is that those financial incentives from the government are funded by unwilling taxpayers such as myself who would rather keep that money and spend it on something else.
Right, but I think in this case gay parents are ponying up the money for surrogacy and IVF themselves. Social conservatives are objecting specifically to this dynamic - paying someone to have a baby.
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Given the discussion here in the past about this topic, I'd guess most people would cynically posit that the government financially incentivizing people to have more babies couldn't possibly work and would just add needless bureaucracy.
As far as I can recall, the usual point is that it is observed not to work.
Is it observed not to work, or do people just assume it doesn't work without checking? My impression is that it totally works but we don't do it anyway (relevant graphs are on on page 67). The upshot is that the Swedish government changed a policy from providing benefits if children were born within 24 months of each other to the same benefit but within 30 months instead, and the number of children born with a between-24-and-30-month gap roughly 1.5x'd while birth rates by age gap stayed pretty much the same for every other age gap. It was not a subtle effect.
They might be referring to Communist Romania, though Ceaucescu mandated rather than incentivized.
Plenty of regimes incentivised having a big family: Jus trium liberorum of Ancient Rome, Battle for Births of Mussolini's Italy, "Médaille d'honneur de la famille française" of France, "Cross of Honour of the German Mother" of Nazi Germany.
The medals probably came with some cash reward.
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Your recollection is probably correct. I should have it worded it more like "has never worked empirically and as such is almost definitely not going to work in this case" rather than "couldn't possibly work."
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Well I'm certainly not among them. Despite being concerned about birth rates.
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You now live in a society where a desperate woman has this as an option, as opposed to simply starving to death in the streets with no choice at all.
I am once again failing to see the downside.
Literally nobody is starving to death on the streets, so to put is as the only available alternative to renting your womb and selling your baby is fundamentally dishonest.
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In practice I’m doubting that surrogacy will be used by the poorest of the poor, but rather by the lower working class. These are not in danger of starvation.
In which case it's a choice, and handwringing about being forced holds no water. Shrug.
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The downside is that there are forms of extortion which tend to take all of the value you can get your hands on (blackmail, kidnapping for ransom, etc). If surrogacy becomes the largest amount of money that some women can obtain with their time and body, a nonzero number will be extorted into it.
I think the upsides far outweigh the downsides here but the downsides do exist.
To note that very high percentages of prostitutes are not doing this voluntarily, and that’s a similarly totalizing commitment to surrogacy.
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We disagree on what is worse or better than death, I presume.
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Perhaps so, but if your contention is that 'some women will be so desperate for cash that they will bear a child just to earn some', the bad thing there seems to be that a woman might ever be in such a situation, not that circumstances have now changed such that they can actually follow through on such a preference.
I hate this argument. "Why don't we just fix all of the problems of society and I can be totally free" is Rousseauan bullshit. We are animals and establishing rules to prevent ourselves from doing evil regardless of our intentions is the essence of morality.
Eliminate misery and I'll maybe consider whether behaviors that exploit it might be allowed, but I'm not considering it fine just because of an hypothetical.
All those Ukranian women and assorted orphans are not hypothetical.
Oh sure I'm not suggesting that one cannot talk about surrogacy until poverty has been abolished, my point is rather that restricting surrogacy would not actually make things better in a society where such desperation and poverty does exist, because while not a decision to be taken lightly there are clearly some women who think that going through childbirth is worth it for the reward, and while it makes me squirm too isn't hasn't actually made anything better about the situation 'women might be forced to choose between surrogacy or deprivation' since you've just made everyone choose deprivation, a deprivation apparently bad enough that they're willing to bear a child to alleviate it.
I understand, but people may also choose to kill in order to escape deprivation and still I feel justified in punishing them for this immoral conduct that endangers everyone by undermining the sanctity of life. This is not exactly similar, but my motivations are not different.
You also ignore the other core part of my argument, which is about the incentive. If you allow this and the demand outstrips the supply, generating misery great enough to provide for it becomes the necessary conclusion. Which is exactly what happened with prostitution and why human trafficking is a thing.
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If you are a leftist and buy into the concept of wage slavery, sure. If you take a slightly less negative view of exchanging money for labor, then they aren't "forced against their will".
I read somewhere that fiscally right conservatives become leftists when it comes to all matters reproductive.
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Well this is where ancaps lose me. I hold to certain things being more sacred that voluntary exchange, and sex and child-rearing is most definitely on the list.
The horror of such a situation is not something I see as allowable, even if Moloch says it's a-okay because everyone consented.
But then of course, the libertarian solution is that you're free to have such horrors in your community so long as I'm allowed to bar you from mine.
"it's against her will, even if it's consensual!"
This is basically the argument made in every spurious me too case.
That’s because the reasons that actually motivate people’s response in those cases are not what they are allowed to argue for in today culture, so that they are forced to make argument in the accepted framework, that is, framework of consent.
I wrote about it at the previous place:
The context was slightly different, but the point is the same.
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A lot of sputtering disgust, and not much in the way of rational argument that I can see.
I am a doctor, my life's work is healing people, extending their healthy lives and keeping sickness and death at bay. I'm just less fundamentally incoherent than people who can perform such a duty and still not be explicitly transhumanist.
I applaud surrogacy. As far as I'm concerned, two people making uncoerced positive sum (to them) transactions is something eminently desirable, and if I find a specific case reprehensible, that's no grounds for me to stick my nose into their business. Someone suffering from infertility (or simply unable or unwilling to childbear) gets the gift of parenthood, and someone with a functional uterus gets a big chunk of cash, and a baby ends up with devoted and well off parents who are immensely motivated to care for it. Neither you nor I have any grounds to meddle, and I feel the same visceral disgust at your disgust as you do for people not harming you in the least.
If my libertarian tendencies weren't obvious enough, I also fully support people doing whatever the hell they want with their bodies, to the extent it doesn't outright harm others. You want to chop off your balls? Go ahead fam. Replace your nipples with subwoofers and your bones with titanium? Fuck my shit up. Not my business, not that I'd want to say no in the first place.
Despite my transhumanism, I don't endorse the modern transgender movement! Most of it appears to be pure social contagion in the mentally unwell, and even the best modern surgical and pharmaceutical interventions are far too crude to make you but a superficial mockery of the other sex.
