That’s an unknown unknown.

But if it eliminates generic variety, I’d land towards saying yes.

I don’t see why the Gattaca/eugenics parallels are “drivel.”

Put yourself in that Rawlsian “veil of ignorance.”

Pretend you’re a disembodied soul and can end up absolutely anywhere in the world, and in any body. Now what if you’re the one with a debilitating disease, or you’re the parent to the child with one, and you’re too poor to access this service.

Or let’s say you were born already several generations into this gigantic social experiment, but you happen to belong to a line of people who had been “left behind” by this technology, as it were. What are the real implications for living as a member of that biological underclass?

Are those lives that can sincerely said to be better off because of this?

Why is being critical of this technology “rolling the dice,” but its uncritical embrace is somehow not also a gamble?

What about concerns about wealth and access to this technology, and the further implications about generating a whole biologically inferior underclass of humans in a few generations?

This feels very eugenics-y to me.

And we all know that wealth will greatly determine access, especially while the tech is new.

Frankly, this all is way too close to eugenics for me to be comfortable with it.

I've taught kids and I've been using ChatGPT for my own stuff a lot lately.

It's great to supplement your work by fixing grammar, spelling, and maybe even economizing your words. But it's incredibly obvious when it's been used. I think any half decent teacher/professor will be able to distinguish its use in regard to plagiarism vs its use in regard to assistance - the latter of which I think should be acceptable and possibly even encouraged.

I agree that the terms "autonomous self-making" and "self-authorship" and "revelatory autonomy" are vague. Hopefully he provides a proper definition of the terms in his academic paper.

Though what I don't quite understand is how receiving advice actually interferes with this. After all, there's still a significant distinction between being told a thing and experiencing a thing.

I'm sure we've all had that experience in which our parents have offered us words of wisdom as children or teenagers, only for us to learn the exact same lesson "the hard way."

It was the title that was auto-generated by reddit when I put the link through. Didn't realize it wasn't the verbatim title. It usually just does it word for word automatically.

This is only an article about his academic article. My own inclination is to disagree as well, but I thought it was interesting for discussion. I'd like to read the original published one. I wonder how Dr. Akhlaghi defends this...

> Dr Farbod Akhlaghi, a moral philosopher at Christ’s College, argues that everyone has a right to “self authorship”, so must make decisions about transformative experiences for themselves.

> In a new paper for the philosophy journal Analysis, he argues that this right to “revelatory autonomy” is violated even by well-meaning advice from friends and family about crucial life decisions.

>…

> Akhlaghi argues it is only justifiable to interfere in someone else’s transformative choice by competing moral considerations, such as if harm is likely to be done others.

>…

Many Aristoteleans (virtue ethics) I know of thought very systemically…

> In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.

-Hannah Arendt

That's still assigning an instrumental value to things, and thus still the kind of "technology" that Heidegger disliked. Though it would be a much better world than the current one, if that was done.

Will it be any real consolation for people to hear that they’re better off than we’re the medieval peasants?

Also, many studies have shown that this pandemic reduced a lot of these gains that had taken a century or so to accumulate. And with the current monetary policies of the US and European central banks, we’re going to see in-debt developing countries fall into a chasm of debt so deep that it’ll look pretty much impossible to overcome.

The system is not resilient.

Also, what do you do in a system that regularly generates incentives to NOT give to charity? I'm not against charity, but to propose it as a systemic way to address poverty is ridiculous.

You're making a lot of assumptions about Singer's would-be critics.

The alternative to charity isn't necessarily throwing soup cans at priceless art, and to suggest that is to provide a pretty unsympathetic view of the critic.

Charity itself is a luxury of sorts, and not everyone can participate.

Also, while some critics of capitalism or of Singer (or both) might be petty tyrants and dogmatically committed to some purity test, there's no reason why that's necessarily the case. There are conceptions of alternative systems that are nonetheless pluralistic, and to suggest that these don't exist is to be intellectually dishonest.

Nor do we have any reason to believe that there's a democratic consensus around the status quo, or that the status quo somehow conforms better to "human nature," whatever that may be.

>In contrast, the Fullerites advise patience and forbearance: Painful as it may be for us to suffer Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Liz Truss, Jim Jordan and Nigel Farage, we are told, the pain is worth the potential next state that it makes possible: A truly pluralistic society where a monopoly of Truth no longer holds and where true and fair competition between ideas is possible

I agree. I'm even starting to see the popularity of this position grow in academic political philosophy circles with the current interest in Machiavelli from people like John McCormick, or in the anti-oligarchic philosophy of Camila Vergara.

The "pre" Post-Truth era had, as the background ideology, an aristocratic republican justification; let the "best" citizens - those who know better - tell you how things really are. Instead now we're seeing a re-ignited interest in a more democratic kind of republicanism amongst political philosophers, which I think reflects the sentiments of non-philosophers alike.

The post-Truth era is dangerous for sure, but it also is opening up the possibility of something constructive and positive.