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Monday, August 13, 2007

Human-Racists

I'm in the middle of reading Science and Ethics: Can Science Help Us Make Wise Moral Judgements. (David Koepsell (Collaborator), Paul Kurtz (Editor) Promethias, 2007.) The Amazon editorial review says that it:
presents a unique collection of authors who generally maintain that science can help us make wise choices and that an increase in scientific knowledge can help modify our ethical values and bring new ethical principles into social awareness.
This isn't a review of the book.

In one of the essays, "From Human-Racism to Personhood: Humanism After Human Nature," author James Hughes, explains what he means by human-racism.
The use of the concept of human nature today is, we see, inescapably racist, human-racist, with the same consequences for tyranny, violence, and suppression of human diversity, as the ideology of European racism before it. The human-racists are more inclusive racists than their forebears, but racists nonetheless in their effort to ground solidarity in biological characteristics instead of shared recognition that another being has self-awareness, feelings, and thoughts like our own.
Hughes is a proponent of enhancement of human capabilites by means of genetic engineering, surgical implants and other enhancements which is what he alludes to above in the comment about human diversity.

Human-racists ground solidarity in biological characteristics instead of shared recognition that another being has self-awareness, feelings, and thoughts like our own.

Human-racist. This may be more easily understood than speciesist.

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