But that's today's failure, not an indefinite moratorium on sex transition. If we had the technology to safely (ideally reversibly) transition people to the opposite sex at a cellular level, such that they were functionally indistinguishable from someone assigned the same gender at birth, then I see no reason to object! I wouldn't fuck a transwoman today, but I would fuck this hypothetical one, because all of my current objections such as the uncanny appearance, smell, texture, hormonal imbalance, infertility etc become utterly irrelevant.
At any rate, I don't expect to successfully argue you out of your aesthetic objections, I simply don't see a better reason for them than that you simply don't like it. That's perfectly fine, your utility function is yours and brooks no argument, but that should at least be obvious to others without such conditions.
That's all very fine, but the obvious point remains - surrogacy isn't like renting an apartment together, it creates by design a third human being, one with it's own interests, but unable to argue for them. As responsible adults, we're obliged to consider them too. it's not just an aesthetic. In addition, the modern cancer that is 'human rights' discourse offers no answers.
Ah yes, normal childbirth, I've heard of that too.
I am no fan of the usual mysticism around human rights, as if they fell fully formed from the heavens, but at the very base level, following the trends and consensus derived from- normal childbirth, Caesarean sections, pregnancy screening for birth defects, IVF etc, in the order in which they become ever less "natural" without really compromising the wellbeing of the future child.
I'm sure we can cobble together a reactionary or two to harangue me about IVF if we really wanted to, but that doesn't change the fact that a once controversial and deeply "unnatural" procedure has simply become unremarkable and only a true monster would object now. I can't really see a harm to the unborn child, barring marginal increases in birth defect rates that can be screened for, so once again, my libertarian self can't find an objection at all.
The day fetal alcohol syndrome becomes a punishable offense on the mother's part is when I accept that society's schizophrenic attitude towards responsible adults making their own child rearing decisions is simply coherent, because it's not. If you can let them get away with such harm to their future offspring without putting a gun to their head or carting them off to rehab, then you have no leg to stand on when upper middle class, well educated and conscientious couples engage in surrogacy.
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As a youth interested in sci-fi and fantasy, Transhumanism always sounded so cool. I can't help but feel that now that it is actually happening, people have made it so lame.
Some of it must be a definition problem. The "trans" part can mean two things: Transition or Transcend. The modern lexicon seems to always have it meaning Transition. You transition from one standard human role to another standard human role. This to me is the lame form of transhumanism. The cool form of transhumanism would have that baby being born in a medical pod. You are railing against role players, actors, fakes. Hollywood seems to have permeated all of society, where the best thing people can do is just play a different role. So boring. I wish you had the real transhumanism to be angry about.
Pod babies, semi-immortal brains in vats, machine enhanced human bodies (more than just a couple of medically necessary interventions like pace-makers), nervous systems transfers, rampant human cloning, etc. None of it exists, none of it is even that close to existing. Transcendent humanism seems deader than ever. Where I once had a hope for it to come about, I'm now more certain than ever that the future belongs to the machines. Not even machines simulating human brains, or building an afterlife for biologically dead humans. Just boring machines running algorithms.
Unless AI turns out to be a real bust, none of this will matter, because biology is just too slow. I tell you this as someone who doesn't see some versions of the "borg" as a bad outcome: the borg ain't happening. There are a couple larpers out there, but they'll all either be dead or swept into the zoo exhibit with the rest of us before any cool Transhumanism comes to pass.
If they did, would there not be countless cries of outrage about what a disgusting affront to God and Nature each of those things are, too?
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There's another meaning of trans that you are missing: transgress.
I had a thought recently which clarified my views on the trans issue. "What if there were no trans people because everyone was born with their correct gender. Would this be a good thing?". According to standard trans ideology, this would be ideal since people only transition to match their perceived gender. They are girls trapped in a boy's body (or vice versa). If Eliot Page were born a male there would be no need to transition. Right?
I believe that a trans activist would bristle at this suggestion. Changing one's gender is not the goal. The transition itself, and the struggle attached to it, is the goal.
In fact, if transition were perfect, the politics would change. Imagine again a magic wand which perfectly changed your gender with no side effects. If that existed, many people would change their gender. It wouldn't even be controversial. And in any ways, it'd be impossible to tell. I'd probably change my gender (temporarily) just to see what it's like to be a woman.
But that would defeat the point. Trans ideology derives its value from the extreme cost and sacrifice needed to change genders. You can't be stunning and brave when it's easy. And the uncanny appearance of many trans people also serves to highlight the immensity of their decision. In this way, I think trans people are similar to Christian or Indian ascetics whose emaciated appearance horrifies and awes the public. A person who believes in something so strongly that they are willing to mutilate their body is certainly worthy of some form of respect.
So what is gender transition if not the ultimate transgression against nature, your parents, and society at large? Like Christianity before it, post-modern ideology celebrates weakness, victimhood, and transgression. Trans people are the modern ascetics, whose extreme commitment to the cause cannot be questioned.
The goal isn't to change one's gender. The goal is to change one's body to match perceived gender.
I would like to see evidence of this view by activists. It's strong and uncharitable enough to require it.
Sure. The question is still how prevalent Chu's view is among trans activists.
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Uh, what? I'm aware that Chu once defined femaleness as having the barest essentials of "an open mouth, an expectant asshole", but I'm not aware of any view of hers that would validate the view that struggle is itself the goal.
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This is an important insight about Queer Theory and the Critical tradition more broadly: permanent revolution is the primary, central goal of the entire intellectual framework. As soon as something has achieved any degree of stable cultural acceptance, it becomes conservative by definition and needs to be transgressed and sublated in turn. What is today’s radical fringe will be tomorrow’s normie cringe. Trans people who get “bottom surgery” might be on the cutting edge of transformation today, but if the Queer Theorists get their way, 100 years from now the same people will be seen as utterly reactionary for reifying the very idea that the physical body has any necessary relationship to identity at all.
No, that doesn't follow. The goal of many of these people is socialism for a reason, the idea of a stateless society where everyone voluntarily works for authentic happiness without coercion is the utopia at the end of the road. It necessarily follows that they would not go the route of "actually, we need monarchy cause statelessness is now so traditional".
