Individual Rights: Minority Imposing its Views on Majority

This from Jesse Reynolds at Biopolitical Times (repsonding to this from Ron Bailey) is one of the more stupid democratic totalitarian arguments I’ve heard (and yes, it does mention the Peter “The Root of All Evil” Thiel):
Public opinion surveys show that an overwhelming 85 to 90 percent of Americans are opposed to human reproductive cloning [...]

Utopian Surgery and the Wisdom of Repugnance

Al Roth points to this Boston Globe story about the initial opposition to anaesthetic. I’m reminded of this great essay by David Pearce, which nicely draws out the lessons for bioethical thinking today. The introduction:
Before the advent of anaesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without [...]

The Confused Idea of ‘Eugenics’

Whenever someone uses the word ‘eugenics’ to refer to anything other than the political movement, popular in the twentieth century, with the aim of using state power to improve ‘the race,’ there’s a good chance they’ll end up very confused. Like ‘fascism,’ ‘eugenics’ today functions as little more than a slur, and is normally used [...]

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Mike Treder reports some interesting poll results from Reader’s Digest:
So much for eternal youth! Most respondents to our latest global survey are just fine with their limited shelf life here on earth. Not even the younger crowd consistently chooses immortality. In fact, more than 50 percent of those 45 and under in seven countries (including [...]

Ronald Bailey on Transhumanism and the Limits of Democracy

Reason reproduces the paper Bailey presented at Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict Workshop on Transhumanism and the Future of Democracy. The paper is too good to extract, and I would urge anyone at all interested in this stuff to read the whole thing, but here’s one part which makes the point I’ve been [...]

Regulation Will Kill Millions

A good point from the Fight Aging blog:
I have said in the past that, from a pure research timeline perspective, by 2040 we’ll plausibly have all the technologies needed to repair and reverse aging. Unfortunately when we look beyond the laboratory, the field is strewn with roadblocks of legislation, slowing everything down. Even the time taken [...]

Technology and Freedom

Reason has a review of David Friedman’s recent book Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World.
In Future Imperfect David Friedman presents a wide variety of possible futures, “some attractive, some frightening, few dull.” Looking through a lens of science fiction and fact, Friedman explores how libertarian ideas can help us adjust our lives and institutions [...]

Is Eugenics Inevitable?

This post from Daniel MacArthur at Genetic Future raises some interesting questions:

The argument is straightforward: allowing a child to be born with a disease that will result in a lifetime of suffering and premature death, when a simple screening test could prevent it, is completely morally equivalent to allowing a child to die of infection [...]

Designer Babies and Eugenics

From Human Enhancement and Biopolitics:
With all the cries that selecting one’s babies will lead to a situation like that portrayed in Gattaca, nobody seems to realise that the movie’s portrayal of public coercion to have a particular sort of baby is already happening. The only difference is the ’sort’ of baby that parents are being pushed, by [...]