Another next frontier of liberalism (every day now brings another next frontier)

In a society in which it is now considered normal for people to have mutilating surgery to change their sex, and obligatory on everyone else not only to approve the procedure but to pay for it, it is no surprise that other technological changes of the human body are also being proposed. Here is the beginning of an article at The Atlantic, “How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change”:

The threat of global climate change has prompted us to redesign many of our technologies to be more energy-efficient. From lightweight hybrid cars to long-lasting LED’s, engineers have made well-known products smaller and less wasteful. But tinkering with our tools will only get us so far, because however smart our technologies become, the human body has its own ecological footprint, and there are more of them than ever before. So, some scholars are asking, what if we could engineer human beings to be more energy efficient? A new paper to be published in Ethics, Policy & Environment proposes a series of biomedical modifications that could help humans, themselves, consume less.

Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating. Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.

The rest of the article consists of an interview with the author of the paper, S. Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University. It seems that if a person is a specialist in “ethics,” he is sure to be advocating the most evil ideas imaginable. The proposal that young babies be killed if their lives interfere with the plans and desires of the people around them comes from Francesca Minerva, an ethicist by profession. Then there is Anna Smajdor, a lecturer in ethics at the University of East Anglia, who says that the fact that women but not men gestate and give birth is a “prima facie injustice” and a “barbaric” imposition on women that must be relieved by ectogenesis—artificial gestation and birth.

- end of initial entry -

Bill Carpenter writes:

A great line for our day:

“It seems that if a person is a specialist in ‘ethics,’ he is sure to be advocating the most evil ideas imaginable.”

Jeff W. writes:

These people are warring against God. God creates unwanted babies, so we should kill them. God’s way of producing babies imposes an unequal burden on females, so we must change it. God created in man a desire to eat meat, so we must ingest drugs to stop us from doing it. God made people too large, so we should design a race of smaller people.

Satan says, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” These liberals provide a vision of hell: a world populated by test-tube grown, vegetarian, diminutive liberal imps.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 19, 2012 10:44 AM | Send