Indeed, the entire point of permanent revolution was about socialist/communist political parties not settling for democratic reforms, but to agitate for socialism or communism. They aren't revolutionary inherently, they're revolutionary because no one was giving them what they actually wanted. If I notice that you are hungry and give you one slice of an apple and you still insist you are hungry, it is insane for me to call you a thief who was never motivated by hunger at all.
You're out of touch with progressive rhetoric. This is already happening and has been a standard argument made for a while now.
I think that you are the one who is out of touch with progressive rhetoric, given that you’re still assuming that these people are operating in a Marxist materialist frame, whereas I think the evidence is substantial that in a post-Gramscian, post-Marcusian paradigm, things have moved past the simple drive toward establishing an anarcho-communist society free of material coercion of labor, and has instead allowed the Gnostic/Hermetic theological elements - present in Marxism from the beginning via Hegel - to transcend the materialist elements of Marxism. I’m drawing mostly from James Lindsay’s analysis of Critical Theory or post-Marxism as a religious/Gnostic faith centered around the Hegelian dialectic, which seeks to totally transcend humanity and rebuild God.
Again, it just doesn't follow. By and large, progressive intellectuals and activists are not interested in being permanent rebels, they want to be the people making decisions at the end of the day. It is true that they are more prone to infighting, but all of those groups have a utopia in mind, even if they don't crystallize it. Even your point about them wanting to rebuild God implies a religious utopia filled with moral people.
Moreover, you're dead wrong about my being out of touch on the trans point, or are you just conceding that? Because the entire premise of progressive gender ideology is that gender is innate and not determined by body at all. You don't have to transition physically to be trans in the trans activist camp, not one bit.
That's where next generation of rebels come in. You can't have a permanent revolution changing things toward the ideal society if you let one generation think it got it exactly right.
It's the struggle that matters - that's the only thing.
Can you define "permanent revolution" for me? Because I think you and the people in question have very different understandings of what those are.
Secondly, they're not creating a generation of rebels. They only become rebels insofar as the current system is undesirable. Progressives do not raise children with the terminal goal of fighting without respect to what is being fought for. Their terminal values are things that, if implemented, they would 100% not tolerate deviation from.
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Then why in God’s name are children, let alone adults, being given “trans-affirming healthcare”? What are all the puberty blockers, top and bottom surgeries, etc. for, if gender identity has no connection to the body? I’m fully aware that there is a gender-abolitionist and/or “gender-fucking” faction within the Queer activist vanguard, but it is very obvious to me that the actual Overton window is still centered on costly biomedical engineering of bodies in order to produce consonance between the physical and the psychological/spiritual elements of gender identity. Are you arguing that this is already the stale and passé approach of people who are not on the, ahem, cutting edge? Even though it is ramping up and expanding by the month and appears to be gaining more steam than ever?
Trans activists are consistently clear that some trans people want to transition and others don't, but both are equally the gender they say they are. This was a major point about the Attack Helicopter poem that was rejected for transphobia, people afterwards went around reminding others that the trans experience varies from person to person. Some want to physically alter their bodies, others don't.
The reason for gender-affirming care for children is that they're on a timer - if you wait until they are adults to see if the dysphoria goes away, you get some people whose bodies have been permanently altered via puberty and this causes significant distress. The idea behind the blockers is that delaying puberty doesn't cause any harm (the accuracy of this idea is irrelevant, we're asking why they do something).
As for why we talk about those who physically transition, that should be obvious. The ones who don't want to never get media attention on them. Action naturally attracts attention in a way that inaction doesn't.
Trans activists are fighting for all trans people, regardless of whether they transition physically or not. This has never been in contention.
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Your proposition is bristled at because they assume you're saying "what if" and sneaking in "it is". I assume that's a large part of it.
Some of it, of course, is bristling at an existential attack on one's community. Unfortunately, that tends to be counterproductive when a community is supposed to be transient (ha!) or transitive in the first place.
Yes, my point exactly. If perfect transition and acceptance were possible it would defeat the point entirely. There would be no trans people, only men and women.
The community claims to want to be erased, "trans women are women", but they don't actually want to be erased. It is the transition, the journey, that is the point. The actual destination is not just man or woman, but a trans man or woman. And to the progressive community there is great value in a "trans" identify which is separate from a gender identity. Because the presence of these people serves as evidence of the huge sacrifices people are willing to endure for the cause.
I think you're seriously underestimating the number of people who would still be opposed to the use of this gender-swapping magic wand because it is an affront to God or something to that effect.
There is some selection bias here: you generally only hear from the trans people who want people to hear from them, and you only identify ("clock") as trans those trans people who don't pass well (plus the occasional false positive). Trans people who just want to be seen as their gender and not as trans-their-gender, and who pass reasonably well, certainly do exist, but they are by their nature invisible.
Bruh, I really want to have the people who claimed those two women were trans subject themselves to a visual acuity test. They're so evidently not it's painful to me haha
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I think this vision of the future suffers from the fact that we humans are very squeamish when it comes to experimenting on humans, especially children. The idea of "decanting" children is both itself rather dystopian (literally Brave New World) in how it rends the family, but the development of the technology itself seems likely to leave a trail of miserable, short lives for children born with severe birth defects when the technology is less than perfect. Like self-driving cars, I think the technology would need to be much safer than natural human reproduction to convince people to switch, but unlike cars, there isn't really a viable simulacrum or small-scale ethical model that could be tested. I suppose you could decant monkeys or something, but how would you know if they end up the equivalent of 15 IQ points lower than naturally-born specimens? I can't see how you'd convince your IRB, nay, the public at large, that you're not going to be remembered as the second coming of Josef Mengele for bringing a bunch of broken humans into the world.
There have been a number of papers showing heightened rates of certain conditions with IVF ranging from certain childhood cancers to long-term general health (admittedly, no better than the rest of medical scientific research, aka trash), and it's a topic that's very hard to broach publicly without seeming to Hate Babies.
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Although I am on the side of the anti-transhumanists, it's a bit harder to say that I'm anti-transhumanism per se.
Someone here described themselves as a human supremacist. I can't endorse that. There could hypothetically be entities that are superior to humans along every axis that matters. Currently we don't know of any such entities, but I acknowledge that they're a possibility.
Human biology as we currently know it did not always exist. It had a beginning in time, and it will have an end in time. Although I share your affinity for the current state of human biology, it seems... futile? misguided? to try to immortalize it in its current contingent form.
