Proposal for the
Declaration of Intelligent Beings' Rights
how (and why)
This proposal is
divided into two parts:
- extending the scope of
the Human Rights
- extending the scope of
the beings that are included
The need for these
amendments is becoming an issue due to the latest developments of
science and technology.
In 1979 Karel Vasak
defined three generations of human rights:
The first generation
includes our civil and political rights: the rights to life and
political participation. It was declared - for the first time - in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was echoed in the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The second generation
is about our social and cultural rights,as in:International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights.
The third generation
includes a declaration of solidarity rights: rights to peace and
clean environment.
We consider
biological liberty (shortly: bioliberty) as a next, fourth
generation kind of rights.
extending the list of the
Human Rights (biological liberty)
The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights declared everybody's
rights to their lives, freedom, to marry, to found a family, etc.
The emerging new technologies change the situation, and the legal
regulation should follow these changes. To give an example,
genetic technologies give an opportunity to change the way of
reproduction, and smart drugs to modify our brains. Now it isn't
enough to declare parental rights for choosing the kind of
education one prefers for his or her children, but sooner or later
one will be able to choose the kind of biological and mental
parameters one prefers. We will have an opportunity to eliminate
the risk of the "Genetic Lottery". On the other hand, unless
we declare our rights to our unperturbed brains, we will loose the
control of our mental states, and loose our traditional liberties,
as well.
So the extension of
the list of Declared Human Rights both gives new opportunities and
protections to us.
Our proposed
amendments to the Declaration of Human Rights:
- Everybody has the right to make decisions on their all-time
mind including the right to refuse any governmental or other
interference.
- Everybody has the right to modify their bodies without an
external influence (including the use of enhancement
technologies and either active or passive euthanasia)
- Everybody has the right to choose reproductive technologies to
give life to their children or to reproduce themselves
(including cloning)
extending the scope
of those beings that are included
It is declared by the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights that every human has
the same rights. The authors of this document used the "human
beings" term as it seemed to be evident to them that only a human
being can be regarded as an intelligent being. But now, facing
with the perspectives of biotechnology, it seems to be a real
possibility that other, non human or non fully human forms of
intelligence will appear. So our second proposal is to extend the
Declaration of Human Rights to every intelligent being, and
instead of "Human Rights", to use the "Rights of Intelligent
Beings".
Similarly, replace
the term "men and women" with "intelligent beings" in the
Declaration of the Rights of Intelligent Beings, as not only two
genders are possible, and we should not exclude other ones.
some quotations...
"Gradually, the truth
dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had
differentiated into two distinct animals..."
H. G. Wells: The Time Machine,
1895
"In the future perhaps it may be possible by selective breeding to
change character as quickly as institutions... We can already
alter animal species to an enormous extent, and it seems only a
question of time before we shall be able to apply the same
principles to our own."
J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus or
Science and the Future, 1923
"But the likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall
either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilization will
have advanced beyond all recognition--into colonies in outer
space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations
from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading."
Richard Dawkins, The
Evolutionary Future of Man, 1993
"On a time-scale of a thousand years... Our one species will be
many. There is no reason why a variety of intelligent species
should not fill a variety of ecological niches in different
physical environments, some adapted to heat, other to cold, some
to zero gravity, others to strong gravity, some to high pressure,
others to living in the vacuum of space."
Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds,
1997
"if we could make better human being... why shouldn't we?"
James Watson, panel on human
germline engineering, 1998
Zoltán
Galántai PhD 2005
http://mono.eik.bme.hu/~galantai
http://monoversum.blogspot.hu