I have a very strong personal motivation for making the moral assertion, “Diversity is good”. I am transsexual, often meet people who have never met a TS before and am rarely in a group which is majority TS. Yet, I do believe in it as a moral requirement. If we are all the same, we all have the same blind spots. If we are all different, we see different things, and this is good, and interesting, and in our interests.
I rather hope that the more powerful alien race we meet will also value diversity as a moral good. I even believe it is a moral good even when, for example during the Scramble for Africa, almost no-one or no-one at all believes it.
While I agree with the value of diversity in general and your points for it, I disagree that it is a good in itself.
Consider the ways in which we are morally acceptable in limiting diversity and by a greater extension individual freedom. We limit the free choices of many people, the most relevant example here being child abusers. We don’t value the diversity of a society which contains the viewpoints of child abusers anywhere near as highly as the value of a society where children are not abused.
The difference with the super-happies is that they are not just limiting humanities ability to harm one another, and to harm its children, but their ability to harm themselves.
Analogously, we prevent people from committing suicide in most cases, prevent access to certain drugs and so on, whether this is moral is a separate question.
A classical Mill style liberal would say that an individual can be restricted from actions that affect only themselves only when they are either irrational or not in possession of all of the facts (e.g. a child or a mentally ill person is considered irrational, and we prevent people accidentally harmign themselves through ignorance).
So are the super-happies behaving morally under this remit? Assuming they consider us rational then they are not.
A better solution would be to allow all of humanity the option to turn their pain on and off, and either prevent all children being born or prevent children feeling pain before emotional maturity.
That would allow individuals to make a rational choice between super-happy and pain/pleasure ways of life, and humanity as a whole could absorb the information and gradually change.
I think we are a long way off of genuinely being able to value diversity among societies. The universalistic impulse to convert the infidels or enlighten the other is still very strong.
I hope we will allow a diverse range of minds to exist. And consequently I hope that humans will someday be ok with humanity branching off into several societies with different values. I value genetic and cultural diversity quite a bit.
I have a very strong personal motivation for making the moral assertion, “Diversity is good”. I am transsexual, often meet people who have never met a TS before and am rarely in a group which is majority TS. Yet, I do believe in it as a moral requirement. If we are all the same, we all have the same blind spots. If we are all different, we see different things, and this is good, and interesting, and in our interests.
I rather hope that the more powerful alien race we meet will also value diversity as a moral good. I even believe it is a moral good even when, for example during the Scramble for Africa, almost no-one or no-one at all believes it.
While I agree with the value of diversity in general and your points for it, I disagree that it is a good in itself. Consider the ways in which we are morally acceptable in limiting diversity and by a greater extension individual freedom. We limit the free choices of many people, the most relevant example here being child abusers. We don’t value the diversity of a society which contains the viewpoints of child abusers anywhere near as highly as the value of a society where children are not abused.
The difference with the super-happies is that they are not just limiting humanities ability to harm one another, and to harm its children, but their ability to harm themselves. Analogously, we prevent people from committing suicide in most cases, prevent access to certain drugs and so on, whether this is moral is a separate question.
A classical Mill style liberal would say that an individual can be restricted from actions that affect only themselves only when they are either irrational or not in possession of all of the facts (e.g. a child or a mentally ill person is considered irrational, and we prevent people accidentally harmign themselves through ignorance).
So are the super-happies behaving morally under this remit? Assuming they consider us rational then they are not. A better solution would be to allow all of humanity the option to turn their pain on and off, and either prevent all children being born or prevent children feeling pain before emotional maturity. That would allow individuals to make a rational choice between super-happy and pain/pleasure ways of life, and humanity as a whole could absorb the information and gradually change.
Upvoted.
I think we are a long way off of genuinely being able to value diversity among societies. The universalistic impulse to convert the infidels or enlighten the other is still very strong.
I hope we will allow a diverse range of minds to exist. And consequently I hope that humans will someday be ok with humanity branching off into several societies with different values. I value genetic and cultural diversity quite a bit.