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The Not-Quite-Human Rights Movement
An anonymous reader writes "Yale University hosted a conference on transhumanism which organizers say served to
coalesce transhumanism from a subculture to a 'movement.' They're even sketching out where the role of violence becomes legitimate in the quest to become a cyborg.
But most of the talk was of peaceful integration and continuation of democratic values."
If we make these limbs much, much better - are we to expect anything different?
Yes! That's basically the whole point. Currently, even the best artificial limbs are a poor substitute for the genuine article. People get artificial limbs because they have lost their natural limbs, and have no other choice -- we do not hate or shun these people any more than we hate or shun people with any other disability. However, if artificial limbs become far superior to natural limbs, people will be able to choose whether they want their (perfectly healthy) natural limbs removed in favor of mechanical ones. At that point you will certainly have fear and loathing between the people who undergo the procedure (the superior beings) and the people who don't (the all-natural people).
As for your further point, it's not the role of bioethics departments to sell stem cell research. It's their role to think about the consequences for society of any new innovatio, and sometimes they might not agree with the techies.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
In my, admittedly limited experience from taking a semester of ASL and having "deaf culture" lessons intermingled with that, what you're saying doesn't seem to be the actual issue.
People who subscribe to "deaf culture" seem to have constructed a world-view in which deafness isn't a biological flaw, but rather a "variation". They promote the view that a diminished or absent ability to hear is a healthy variant of the human biological norm. This is, I assume, a social reaction to the idea of being "flawed" or broken, and stems, I am sure, from the fact that by and large deaf people are capable of fully interacting with human society, so long as concessions are made for their lack of hearing.
But now its gone far beyond that, and in some cases (such as this) its gone to ridiculous extremes. Instead of being ostracized by hearing (aka "normal") humans, they ostracize people who recognize that deafness is not the human norm, and actually use technology to fix it.
It saddened (and angered) me when I first encountered this. Deaf people of this opinion think that folks who want to "fix" them just don't "get it", and that we as hearing people (as they call it) are just some sort of other normal variation on homo sapiens. As if the ability to hear is akin to hair color or something equally as irrelevant to human functioning.
I wonder if the same people would consider other birth defects "normal variations", and acceptable.
Here's what we need to tell people:
When you're on your deathbed, only days or hours from kicking the bucket, will you regret your opposition to stem cell research during the early 21s century, that might have let you happily live another 20 or 30 years?
Nobody cares unless it directly affects them. We need to convince people that it will directly affect them.
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