In a comment at FuturePundit, Steven Horrobin chides me for supposing — though all I said was that I hadn’t yet seen a counterexample — that all bioethicists are anti-life.
Amy Greenwood takes on those pestilential ‘bioethicists’ whom I have heckled more than once.
Yes, if the world is different, we will think about it differently. So what? A worldview in flux is not an ethical problem, and why assume a new one will be inhuman or less profound? Besides, I don’t think I’m less committed to science now that I expect to live to 80 than if I expected to live to 40. In fact, if I had reason to believe I would die at 40, I might as well stop working on difficult problems because I probably wouldn’t have time to make much progress anyway. So in that way, I may be more committed to my work and to my personal engagements because I expect the long run to be, well, long.
. . . .
Anyway, the idea of living to 200 appeals to me enormously. Wouldn’t it be fun to have more time to get good, I mean really good, at what you are doing? There are so many languages to learn, books to read, people to talk to . . . in fact, I would distinctly relish a glut of the able. Maybe I’ll have my grandmother send some cookies over to the Council on Bioethics, because life is just really not that bad.
(Thanks to Charles Murtaugh for a link.)
Randall Parker goes after the bioLuddethicists at some length.
If there’s ever a charity dedicated to rejuvenating the poor, might I suggest that priority be given to those whose native language is dying out?
Apparently Mr Bush has created something called the President’s Council on Bioethics. Now, I’ve never heard that term except in connexion with some chin-puller’s opinion that it’s naughty to tamper with God’s Will Nature by curing infertility or whatnot; so it comes as no surprise to read that one Leon Kass, appointed to chair the Council, has written a book in praise of Death. ( . . more . . )
The `bioethicists’ seem to be worried that desirable diversity could be wiped out by fads, which would make sense if a majority of parents for thirty years were to fall for the same fad. Am I missing something?
(Where do `bioethicists’ come from, anyway? What are the roots of the discipline? Do bioethicists say anything falsifiable?)