You can say "it's a bad idea to work on extending life", but following on from there to cast the person presenting the idea as unethical is doing more harm than good.
Why would it be wrong to regard someone dedicating most of their time to actively accomplishing ("working on") an unethical thing as an unethical person? What else could "unethical person" possibly mean?
I haven't censored anyone or shut down any argument by saying this, and neither was I attempting to, so your point seems to be confused.
You haven't shut down any argument by saying "anyone who works on this is a bad person"? Seriously? I happen to think the exact opposite: life extension is probably one of the most noble things we could possibly be working on. Imagine if Einstein were still alive. We never learn from history, maybe because the people who lived it are all dead now. But in your mind, thinking this way probably makes me unethical (i.e. bad)! It's no problem when we're both two blobs of text on a forum, but I certainly wouldn't want you to be a boss or someone I was forced to interact with on a regular basis. And if enough people behave as radical as you are they will likely want to go beyond simply labelling people (e.g. see all the "hate crime" talk).
I don't see how I can stop extrapolating from "action X is unethical because the expected consequences look like bad ones" to "this person who dearly wants to bring about action X is behaving unethically". I simply don't see them as being meaningfully different statements.
In your second paragraph you've deviated from what I'm talking about (perhaps I was responding to the wrong person? EDIT: I didn't). "Person X is behaving unethically" is perfectly fine. "This person is an unethical person because they engage in action X" is where I draw the line (asuming action X is controversial and not very clearly evil like first degree murder) because it assigns a trait to someone by which they will be judged by their peers.
EDIT: Actually no:
>people dedicating their lives to it today are unethical people.
You said that. So your revised statement is moving the goal posts.
> I haven't shut down any argument by saying this
You're being naive if you think that saying this doesn't end any hope of a reasonable discussion.
One person's reasonable discussion is another person's interminable sea lion. http://wondermark.com/1k62/
Given your stance here, you're perfectly ok with the baker refusing to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple, right? Because the law was effectively the sea lion in your comic.
Everyone is going to have some threshold where they think 'an act that is this immoral means the person doing the action is also immoral', where actions that are below that threshold are treated as 'this action is unethical, but the person doing it could still be good'
Most people think someone who murders is a bad person (the act is immoral, and the person doing it is immoral). However, as the we move down the line, EVERYONE has to 'make the call' as to where the action becomes something that doesn't immediately make the person doing the action immoral. It isn't wrong that we have to make that call, it is the only way.
If people aren't allowed to state that 'behavior X makes person Y unethical', then how are we supposed to determine what is 'objectively unethical'.
To be sure, there is a lot of self-censorship -- the Overton window is real, and it's not advisable to say things fully outside the Overton window. Perhaps Altman is saying that the Overton window is closing on some opinions that he thinks we should be able to discuss openly, but because they're now outside the window he feels unsafe mentioning them. That would be a fair argument, though it'd be nice to make a list of things that can and cannot be said publicly, then we could argue whether we should widen the Overton window.
I happen think the Overton window is a good thing, even if I'm not always happy as to what falls inside and what falls outside of it. And, of course, the Overton window is a natural result of human nature, so it's hard to argue that there shouldn't be an Overton window. We can affect the Overton window, and sometimes we really should try to.
If person A is a white supremacist, and person B thinks ether exists, am I supposed to treat them equally because otherwise I would be "ostracizing" person A?
"I think black people are genetically inferior." ...followed by... "Why can't we have a free exchange of ideas?"
What if the ideas are unethical? There is a lot of that going around these days.
Life extension is one that comes up quite a bit, because the question doesn't seem to involve life extension for all, but life extension for a few who can afford it. Or, if it is being presented as a public good, the owner of the tech gets to become a new robber baron.
Maybe we need to decide if being ultra-wealthy is moral when people are in need and there is a system in place that generates people in need.
Downvotes away!
A: "I think black people are genetically inferior." B: "I think that's a bigoted thing to say that has historically caused a lot of harm to a lot of people." A: "Why can't we have a free exchange of ideas?"
Person B is engaging with that idea, it's just that they think it's completely indefensible. I have a hard time understanding how Person A thinks this conversation is supposed to go -- like are we supposed to entertain everything as if it were serious? If I go up to a physics professor and say "I think physics is completely inferior and wrong" what is she supposed to say?
And more importantly, people with decision-making power have shown a remarkable tendency to submit to the will of these capricious and volatile online mobs.
If I can just ignore Twitter (and I do) then Twitter mobs don't directly affect me. But if my management does things because of Twitter mobs (or anything else like that) we have a big problem.
A: Statistically speaking, there are some genetic explanations for trends we see between men and women.
B: That is a sexist thing to say that women can't do tech, so you are harming women in tech. You need to be fired.
A: But... that's not what I said...
B: SO COURAGEOUS of the company to fire that employee for those bigoted ideas
C: Why can't we have a free exchange of ideas?
D: Every time someone says something bigoted, they're like "muh free speech!" Stop saying bigoted things!
