involuntary suffering can only be abolished through a postulated redesign of the biological systems - and the right to seek happiness voluntarily should allow individuals to pursue this

Rights aren't inherently protected by anything other than people who recognize when rights are being encroached.

Oh spare me. :nonooo:

I'm not out to refute or challenge. I'm out to have a conversation.

It's from his song "My Back Pages". It refers to how much he thought he knew when he was a young, idealistic crusader.



Some innocent bystanders died when we entered Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s to interrupt their ethnic warfare. The Rwandan genocide ended because a Ugandan-backed Tutsi army came in and drove the Hutu militias out of the country, and innocents died in that case too. Do you get the point? The point is that if the goal is to intervene in oppression and suffering, and the only way to do it is with warfare, then some innocents may die in pursuit of a greater good. I can't stand Bush, and I have never supported the Iraq war, but I do understand that it could be rationalized that way.

Yes I have. In fact that's the only area of philosophy that I've studied academically.

I'm not the abolitionist

Laws don't come from ethical directives, though. Laws come from lawmakers who have their individual beliefs and constituencies, and in the end laws are compromises.

I'm not trying to justify laws. I'm saying that your "directive" is innate and uniformly understood whether you spell it out for us or not.

That's not what I said at all. Read it again. Look up the word picayune if you need to.

Send me a private message.

I practice infectious diseases and tropical medicine as a profession, (though I do general adult hospital medicine and medical education half the time), and as part of that I practice clinical medicine, research, and I have policy responsibilities.

Typing on here is procrastination -- I've got a day off, my son is in day care today, and I have to mop the floors, finish some clinic notes, buy some diapers, and go to the gym.

Yes. I'm on a national committee with the IDSA, and if you're still hanging around here when we have our press conference in October or November you can find out all about it. I'm on two institutional committees at the medical center where I'm on faculty, and since I can't travel overseas these days (with a baby at home) I'm doing quality improvement and patient safety research with a goal of implementing new policy.

Why must you test the rationale? Why can't you use historical controls? Look at the crimes of history and extract from that the unacceptable versus the acceptable. Distill out the common denominators and you arrive first at your directive and ultimately at a shared sense of custodianship for other humans.

This is your eugenics idea with prenatal screening, right?

Look at the major causes of morbidity and mortality in the world:

Cardiovascular diseases, cancer, infections, accidents, diabetes, nutritional disorders.... these are NOT genetic diseases. There are indeed genetic risk factors, but by and large they are acquired diseases, and there is no eugenics program that is going to help.

Well, then this is clearly distinct from preference utilitarianism, but I feel that the concepts are still in their infancy. Know that no set of axioms will be universally agreed upon, you would have to force this on some people(anarchists, libertarians ect.) so it would have a potentially dystopian effect.

I would suggest a system by which violation of your axioms can be quantified. Say, violation of the axiom against involuntary death, would be 10 points while violations in respect to suffering aside from death are worth between 1 and 9....you must essentially quantify suffering as best you can. Some may argue that

For instance, a man who murders a homeless man will have most likely not invoked any suffering, depending on the method of execution. Suffering requires life. On the other hand, the man who kills a child may invoke great suffering, thus a more serious punishment would be in order. In this sense you mist quantify the worth of people, this is quite difficult and many would very much disagree with any attempt to do this, but since this is so hypothetical, I will ignore the practical difficulties. I would suggest trying to hide the unit values of various citizens from the citizens and officials to be released on a need to know basis, such as in a death.

Know that in order for one to legitimately put forth a set of axioms one must make a very hefty argument(amounting to a rather large tome, if you want to get a quality argument such as a professional might give) and also that most of the people on here are not qualified in the sense that they do not have degrees in philosophy. That wouldn't necessarily qualify you, such qualifications are superficial and the only reason to involve them is if you are planning to present the argument for said axioms to people who do not understand it or have enough difficulty understanding it that they would not put in the effort unless you had credentials. I am not sure who you are planning on presenting this to or what you plan to do with it. I will look at your website.

I am not sure why you would choose a forum as a place to present this challenge, unless you hope that someone will have a need for $300 which would be nowhere near enough to pay a prominent academic to write something up on this subject. I suppose it is meant to be some kind of stimulant to the discussion...but why put forth an idea which is not your own?

