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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: E who wrote (50196)8/9/1999 12:30:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte  Read Replies (2) of 108807
 
Forgive me for Dieseling on this subject, but I think you oversimplify FT's main contention. (Doubly remarkable because that is not usually a danger.)
Currently a species, including man, adapts at the expense of the individuals. That is because the recipe for survival is to have lots of kids - and the ones who are both tough and lucky get to live. The rest have a bad time of it.
BUT the reasonable hope is that we will soon (decades? centuries?) advance our technology of the flesh to the point where we can cut out the well-worn cycle of pain and death. We can desist from this enormous wastage of individuals in the blind quest for a healthier whole.
This will totally rewrite the ethics of reproduction. Because the chance element in conceiving and bearing offspring, and wondering how they will turn out, will be reined in. We will predetermine the health, beauty, mental vigor of any offspring we choose or are authorized to have.

But we're not nearly there yet. We can imagine it, we can write lucid works of fiction about it, but we don't have the machinery to do it, just as Jules Verne's contemporaries did not have a moonwalking technology.

In the meantime the old ethics hold. On the one side are the Parents (I use this as a codeword for people who feel other's suffering perhaps more keenly than the average person) who are willing to sacrifice their wealth in the implementation of compassion. On the other side are Kings who believe that dividing the gold among the hungry peasants would remove the chance and mandate for the Kingdom's strength and greatness. There is a certain hard moral truth to the idea that you can feed either your poor sister now or your own grandchildren later. Like genetics, the economics of limited wealth still rule us; we don't rule them.
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