There are obviously genetic differences between races. That's how AncestryDNA can tell where you came from. So if there are obviously genetic differences, why can't I talk about the pros/cons of being black without being hateful? Some differences are going to be objectively better or worse, why I can't we talk about them without going into full blown racism? If we acknowledge the fact that there are physical differences due to genetics, maybe there are mental differences too (that's a real touchy one)?
Pro: some localized African phenotypes make for world-class athletes in certain sports- a single tribe in Kenya is vastly over-represented in marathon running.
Con: Africans are worse at living in the Arctic Circle compared to Nordic people. Their dark skin isn't suited to producing enough vitamin D with limited skin exposure.
Con: Black people with high blood pressure don't respond well to beta blockers and ACE inhibitors. Instead they need to be prescribed diuretics and calcium blockers, but these have worse side effects.
It seems like today if we mention that there are actually genetic differences between races it automatically gets shut down because they assume we're going to start making the conversation about hate instead of what we can do to fix some of the cons.
I guess what I mean is that even when folks are talking about these things in good-intentioned ways, they're not appreciating the weightiness of the ideas they're throwing around -- and depending on your priors, it's reasonable to worry about that.
Then argue the case for that position and tease out the ethical ramifications with your interlocutor. Bring a lot of evidence to back up that argument. Argue against the strongest form of the opposing idea(s), don't just create straw men to knock down or attack simple weak spots for easy points.
Unless the person advancing an unethical idea is intentionally trolling, take them seriously and seek to engage & explain your point. But it also requires truly understanding the other side (hence why you should be able to both articulate and argue against the strongest form of their argument).
Humanity has had some pretty awful ideas over its brief history. We have a mixed record when it comes to eradicating them by dialogue vs fighting. Usually we try dialogue for as long as we can. Too often, we wind up fighting when dialogue fails. Changing hearts/minds isn't an easy task. But the more we vilify, insult, ostracize, and otherwise verbally (or physically) attack those whose ideas we deplore, the more they frequently dig in on their position because they've tied their own identities to their beliefs. It's a funny condition with people that they often hold their identity as a believer in thing X far more strongly than they actually hold thing X.
[edit: wording & a little extra explication]
The best argument for life extension here would probably be to say that technologies like cell phones, which we now consider to be liberating technologies that almost everyone can afford -- even people living in poverty -- also started out as affordable only by the ultra-wealthy, and there's simply no way to arrive at a new tech without going through that stage.
If the tech were only useful to the ultra-wealthy once developed, that would be a flaw demanding criticism. But criticizing a technology for having a first stage of not being affordable before it becomes more affordable later seems to miss the mark.
Are you actually hearing that, or are you reading someone else's disingenuous over-simplified interpretation of what someone else said? Maybe just doing the incorrect reading yourself? Or are you reading an anonymous 4chan one-liner that could have been posted there by anyone for any reason?
> What if the ideas are unethical?
Then explain why. If you can't explain why something is unethical without resorting to intimidation of the people expressing those ideas, then maybe they are more ethical and your concept of righteousness is flawed or missing something important.
I disagree as to inequality. You just can't get equality; get over it. But life extension can still be problematic. E.g., life extension w/o extension of working years is a tremendous burden on everyone else, especially if such life extension is/becomes low-cost, and the only way out is to automate more and more so that we might provide for enormous elderly populations. On the other hand, we'll end up automating as much as possible, so it may be that this is a non-issue. Life extension w/ extension of working years would certainly be better. Another issue is whether we can correspondingly extend fertility years, otherwise we might risk negative population growth (which might or might not be a good thing anyways).
Workers can't afford to buy the products and businesses lose demand in a downward spiral.
That's what worked about the New Deal. If capitalist's want to continue getting to be capitalists, they have to sacrifice large amounts of profit to the common good. They still get to be wealthier than every one else, just by a smaller amount.
I really just consider life extension a wealthy vanity project. All of them contribute some money to defeating death, just in case...It really makes you think you should be in the business of promising immortality to wealthy people.
Propositional claims, in and of themselves, cannot be unethical. It's just a category error.
Now, if you're talking about the propositional claim, "black people are genetically inferior", well, as far as I know, it's contradicted by reams of available evidence and supported by little to none. You might as well claim the moon landings were faked, and, I suppose, many racists probably also do claim that one.
I do think there's a difference, so to speak, between heresy and quackery, and if we're treating racism as heresy, we've arrived to a very worrying place. The problem is, we treat ideas as heresy when we don't think we can actually provide evidence against them. That's why the whole notion originates with the unprovable realm of religion.
Claims like the supposed "inferiority" of some groups of people, on the other hand, were, at least as I was taught, quackery. They're just wrong, and all you have to do is point at the contradictory state of affairs in the real world.
A quack you ignore because you can prove they're wrong. A heretic you burn because you're secretly worried they're right.
Which makes me wonder how many secret racists we have around those pyres burning racists and sexists.
>Maybe we need to decide if being ultra-wealthy is moral when people are in need and there is a system in place that generates people in need.
This sorta idea? https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/its-basically-just-im...