My real contention with the transhumanists is that the type of person who's heavily invested in transhumanism probably doesn't share my conceptions of value and virtue, and their ideal future is one that I would disapprove of, on the grounds that it doesn't allow for my own ideal conception of flourishing.
I’ll bite - what are your values and concepts of flourishing?
Nothing that could be summarized concisely in a bullet point format.
I have plans for several top level posts that will at least partially address this question.
I’ll wait to see them.
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Two points I guess.
First, can I get some theory or principle for when people are obliged to accept the limits of their biology and when they aren't? I'm assuming your ok with humans ignoring the limits of their biology when it means not going blind, or letting deaf people hear, or crippled people walk. If I'm correct about the above why are LGBT people obliged to respect the "limits of [their] biology" with respect to having children but the others aren't for their conditions?
Second, why care specifically about being "human"? Whatever that means to you. I see downthread you complain about playing the definition game so I'll sidestep that and say that if becoming a "cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg" leads people to live longer, happier lives of the kind they want to have I think that's good, whether or not you (or anyone) would call the resulting entities "human."
Catholics have had a longstanding argument about which kinds of technological help are warranted within a respect for God's creation and I must say I find their conclusions very reasonable.
The line between health and degeneracy is repair. It's fine to do anything to repair broken humans and allow them to do what they would be able to do if not for some disease or mutilation holding them back.
It becomes immoral when you start trying to augment humans beyond their natural existence and try to turn them into something else. Humans are not immortal, they don't reproduce asexually, they don't have 10 arm, etc.
Of course the debate at the margins can be fierce, especially since industry has changed a lot about the human condition and arguably too much already so that we suffer ills of our own making, but I think it's a generally sound principle.
Aging is merely the ability of the body to repair itself breaking down. Who says we mustn't repair that one, too? (Rhetorical question, Christians!)
I don't think Catholics would have a problem with anti-aging technology. They don't have a problem with binoculars, even if they give people the ability to see further than normal healthy human eyes could. Rather it's more tied to the concept of human flourishing, things that provide a force multiplier to human nature are fine. See The Metaphysics of Bionic Implants.
Catholics reject surrogacy because they reject IVF and the commodification of human life. They see the relationship between a mother and a child as the clearest indicator that humans cannot be reduced to individuals forming contracts, but rather we are social creatures who work towards common goods. Making a child outside of an act of love between two married people is a farce and a sin against the child - but at least usually it's a sin of passion. Surrogacy is a dispassionate sin where the maternal relationship is broken with a contract - a dramatic inversion of the family being the last bulwark against a pure Lockean society.
Doesn't the whole "Heaven" thing require that you die, as opposed to sticking around and possibly, God forbid, start getting ideas of building your own heaven on earth?
Answering as a Catholic: I assure you, this world will pass away eventually. Anti-Aging wouldn't stop the second coming of Christ, it won't even stop the heat death of the universe.
I strongly doubt our ability to build a just society on Earth on our own power, but if it happens that would be great - it's one of the things we were made to do.
In that case I don't see why not stick around until whichever comes earlier.
I don't disagree, assuming we can solve the problems of overpopulation and acedia without creating a worse mess.
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Death is a necessary and natural part of life. You don't repair what's not broken.
You are a traitor to humanity, aider and abetter of the Great Enemy. I genuinely can't believe so many people hold this view.
Seems that describes you better since you don't even want to be part of humanity.
Humans die. People that don't are something else.
As I’ve said elsewhere I’ll die, I just hope it’s billions of years away instead of 50 years away. What’s the difference?
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Right back at you, neighbor.
You posted somewhere else in the thread that the obvious core drive of a human is to escape death. I assure you, I find that statement as repugnant as you appear to find its opposite. I see it as a repudiation of everything I recognize as noble within humanity, of the true core function to choose well from limited, fraught options. Obviously, I can't force you to adopt my view, and neither can you force me to adopt mine. All that can be done is to point out that the chasm between values, even for baseline, unmodified humans, yawns wide indeed.
Then you die and let me do as I will.
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You're Christian, yes?
I find the Christian objection to transhumanist anti-death pushes fascinating, because "death" means such different things to Christians and atheists. To a Christian, there is no need to escape death on Earth, because Christ already overcame the bonds of death for us with the Resurrection, and we too will be resurrected and raised to a state of perfection if we hold firm. To seek to overcome death on Earth looks like pursuing a shallow, partial, impossible form of what is already granted free of cost to all of us. Christians have fulfilled this drive already in their minds. The rest of us, lacking such a perceptual safety net, do what we must.
This fundamental disconnect over what death is makes it complex to have a meaningful conversation about the nobility of pursuit of immortality between Christians and non-Christians, as the rest of us seek to build what you believe you already have.
I am Christian, but I've been an atheist too. Even from an Atheist perspective, I think people are better off making their peace with death than fighting to the bitter end. One of the things that makes life good is people being willing to eat the badness set before them, rather than desperately attempt to avoid it or pass it off to others. Even on the assumption that death is the absolute end, how one reacts to that end is the product of immediate and indirect choices. Abject terror is largely, I think, a choice, and not a very good one given that it seems pretty unlikely to me that such death is going to be avoided for most of the current population. Where such fears grow especially pernicious is when the threat of death might appear to be forestalled by exploiting or victimizing others. In that case, the opportunity for evil is nearly boundless, and the attitude that takes death to be the worst possible thing just weakens one's resolve.
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the resurrected person would be a copy of that person who long ago died and was buried in a grave, I think its arguable to say that its the same thing as extending your life without death.
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I’m glad we have so much diversity of values!
I was a bit hyperbolic there I admit - I apologize. What do you find noble in humanity?
The ability to choose what is Good, even when the choice is hard. Death and pain are among the things that make it hard, but it seems to me that one of the choices we have to make is between accepting them, and acquiescing to them. Avoiding death is of great value, but it is not a terminal value. Treating it as a terminal value often allows one to be "forced" into choosing evil, in an attempt to avoid the ultimately unavoidable. Evil is the Great Enemy. Death is just an unfortunate fact. One might as reasonably declare that the speed of light is the Great Enemy, and all that matters is breaking physics by achieving FTL. Any passive feature of reality can be transformed into the ultimate villian, if one is willing to torture perspective sufficiently.
