Having an ethical outlook is a great idea. And it's good to criticise ideas you think are unethical.
The point of the post is that just because a person presents an unethical idea doesn't make that person universally unethical. The point is to separate the ideas from the person presenting them, so that people can feel free to present novel ideas without fearing damage to their reputation if the ideas are unpopular.
> The entire point of the post is to separate the ideas from the person presenting them.
But that wasn't the entire point of the post. The post also didn't like people criticizing life-extending research, when the examples were people criticizing the direction of the research itself.
The post was hazy about what, exactly, it wanted people to stop doing, but it seemed to dislike any criticism.
Whether the "life extension is bad for the environment" argument was a good argument or not, criticism of the ethics of work must be part of free discussion.
The article made the distinction between criticism of an idea and criticism of the person behind the idea. "Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can’t just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the actual idea." It says right there that criticism of an idea is welcome.
Moreover, "heresy" implies that a person becomes heretic - socially despicable - by embracing an idea. This is what the author opposes. And for good reason - embracing the concept of heresy means you're only allowed to think things sanctioned by the current sociopolitical philosophy. And since every society has some amount of batshit insane ideas it believes, allowing for heresy means cutting out the safest / most peaceful way of correcting that insanity.
It's fine to criticise the ethics of the work. Beneficial, in fact. The problem arises when you can't separate the ethics of the work from the ethics of the person doing the work.
When "this is a bad idea, maybe you should stop" becomes "you are a bad person".
It's fine in theory to criticise the ethics of the idea alone, but there can be a limit to that.
If the CEO of a mining company has the "ingenious, un-PC idea" to increase mining profits by lobbying Congress and donating to sympathetic lawmakers to ease EPA regulations so he can dump mercury directly in the river, my ethical argument against the idea is that it damages the environment and the people in the communities, possibly for generations.
If his answer is "I know that, but I value profits more," what is left to discuss about the ethics of the idea? We agree on the facts of the matter.
All that's left is for me to say "I think your moral framework is very different from mine," which is really not that different from my saying "I think you are a bad person."
But can't you see the difference here? There is no argument that dumping mercury in a river is good for society, the environment or anything else. It's only "good" for this companies profits and even the real value there is a question given the impact on most people working there.
But extending human life? Maybe it will be bad. Maybe people will keep having children at the same rate and with no one dying anymore the whole planet is completely full of selfish people who don't care about others of the environment. Maybe only the rich will have access, block everyone else from getting it and control the world by simply out living anyone who is in their way.
But what comparable things do we actually see in history? In every country I'm aware of, once basic survival is taken mostly for granted people stop having kids as quickly and often as they can. In fact these days people often wait so long they depend on science to make birth even possible in their advanced age. And most people have, at most, 2 kids.
Imagine if we lived 10k years. Some people might say "well, lets have our kids right now so we can give up 18 years or so now and then have the rest to ourselves" but I suspect most people would say "what's the rush?". Some would even say "why invest 18+ years to extend my legacy to someone I can't control, can only marginally influence for a decade or two? In 10k years they're bound to solve death all-togher. I'll be my own legacy! And if, after 9,900 years they still haven't done it, I can always reproduce then". Imagine not wondering if there was a Troy, we could just ask the people who lived there. In society, we tend to be safe from some tragedy until most people who lived it are dead then we fall in the same trap again. What if they didn't die?
I say all that to say, it is not remotely obvious that extending human life is in the same category of behavior as dumping mercury in the river to make a few bucks so the consequences should not be the same or even similar.
Sure, life-extension is a nuanced question, but the topic under question is whether we should ever criticize the person presenting an "outside-the-box, maybe un-PC" idea, rather than criticize the idea itself.
My mining company example was much closer to the kinds of ideas that are actually pushed by people in the real world, quite frequently, more so than the article's anecdote about life-extension being criticized.
I'm saying that some people seem to pursue profits in such a way that they clearly have a moral framework that doesn't match mine, and arguing over the ethics of the idea with them is fruitless.
Did whoever it was at Volkswagen who had the bright idea to make cars have a system to detect when they were being tested, and change their emissions accordingly, really need someone to debate with about the ethics of the idea? I don't think that was a case of someone with a simple lack of knowledge of the ethical arguments.
These are the kinds of "innovations" people are coming up with in the real world, more-so than life-extension. People are going to create new apps that allow microloans with Bitcoin, with usurious rates, and market them to poor people. People are going to create dolls that listen to your kids and use the info to market toys to them. People are going to create devices to allow you to monitor your health, and sell the info to drug companies, or even to employers. There are going to be plenty of Bad Ideas where the people peddling them know the ethical arguments against them. At some point, we get to criticize the people coming up with these ideas as well.
On the other hand, people not only drive, but also oppose progress; as a smarter than me person (don't remember who it was) said: Science advances one funeral at a time (it's basically like evolution). If people stop dying (barring accidents), we'll basically stop advancing as well.
Aging eventually impairs the brain. If life extension is possible, it will have to protect pretty much all your organs from aging, and why would the brain be excluded?
Again, you're preseenting assumptions. We don't know that things will still work that way if people lived radically longer. You certainly don't know that well enough to shun people who try to find out.
Fearing damage to your reputation if your ideas are unpopular is literally how society works. Unethical ideas aren't just unethical out of the ether, they usually involve harming someone or some group. Putting those ideas forward should come with risk to yourself because it definitely comes with risks to others.