There are several topics that I am unsure about related to the removal of psychic suffering:

Would it be possible that given that there is no suffering, there would be a total lack of empathy in everyone effectively creating a total self centered outlook, in which one is concerned solely with one's own pleasure? Can this be worked around?

How do we retain the useful aspects of the tendency to worry such as cautiousness?

What is the difference between addiction to a substance and motivation through the reward of greater bliss? i.e. how is this system of motivation, which is necessarily in the hands of the few, going to avoid problems with abuse of power and manipulation of the public?

The answer to these should clarify what the directive should be a bit.

Would it be possible that given that there is no suffering, there would be a total lack of empathy in everyone effectively creating a total self centered outlook, in which one is concerned solely with one's own pleasure? Can this be worked around?

I've skipped over a lot in the middle of this thread.

I don't personally believe that eliminating involuntary suffering would be a positive action to take. In many cases, it is involuntary suffering that strengthens our bodies, spirits, resolve, and our social identity. Without that adversity we would be quite pathetic things (and a case may be made to suggest that's a direction the US is slowly turning in).

I can't fathom why genetics is not the most important thing on everyone's mind - it is the fundamental design of our experience.

Those that want to rationalize their genes are just like religious fanatics and are holding back the human race from accomplishing it's universal and inherent values.

Of our experience? No it's not.

And even when you take into consideration things that probably have a genetic basis, actual genetic associations can only be identified in a tiny minority of cases. Look at intelligence, for instance. Numerous genetic markers associate with intelligence. But the STRONGEST genetic predictor of intelligence only accounts for one quarter of one IQ point, and only exists in 1-2% of subjects tested, which means that intelligence is a highly complex, polygenic trait that is modulated both by a nearly infinite number of genetic variants AND by environmental exposures and experiences.

Even strong genetic associations, like HLA-B27 and HLA-DR4 with some autoimmune diseases, do not a priori predict that someone will get a disease at all (let alone which one). In other words, HLA-B27 may be found in most people with ankylosing spondylitis, but when you turn it around you find that HLA-B27 is NOT a guarantee that ankylosing spondylitis will arise. Some protective genotypes, like CCR5 deficiency in long-term nonprogressors with HIV, may have critical physiologic consequences that we have not identified. And some protective genotypes (like sickle cell heterozygosity versus malaria) comes at a price of a severe disease in heterozygotes, so any advantage or disadvantage of the genotype is wholly dependent on environmental conditions.

And those who obsess about genetic determinism need to study genetics instead of science fiction.

I have never made the claim that we fully understand the complexities of the human genome.

I also say that genetic screening technologies are still indevelopment.

I never said we could just abolish all involuntary suffering right this very moment or that we can change our design right now.

Woah... This suddenly has become very confusing to me, particularly because of the veritable deluge of Abolitionist's posts.

I'll comment on what I can follow from above...

In our childhood, we come into contact with various bacteria and viruses. Our body's natural (genetically determined) response to this is to create an immune system to fend off such things in the future. In such a way we are made stronger, but for that strength to come about we must suffer.

Similarly, we often come into conflict with various argumentative people throughout our lives, and often they will use put-downs and abusive language. In response, our psyche's become strengthened against such use of language, and we learn to shrug it off. In such a way our suffering leads to strength which will help protect us in the future.

In both of these cases, suffering ultimately leads to a beneficial strength. If that (involuntary) suffering never took place, we would have no protection whatsoever from outside influences.

sufferverbsuffren, from Anglo-French suffrir, from Vulgar Latin *sufferire, from Latin sufferre, from sub- up + ferre to bear - more at sub-, bear Date: 13th century transitive verb
1 a: to submit to or be forced to endure <suffer martyrdom> b: to feel keenly : labor under <suffer thirst>
2: undergo , experience
3: to put up with especially as inevitable or unavoidable
4: to allow especially by reason of indifference <the eagle suffers little birds to sing - Shakespeare>

intransitive verb
1: to endure death, pain, or distress
2: to sustain loss or damage
3: to be subject to disability or handicap

The complexities of the human genome cannot be fully understood, because it interacts so heavily with non-genetic factors. The degree of chaos here is so great that even the SAME point mutation results in vastly different diseases in different people.

Sickle cell anemia is caused by a single amino acid substitution in the beta chain of hemoglobin. All people with HbSS (true sickle cell anemia) have this genotype. Yet some live until their 40s and 50s, raise families, have good lives, and some die in childhood.