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Revolution against people who insist that their way is "natural" "necessary" and "god ordered" even when it leads to endless death and suffering is necessary and natural part of history.
What if I do repair what is "not broken" to avoid dying?
What will you do to stop me? What will you threaten me with that is worse than death?
Is it? Can you point to some examples where such revolution actually succeeded according to its own priors? Are we about to get another of those cartoonish, unsourced anecdotes about how everyone prior to the Enlightenment thought medicine was witchcraft and burned doctors at the stake?
Why even attempt to form a correct view understanding of reality, when re-writing the past is so much easier?
Shouldn't death be sufficient, since that's exactly what hypothetical-you is desperately trying to avoid?
"What is the consequence of defying the luddite?"
"Death. "
"Then what is the consequence of submitting to the luddite?"
"Death."
"How shall we proceed, General?"
Conflict is eternal; if you can't deter people from instantiating horrors by threatening death, there's nothing left but to follow through and fight it out.
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Hey! I just wanted a Space Ark to GTFO of here.
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It certainly is. And those revolutions always fail. Because if something is truly natural, necessary and ordained by God, you never really escape the consequences.
Of course if it isn't, then they don't. But I don't see any reasonable argument that death isn't a natural part of the universe.
Violence ultimately, but I don't hold that cruelty has ever been an effective deterrent so I don't feel the need to invent worse punishments than death.
Hmm, certainly seems like us transgressors of God are doing quite well for ourselves as a matter of fact.
I'm not arguing this. Everything dies eventually. I'm arguing that dying in 100 years isn't any less natural than dying after 100,000 years. Do you see a difference yourself?
I'll refer to the first part of this reply. We've got you beat on the violence as well buddy.
I don't really care to go into the large argument about how miserable industrial society has made everyone, go read Ted if you want to see those arguments, but on the face of it I do want to address the most painfully ridiculous elephant in the room, which Nietzsche famously predicted as a direct consequence of this transgression:
How many people died in the XXth century?
This doesn't alter the moral calculus a iota for me. But I also don't believe you. Otherwise you'd be holding Afghanistan right about now.
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If my way is not ordained by God, then let Him strike me down. If yours is, why are you worried that He will allow my way to destroy yours?
We are all instruments, and my worry is part of it. I'm tempted to quote that parable about the man who refused help many times on account of his faith, not realizing it was God sending all those people to help him.
We can't expect God to do all the work.
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Death is a necessary part of one particular configuration of an ecosystem, and appealing to nature is pointless. Everything is natural.
edit: not even that. Like darkness is an absence of life, death is an absence of longevity. It is not "a part" of life, it is that longevity is not a (necessary) part of life based on sexual reproduction. "You have outlived your usefulness", says the gene once it is duplicated and recombinated into a fresh host. I'm sorry, but who asked?
I could start to argue metaphysics, because I definitely think your view is incoherent, but that's boring and not very convincing.
Let us instead drop merrily into the realms of practicality: immortality is heavily and obviously dysgenic. Stagnant organisms lose the possibility to change, and therefore to adapt. And no cultural process can replicate one's just anihilation once they have indeed, outlived their usefulness.
Well your children presumably. I certainly think the boomers are robbing a few generations of their due by sticking around and holding onto all ressources for too long. Which is not fair, because they were themselves handed society in trust.
Immortality is just the extreme extension of this problem.
why does it matter what is improved in the future if you wont be alive to witness it?
Because society was not given to you, it was loaned. You have a duty to the future much like the past had a duty to you.
If you break that, things stop existing.
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I for one would be ecstatic to have my parents around for longer, along with the rest of their generation, even if it robs my generation of its due.
I agree that greatly extending the human lifespan would cause massive societal problems. I am willing to struggle with those massive societal problems for as many centuries as it takes.
I think it's pointed out elsewhere in this thread, but this is where the bright line between immortality and anti-aging is fuzzy. Had we robust ways of dealing with those societal problems one might be able to consider integrating that technology.
But to remove death in the absolute is clearly over the line for me. I won't go into the minute details of why given there's seemingly endless art that explores the topic.
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Again, an ability that they only don't have as long as the evolutionary process didn't deem it necessary for them to propagate. Or as long as they don't research neuroplasticity restoration and body modification.
I'm sure I'll reckon with my children amicably, somehow. Another incentive for us all to go to space. We could also explore all those proposals about social systems that discourage concentrating wealth in a few people's hands...
"It's not like you can take it to the grave" would certainly age like milk.
All I'm hearing is a communist assuring me that once computers get good enough, they'll solve the economic calculation problem and we'll have FALGSC.
I hold this to be wish fulfillment untethered to reality, like a lot of futurism.
I don't think you will. Chronos didn't really get along very well with Zeus.
Fair enough, but I hold no objection to that. Exploration is, in fact, quite natural for humans.
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Yes! I feel a bit insecure recommending Catholic teachings, because it's been a while since I heard / read them, but there are some half-remembered arguments that are bouncing around my head, that I'm recently finding myself sympathetic towards. So that would also be my official response @Gillitrut.
That's fair enough, but to that I always say the lines are drawn, and all that is left for us is to do battle.
Or let's divide the territory at least. Since you're the transhumanist, can't you go live on Mars, or something? It would be a lot easier for you than for me.
CC @IGI-111
I guess being neither Catholic nor religious I don't find arguments about humans being a certain way relative to God's intention to be very convincing.
I don't see any reason why peaceful coexistence isn't possible.
I'm not Catholic either, but I am a perennialist which is really all that's required to hold such a view: to recognize that there is an immutable (or at the very least very very slowly mutable) human nature.
I'm also of the opinion that part of this nature makes humans unwise, and certainly unwise enough that them being in charge of their own condition is the harbinger of catastrophe. We suck at planning, everything we do has unforeseen consequences and the Enlightenment, which is most essentially the project to organize the world using reason, is a massive failure.
Like I'm fond of saying around these parts, the Jovians are the good guys in Eclipse Phase.
Because I don't think you would leave us (and by us I mean humans) alone. Hence why the strict minimum of North Korea strong borders and armed neutrality is required.