This is a reasonable point in the abstract, but it doesn't account for the current reality in which "Look, I found a heretic" affords such outsized rewards in karma (or social cachet, or the personal satisfaction of having taken down a baddie, or whatever you want to call it).
Fifty years ago, you could say women are too dumb to program computers and still keep your job and be invited to dinner parties, and now you would be fired and shunned. Progress, right? The problem is, that power - the power to destroy careers of people who have done something bad - is not being wielded consistently or sparingly. We're aiming it at misogynists and homophobes, and also their defenders, and also people aren't defending them per se but kinda sound like they are if you only read the headline.
(But the point of the essay is not that Brendan Eich and James Damore shouldn't have been fired; it's that the "Brendan Eich and James Damore should be fired" position has caused a chilling effect on open dialogue.)
Nitpicking here, but your example was somewhat ironic, as 50 years ago, Computer were predominantly programmed by women [1] , so the heretical idea would have been to say that men should be programming computers.
"Programmer" was a data entry job that we automated away. They were basically compiling flowcharts that were written by "systems analysts" doing the work we would call programming.
It's like an "EPROM programmer", which is a tool to make the hardware run the software.
In the old days it was thought that only the implementation of an idea could cause harm. The only evidence I've seen presented that the idea itself is harmful rests upon an assumption it will obviously be implemented or you wouldn't be thinking about it. It's aenthema to a free thinker.
It is not clear or obvious that allowing people to live longer is unethical. Resorting inmediately to an ad hominem is not an appropriate form of debate.
No individual has a moral obligation to debate ideas. However if debate is shut down with fallacious arguments it limits the ability for the idea to progress.
If this happens too often then progress will be slowed. That is the point of this post.
But the argument isn't fallacious and it's not an ad hom...
Extending life expectancy will increase human population and harm our environment and that harm to the environment will harm future generations so individuals working towards extending life expectancy are hurting future generations and that's unethical which makes them unethical. You can disagree with the argument but it's not fallacious.
Regardless ideas need to be discussed divorced from the people presenting them. Medical care is no more or less ethical because Hitler is making the argument.
Yes but this isn't about presenting an argument, the one example given in this blog post is about someone working towards a goal. If that goal is unethical and the person is working towards it we should be able to call them unethical. It's not about whether Hitler is saying medical care is good, it's about whether someone working to exterminate the Jews can be called unethical.
Everyone has done something that caused harm at some point. If that is the bar to declare a person unethical then we all are. In this framework you are right but it makes the label useless.
Most people would require action which creates direct (not second order as in this example) harm of a large magnitude before applying the label to a person.
In any case labels mean different things to different people in emotionally charged subjects. Which is why they don't have a place in honest debate.
>Most people would require action which creates direct (not second order as in this example) harm of a large magnitude before applying the label to a person.
That doesn't make any sense. If I directly try to eradicate the Jews I'm immoral, if my actions just have a second or third order effect of eradicating the Jews then I'm not? Most people probably use the direct vs second order distinction when it's themselves who are doing something unethical via second order effects but that's just to save some cognitive dissonance. If I know my actions have second order effects of hurting lots of people and I still do it that's unethical.
>In any case labels mean different things to different people in emotionally charged subjects. Which is why they don't have a place in honest debate.
Reality isn't an honest debate, reality is realpolitik. People are likely to be emotionally charged when they're told that it's okay they're being hurt because it's just a second order effect after all. Learn to deal with that emotion and argue against it, not make posts on the internet opining for something which never existed.
> If I directly try to eradicate the Jews I'm immoral, if my actions just have a second or third order effect of eradicating the Jews then I'm not?
This is a common moral principle; it is found in, for instance, the classical Christian doctrine on homicide, where directly willed killing is (leaving aside war and capital punishment) categorically prohibited, but killing (even when it is a certain result, or as nearly so as practically occurs) incidental to some act with a different end is not categorically prohibited, but judged according to the proportionality of the risked harm of the act with the harm it was avoiding. (Self-defense doctrine in American, and some other, law is ultimately strongly influenced by this principle, though it diverges a bit from it.)
First order effects are easily anticipated such that intent can be assumed. Second order effects are not always obvious even to experts in the field and so require debate and consideration. Intent is unlikely in this case without evidence to the contrary.
Of course If your definition of unethical doesn't require intent to harm then this is a meaningless distinction. Another Reason why labels are unhelpful.
>Extending life expectancy will increase human population
[citation needed]
>harm our environment
[citation needed]
>individuals working towards extending life expectancy are hurting future generations
[citation needed]
We don't know any of those things. You can debate it. Even passionately so, but it's wrong and dangerous to assume your unproven beliefs are facts and label people based on them.
And yet here we're discussing an idea for which you personally believe that someone or some group will be harmed but it is not certain, some of us would say it's not even likely. Some of us would even say it would be a great benefit to society and have the opposite affect you claim.
But because you believe (perhaps even irrationally) that the idea could harm you give yourself, and anyone who thinks as you do, the right to damage people's reputation. History has shown this to be very dangerous behavior.
The point of the post is that just because a person presents an unethical idea doesn't make that person universally unethical. The point is to separate the ideas from the person presenting them, so that people can feel free to present novel ideas without fearing damage to their reputation if the ideas are unpopular.