Category Archives: People

To be fair, if one watches this one could have an entertaining debate with oneself about what constitutes a problem and what doesn’t

We could, should we choose to be Devil’s Advocate on this, ask if getting a cavity filled is an upgrade. Ok then, how about dental implants? Fake breasts on women, and increasingly these days, on men.

When we alter our diet for better health, are we doing an upgrade? Is it problematic? What about taking steroids and other performance enhancing drugs?

If we take this back to the GMO food debate we have a better analogy.

When Gregor Mendel found a way to genetically enhance food plants by selective breeding and developing plants by grafting one on to another, he most decidedly changed the world. And that was in the Nineteenth Century. There is probably not a food plant left on Earth, not changed quite fundamentally by Mendel’s work. Then came direct genetic manipulation of plants. The results are a mixed bag. If it wasn’t for Norman Borlaug, a lot of the world would have starved to death and most of the world would not have been born. Borlaug by the way, was a Malthusian. He felt he was buying the world time to feed its teeming billions while we figured out a way to reduce the population of the world. Nonetheless he did create the tech that does feed the world. And he won the Nobel Peace Prize for it, back when the prize meant something. For those interested, find the episode of Pen & Teller’s Bullshit called, “Eat This”. They discuss Borlaug a lot and related issues of food snobbery, mostly “eating organic” as it was back when the show was made.

So it isn’t really that simple to draw the line on what constitutes a harmless procedure and what is playing God. One could, if one wanted to argue it, say that a woman that had silicone breast implants might attract a mate that she otherwise would not have, and bear children that she would not have had she not had the upgrade, and therefore has changed the genetics of all future generations of her offspring in an unnatural way. Sorta kinda.

It does get easier to pass judgement when it comes to volition though. When you have no choice in the matter. When the consequences of the upgrade are unknown beyond a reasonable amount of risk. (like the mRNA shots) When it is intended to change fundamentally your capability of agency, and when it changes your germ line for all time.

One could say that the problem with Fentanyl and Carfentanil etc. is its destruction of your will. It isn’t so much its health issues, as serious as they are. It is that once you use it even once, you arguably have lost your free will to chose not to take it to a degree that must be staggering given what people do to get it and how many it kills. Very few people will sell sexual services to strangers for example, for a pack of cigarettes. But opioids? It would seem so if the movies are to be believed. And if the upgrades remove your agency, it has made you into slaves.

The video below does deal with changes that do affect the germ line, or the DNA in your sex cells which are then reflected permanently in future generations issuing from those who may have had these upgrades. And I think that is a safe place to say where a line is crossed. If you want to do crazy things with your own body, as a libertarian its hard to say not to do so. But the future of humanity might be argued to be a collective right in so much as there is one.

Please read the story details at: Rair Foundation USA