This is simply drawn from the experience of history. Progressives can't help themselves from being universalists and try to insert their agenda in literally any traditional project. Ask any country colonized by Europe. Or more recently, Afghanistan.
I am unclear on what this human nature is. Humans seem very different to me all over the world such that it would be difficult to ascribe some specific nature to all of them.
Can you quantify the "humans" that are unwise enough such that being charge of our own condition is catastrophe? With an existential quantifier it seems trivial (surely some humans are so unwise it is catastrophic for them to manage their own condition) and with a universal quantifier it seems clearly false (no human is wise enough to manage their own condition). Indeed, unless you're an anarchist it seems like you believe some humans are wise enough to manage the condition of others, let alone their own condition.
What do you mean by "leave [humans] alone?" Like, we're not permitted to interact at all? To evangelize alternative ways of being? Are humans permitted to do the opposite? To decry why us not-humans are inferior and no one should be like us?
That's funny because Humans seem very similar to me all over the world. They all have the attributes Aristostle and Confuscius independently identified them as having.
That's easy, the number is zero. No man is wise enough for such a task. The wish to be as gods is always and forever delusional hubris.
First, the human condition and society are different things. Humans have to manage society as a pragmatic necessity, and yet it's established that you can't just hand this out to a single person's whims without ending up with what we call tyranny. All successful societies pretty much have complex methods to eliminate these problems, and none of them have ultimately succeeded in avoiding catastrophic failure. Which is why societies, like humans, are always dying.
But the part we're talking about isn't the cultural aspect we've already fucked up pretty bad. It's biology, and the consequences of fucking with that are much more definitive and far reaching, not to mention our wishes around it extremely influenced by irrational pulsions.
Policy is of course contingent on practicality, but it would indeed be up and including that. Subversion is an existential risk that must be prevented regardless of it being done through hard or soft power. I reserve the right to suffer not the xeno, the mutant, the heretic if necessary.
That's not for us to decide.
Such as?
For the rest of this comment I feel like I need some clarification on "the human condition", biology, and the relation between them. It seems to me humans already manage our biology in ways great and small with mostly positive results. The person with cataracts who gets surgery, the deaf person who gets a cochlear implant, the diabetic who takes insulin, the person with a lethal allergy, are all managing their biology. Sometimes with life or death implications!
So what parts of our biology does "the human condition" consist of such that we are incompetent to manage these parts?
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Funnily enough, I'm not Catholic either. I've been an atheist for more than 20 years, I just can't help but find their moral framework compelling, regardless of whether or not god exists. I guess, as the joke goes, I'm a Catholic atheist.
I'd like some degree of isolation, if it's all the same to you. Otherwise it's like trying to raise your children in modesty while neighboring a strip club.
I guess I don't understand what the source of the standard that it is appropriate to return humans to is in a more atheistic framework. I understand the logic of restoring people to Be the way God intended. What is the substitute for God in terms of determining what state it is appropriate to return humans to?
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I resent being asked to move for your sake, but I could personally be convinced.
Hypothetically, let's assume that 10 billion humans are assigned equal chunks of the lightcone, including Earth. Since I'm not particularly attached to the latter, but most are, prompting very high demand, I would trade my share of Earth for any of- several thousand square kilometers of Mars/ a Jovian moon/ an exoplanet nearby/ a distant star system/ a very distant galaxy at the end of the lightcone. You're welcome to buy it off me if you care so much.
It can't be worth much to you can it? 99.9999% of the volume of the universe is unsuitable for baseline humans, and with your disdain for enhancement, you wouldn't survive the journey to the nearest star system in the first place. If all you luddites want to pool together and buy Earth to keep in stasis till the Sun engulfs it, that's entirely your right, as long as you suitably compensate the more sensible.
Just out of curiosity: what are you going to do on Mars, or in the patch of empty space in the distant star system you own, or whatever? What sort of plans do you have, outside of just owning more and more space?
Me personally? I'll become a mind upload if technologically feasible, and I see little reason it won't in the long term.
Such an entity has far lower resource footprints compared to an equivalent human in space, considering life support. All you need is a steady supply of spare parts for the computers and energy, which is available in copious amounts via fusion or solar.
So I would end up owning a large patch of land to store my compute, and any robotic industrial equipment I need for self sufficiency or simply for trade with neighbors. That's more doable when you live close to others in tightly packed neighborhoods, which is why I value a large chunk of Mars as much as an entire exoplanet. It'll be livelier if nothing else.
So once I have my share, I'll be living mostly inside simulations, running autonomously on the outside, and doing my own thing till Heat Death. I'd likely end up in a community of like minded people, or just forks of my own consciousness or children.
TLDR: I largely care about the resources and opportunity cost of a plot of land/space. Since it takes an enormous amount of time and energy in a dying universe to travel, I value a smaller sum nearby, in company, over a larger one further away or less populated and convenient.
So you wouldn't value physical exploration/discovery at all? I'd like to spend at least a few centuries venturing out. Sitting in the same server on Mars for my immortal life sounds dull, although I agree that valuing community over novelty is a good long term plan.
Keep in mind that as a mind upload, I can trivially fork and modify my consciousness, so sending a copy of myself out to explore the universe is no issue.
I can't say that would likely be a major priority for me, given the sheer travel time, and the fact that I can experience most of it in VR, but it's always an option.
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The same plans people had on the frontier, but with a higher range of activities and environments available?
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Why the resentment? I can be the one to move if it bothers you so much! Use your superhuman capabilities to build us a Space Ark, and launch us to Proxima Centauri, and I'll be the first to buy the tickets!
What? Not stabbing you in your sleep before you turn yourself into a cyborg is not enough?
I reject your gift of charity as much as I reject the mugger offering me an otherwise stunning deal of 60 years of my life for the low, low price of the contents of my wallet.
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How about I receive "not getting stabbed in my sleep for daring to do something to my own body", and you receive "not getting herded into a luddite concentration camp before you lot start stabbing people"?
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People should be allowed to make their own decisions with what to do with their body. When we stop sending men into the bowels of the earth to break their backs and risk collapse in order to supply our society with necessary materials I'll take the idea that people shouldn't be able to trade use of their bodies for money more seriously. If people are being coerced, as always, that is different.
No. It's not how society currently operates, and not how it should operate.