If there is THIS much phenotypic variability arising from a single point mutation, then what can you make out of complex polygenic traits that are caused by errors in gene regulation rather than in the somatic gene proper?

At a level FAR different than what you seem to be hopeful of.

Will we one day prevent our genes from mutating? If so, how will we evolve to accomodate changing conditions?

And if we cannot prevent our genes from mutating, then how will you abolish involuntary suffering that arises from genetic errors?

Remember me? I'm not challenging the ethical directive because I dismiss its importance. The life or death of this genetics idea of yours does not at all compromise your directive and that's not my mission.

It's not learning, it's adaptation. Computer's can't complain unless they're programmed to, in which case they're certainly not feeling any discomfort, they're just following code.

By definition, suffering does not require complaint. Therefore there is no need for me to hear complaints from my immune system in order to say that it suffers.

i agree, we cannot fully understand the complexities right now (our abilities are limited), but this will not necessarily be the case in the future. Our abilities are progressing rapidly. Continued screening after birth will still be prudent to ensure that harmful mutations do not arise - and we'll likely have many surprises.

However, if it limits the lifespan and causes health problems why shouldn't we screen for this possibility when able.

if we can remove it - why shouldn't we? Does it confer some other identified benefits? Would anyone choose to take on this substitution voluntarily?

gene regulation is also controlled by our design interacting with environmental variables and can be learned about and understood with time

it's possible that we may be able to prevent our genes from mutating in the future and learn to create changes to our design through controlled science

I would also point to the example of how the hypervariable aspect of antibodies does not create suffering regardless of random mutation.

Assuming many things about our use of research and clinical funding, though. Public health and research money is very much finite, and in my mind there are far higher yield avenues for public health than to screen for ALL possible genetic causes of suffering.

We already screen for it in all African American newborns. It's easy to screen for -- just a hemoglobin electrophoresis (it's a test of the protein, not the gene itself). Genetic engineering has been tried by various means, but it's not in clinical practice.

Yes. The sickle cell gene in heterozygotes is HUGELY advantageous in areas with high transmission rates of Plasmodium falciparum malaria. In fact linkage analysis has shown that the sickle cell genotype has independently arisen in Africa 5 separate times in the last 10,000 years, which not surprisingly corresponds to the appearance of P. falciparum. (My former research mentor did some of this work on the age of the P. falciparum species)

Since P. falciparum malaria is the leading cause of death in African children, since Sachs and Spielman's analysis has shown that it is the single most important impediment to economic development in Africa, and since it infects as much as 3/4 of a billion people per year, we would NOT want to eliminate the sickle cell gene from that population until we deal with the far worse problem of malaria.

True, but remember that single gene products can serve many many roles, and because of that the modification of a diseased gene may cause wholly unanticipated effects elsewhere in the body (including lack of viability). And unless you think it's ethical to do this experiment on humans (which would put people at risk of involuntary suffering and death), then we cannot know the consequences of such decisions. And even once we start intervening in a rare genotype, we might never know what is an effect of our intervention as opposed to something else unrelated.

Remember the economic burden of doing this. If there is some sort of major climate change, economic depression, war, disaster, whatever, then the technical capability of doing this might be beyond what can be afforded. And if there is a sudden climate change or something, then you might not be able to make the currentgeneration survive long enough to help the next one.

The hypervariable region of antibodies is not a product of mutation!!

Hypervariable regions are caused by rearrangements of the V, D, and J genes irrespective of mutation!! This happens in the lymphoid progenitor cells early in life, and does NOT happen in the germline cells (sperm, ova) and zygotes. This is an ENORMOUS difference, wholly divorced from the concept of mutation. The VDJ rearrangements can generate billions of different antigen specificity -- but this capability is independent of mutation.

Very important for you to know this!

And this is true of the T-cell receptor too, by the way.

actually, that is not a very good example, because it is possible that random mutation might cause autoimmune disorders or some other health problems

Molecular mimicry can also do it, though (not only with antibodies but also other aspects of the immune system). Look at rheumatic fever -- an autoimmune destruction of the heart valves caused by antigenic similarity between the streptococcal M-protein and native heart tissue. That's what you can get from a nearly innumerable level of diversity in our antibody generation.

I've got to run, I'll start a new thread tonight or tomorrow when I get a chance. You can start one as well and I'll move this over there.