And even if I agreed to it as a principle, there are many more restrictions that should be removed first, before we allow surrogacy.
I'm not seeing much of an argument here. My take is grounded in the value of liberty, I can see some valid arguments for your position but I'm not going to put words in your mouth.
The problem with the "I'm not seeing an argument here" is that it's a fully general argument. For example, why should anyone value liberty?
I can give you a few that fit into your liberty framework, if sheer cosmic horror doesn't do it for you. For example, given the evolution of the internet, what makes you think we'll get Transhumanist Lalaland, where you get to do whatever you want, instead of one where you're bread, or modified on-the-fly to fit the fever dreams of some demented Gardener like Scott Alexander? Just because you can imagine a future where it doesn't happen, doesn't mean it's the most likely outcomes of that technology existing.
You could at least start by getting down to the values you think are being violated. It's unnatural and disgusting to you, ok that's not nothing. I won't pretend to be all that convinced on what your disgust should override liberty but at least I can understand your position and agree to disagree. Your previous response was not this, it was just pure opposition and a strange kind of opposition that doesn't seem to really reflect reality as the right to engage in surrogacy is actually how society does operate and, besides the new fangled version with all the fancy tubes and needles there were other forms of surrogacy like harams.
Short of a Butlerian jihad I've made my peace with what will be, technology is coming whether I want it to or not. I may as well attempt to adopt it into the values framework I have to work with.
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It most certainly is how society should operate. You have a natural right to do as you wish with your own body, to the extent that it doesn't harm others. To get involved in restricting that is tyrannical.
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Yes, and as long as we openly call it debased, I'm mostly satisfied. It's the push to see it as a good thing that bothers me.
No it's not! Degeneracy is a spectrum. Cheating on your partner is debased, partaking in crazy Eyes Wide Shut orgies is more debased, and surrogacy is so far off on the spectrum you'd astronomical units to measure the distance.
Ah yes, surrogacy isn't spicy enough, let's add eugenics to the discussion.
Well, yes, eugenics should be an integral part of this discussion. Frankly, humanity is in dysgenic freefall at this moment in history. I don’t share all of @TracingWoodgrains’ moral priors, but I share his fundamental outlook about the vital importance of making not only more humans, but better humans. Humans who can transcend the entropic baseline and achieve iterative and intentional improvements.
This will, I believe, necessarily involve something that satisfies at least certain definitions of “eugenics”. It might not be babies born in factory vats, á la Brave New World, or meticulous culling of non-engineered bloodlines like Gattaca. (Both of which are, at heart, mawkish failures to engage in any serious way with the upsides of the societies they purport to depict.) It could be as simple as: every poor family gets to raise children, but they might end up raising other people’s biological children. I can try and provide a more comprehensive picture of what that might look like if you want, although I’m certain you already find it monstrous and I don’t know how worthwhile the conversation would be.
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I don’t see any actual arguments in your post, just the fact that you’re unsettled over aesthetic differences. Why exactly must transhumanism be destroyed?
Also please don’t fall back on
We’ve been through this enough times that you’ll have to define humanity.
I agree a lot is left unsaid in the original post. But I suspect what the OP is reaching toward is that a child has should have a right to a biological mother and father (a reasoning that I think could only rely on ideas of Natural Law) and technological or legal advances have blown past that bench mark without any reflection.
I'll take the discussion in a different direction: 'planned orphanhood.' There was a news story where an Israeli mother's only child son was killed in army and she made the decision to have his sperm harvested in order to one day have grandchildren. If people have a 'right' to children, do people also have a 'right' to grandchildren? I don't have anything concrete to say about the original topic of surrogacy or the planned orphanhood, but I believe the advances of technology in this area have come without pauses for legal implications, and seeing ethics on other topics change so much in person's lifetime (not my own I'm not that old!) I think in the future the ethics of this area will probably be changed.
If so then he missed the mark. Heterosexual couples can make use of surrogacy too. My wife had to have a hysterectomy for medical reasons, and as a result we've discussed the possibility of having children via a surrogate. Those children would have a biological father and mother (my wife and me), but I don't see how it would be acceptable to OP. He seems to be more rooted in an idea of disgust about surrogacy in and of itself, not just that he doesn't think gay couples should pursue it.
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Can we not do play this postmodernist game?
What's your definition of X?
Oh, how about ABCD?
Oh yeah? What about edge case E? Is it X or is it something else?! You see! X does not exist you fool! Anything could be X!
Or are you genuinely having trouble understanding what a human is, or what fundamental human experiences could be?
Edge cases, and fuzzy boundaries aside, can we agree that by the time we've genetically modified ourselves to be a blob of flesh with hundreds of appendages, neuralinked ourselves into a hivemind, or uploaded our consciousness to the cloud, we are no longer recognizably human?
Because it's an existential threat to the human species? It openly wants us to transcend our very nature? It's right their in the freaking name!
This is far older than postmodernism, this is called basic rule of law.
If you want to ban something, you need to define what you want to ban.
"Shotgun barrel longer than 18 inches? Fine, go home."
"Shotgun barrel shorter than 18 inches? Not fine, go to gulag."
Well, you do not need to. You can go the way of old time unlamented obscenity laws. There was no definition what is "obscene" and this was the point. If judge saw something as obscene (for example, protesting against WWI and shitting on our brave boys fighting the beastly Hun) it was obscene and you went to prison.
Now, we can have the same thing for medicine, if you get what you want.
Doctor performs procedure on patient. Patient is happy, doctor is happy.
The Judge is not happy. Why? The procedure is disgusting.
Both patient and doctor go to prison. Everyone is happy now.
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If that's considered an existential threat to humanity, then homo sapiens was an existential threat to homo erectus and your son is a tiny existential threat to yourself.
Sort of, but I'll take the L from natural selection, but I'm going to put up a fight if it comes from the deliberate action of another human.
Is "exercising one's advantage in natural selection over arjin_ferman" not a deliberate action whether they do it traditionally or not? What, they slip and their dick falls into a woman producing genetically fit children on accident?
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I’ll ignore the clearly bad faith snark, and say that yes I don’t think humanity is as clear cut as you’d like to believe. Humans nowadays are different in incredibly drastic ways from our evolutionary origins, yet nobody has any issues calling us human.
As to your dig on post modernism, I barely want to give that any credence. Definitions and getting to the heart of a matter is the core of Western philosophy, something you presumably care about given your snide dismissal of what you mistakenly see as ‘post-modernism.’ Ever heard of a guy called Socrates? He was obsessed with definitions.
I think you can make a good case that a blob or whatever is still ‘human.’ Your argument makes no sense because it’s circular - you’re refusing to define what humanity means then using the term again as the crux.
It's not snark, and it's not bad faith. It's a real issue I have with this debating style. If there's a real lack of clarity or understanding, I'm happy to try to come up with a definition or point at a few examples. But if it's just a strategy to get the other side to run in circles and claim victory by default if they can't give you a definition that covers all cases, then I'm out.
I've been doing this long enough that I know how it goes. Even if someone does give a definition, the other side can just pick another word to chip away at:
What is woke?
Uh... how about applying Marxist class analysis to groups that aren't based on economic relations?
Oh yeah? What's the difference between Marxist class analysis from non-Marxist class analysis?
and so on, and so on, ad Infinitum, just so we never discuss the issue with the original thing that was brought up.
Yes. And even though I grew up using the Socratic method, and still find it hard to ditch the habit, I'm starting to feel real sympathy for the Athenians that decided they had just about enough of the guy.
Then can you make that case? In what sense is that blob human that a cat or an octopus isn't? Why am I the only one that has to give a definition that works with micron-precision?
It's not circular. We're not talking about mathematical abstractions, we're talking about things that have a real world reference. That breaks the circle.
I repeat - it's a real lack of understanding. I don't mean to be a jerk or use argumentative tactics, but I genuinely don't understand what people mean by 'human' when they have this discussion. If you mean biological, baseline human then I disagree. As I and others have pointed out throughout this thread, we're already far away enough from our ancestors to make that distinction meaningless in my view.
I'll give it a shot. To me the essence of humanity doesn't rely on anything biological - bipedalism or our omnivorus nature have nothing to do with it. You could say the core of being human, what separates us from the animals, is a sort of curiosity and indomitable will. I don't mean the Will to Power, just the ability to persevere in the face of long odds.
Our ancestors who were most human in this view were the ones who tamed fire, who created stone tools. Those who domesticated crops and animals, who painted in caves and build temples to their deities. Technology is a natural outflowing of curiosity, it makes use of the knowledge you've gained and allowing you to gain more.
Out of all of the life we see on the planet, humans are the only ones who have this divine spark - this is why to the Greeks, Prometheus was the one who gave us the great gift of fire, of knowledge. This doesn't mean technology is always good, but it can be used for good. And so far we've done a great job on the whole.
Even if we reach @self_made_human's future where our minds are uploaded and we live on a server farm on Mars, I'll still consider us human if we keep to our curiosity and will to overcome challenges. Ultimately our main goal has been, and should be, to defeat the Great Enemy - Death itself. All other concerns are secondary, and if you dig deep enough, the core truth of most things can be resolved into the drive to avoid death, convert entropy to order, or some other formulation.
I'll make it clear that I don't see this is a totalizing moral vision. I also care deeply about love, charity, forgiveness, and other moral traits. That being said, I also don't see humans as inherently good or bad. I'd be curious if this satisfies your idea of a definition.
I'd imagine being human is far different in your opinion!
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We anti-transhumanists need a schelling fence of some kind or other... why not erect it attempts to tinker with the reproductive process? Even if it's not an entirely rational line in the sand, neither is setting 18 years as the exact line for age of consent. Would you be open to getting salami sliced on that issue? One year, we agree 20 is okay. Next year, the debate goes, if 20 is okay, why not 19? Then, if 19 is okay, why not 18? If 18 is okay, why not 17? 16? We've been through this enough times that you'll have to define pedophilia.
Maintaining a line is important.
So you’re okay with cyborgs and life extension and swapping genders etc as long as it doesn’t mess with reproduction? I’ll take that trade.
No brain modifications is the clear schelling fence there.
No obvious schelling fence with this one
As long as the resulting persons remain infertile, otherwise it's interfering with the normal reproductive process. No making babies from bone marrow either.
What’s your issue with brain modifications? We’ve already massively modified our brain from homo erectus and I’m pretty happy about it.
I'm pro-brain mod, but there's huge dangers to the framework even with what we've done so far. The tendency for at least some mental enhancement drugs to zoom at least some number of their consumers right into bizarre behavior is pretty well-documented, and the line between cool mental trick and hallucination-creator can be somewhat surprising (if, uh, less so for the unihemispheric sleep people).
Trivially, 'but you have to do it right' is an obvious answer. I'm not sure people have a good understanding of how narrow 'right' is, here.
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Not all values are compatible. Some are mutually antagonistic, making peaceful coexistence difficult or impossible. It's turned out to be surprisingly easy to achieve mutually-incompatible values with baseline human brains. Add in brain modification, and you jump straight to semantic apocalypse.
I’ll agree that brain modification could lead to some nasty outcomes, but overall I think the benefits outweigh the risks as with most technologies. I trust us to use it at least relatively wisely.
What's your conception of the consequences if, in fact, we do not use it responsibly?
From the previous link:
Every method of conflict resolution other than naked, merciless force is founded on the idea that the core nature of Us and Them is in fact fundamentally similar, that at some point we find common ground in our values. You are talking here about technology that could very easily render this idea empirically false. Merely calling this assumption into question in the last century caused a drastic increase in the concentration and intensity of human misery. It is hard to imagine how definitively falsifying it would work out better.
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Yes, "you're" happy about it. The non-human entity that succeeds us will be happy, too.
Assuming happiness or sadness is even a factor for it.
So do you think that we should’ve let homo erectus be the pinnacle of achievement, and that homo sapiens sapiens is a disgusting, horrible alteration that should be destroyed?
The extinction of any morally relevant species is tragic. I preferentially avoid tragic outcomes for morally relevant organisms closer in kinship to myself (I've donated more to my brother's medical expenses than to malaria nets for Ndugu.) But I am not filled with joy that those inferior pre homo sapiens vermin all died out, were outcompeted, were genocided, no.
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If you feel like being creeped out by the implications of this industry, I cannot recommend Joanne Ramos's debut novel The Farm highly enough.
Thanks for the recommendation!
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