Nach der After birth abortion....

... Schlagen nun Leute vor, den Klimawandel durch Human Engineering entgegen zu wirken. Denn der Klimawandel ist ja eines der größten Probleme auf Erden (nicht etwa die Armut und das Elend in der Dritten Welt, die Kriege, die Krise...)

Was sie genau tun wollen?

1.) Durch pharmazeutische Mittel soll der Genuß an Fleisch abgewöhnt werden.

While eating red meat with added emetic (a substance that induces vomiting) could be used as an aversion conditioning, anyone not strongly committed to giving up red meat is unlikely to be attracted to this option. A more realistic option might be to induce mild intolerance (akin, e.g., to milk intolerance) to these kinds of meat. While meat intolerance is normally uncommon (Aparicio et al. 2005), in principle, it could be induced by stimulating the immune system against common bovine proteins. The immune system would then become primed to react to such proteins, and henceforth eating ‘eco-unfriendly’ food would induce unpleasant experiences. Even if the effects do not last a lifetime, the learning effect is likely to persist for a long time. A potentially safe and practical way of delivering such intolerance may be to produce ‘meat’ patches – akin to nicotine patches. We can produce patches for those animals that contribute the most to greenhouse gas emissions and encourage people to use such patches.

2.) Menschen sollen kleiner werden.

A way to reduce ecological footprints, then, would be to reduce size. Since weight increases with the cube of length, even a small reduction in, e.g., height, might produce a significant effect in size, other things being equal (To reduce size, one could also try to reduce average weight or average weight and height, but to keep the discussion simple, we shall use just the example of height). Reducing the average US height by 15 cm would mean a mass reduction of 23% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction of metabolic rate (15%/18%), since less tissue means lower nutrients and energy needs.

Und wie soll das gemacht werden? Na ja, natürlich unter anderem durch pränatale Selektion! Aber auch die anderen Möglichkeiten sind krank....

One way is through preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). While genetic modifications to control height are likely to be quite complex and beyond our current capacities, it nevertheless seems possible now to use PGD to select shorter children. This would not involve intervening to change the genetic material of embryos, or employing any clinical methods not currently used. It would simply involve rethinking the criteria for selecting which embryos to implant.
Another method of affecting height is to use hormone treatment either to affect somatotropin levels or to trigger the closing of the epiphyseal plate earlier than normal (this sometimes occurs accidentally through vitamin A overdoses (Rothenberg et al. 2007)). Hormone treatments are used for growth reduction in excessively tall children (Bramswig et al. 1988; Grüters et al. 1989). Currently, somatostatin (an inhibitor of growth hormone) is being studied as a safer alternative (Hindmarsh et al. 1995).
Finally, a more speculative and controversial way of reducing adult height is to reduce birth weight. There is a correlation between birth weight and adult height (Sorensen et al. 1999), according to which birth weight at the lower edge of the normal distribution tends to result in the adult’s being ≈5 cm shorter. Birth height has an even stronger effect for adult height. If one is born at the lower edge of the normal distribution of height, this tends to produce ≈15 cm shorter adult height. Gene imprinting has been found to affect birth size, as a result of evolutionary competition between paternally and maternally imprinted genes (Burt and Trivers 2006). Drugs or nutrients that either reduce the expression of paternally imprinted genes, or increase the expression of maternally imprinted genes, could potentially regulate birth size.

3.) Natürlich durch Reduktion der Geburten:

In 2008, John Guillebaud, an emeritus professor of family planning and reproductive health at University College London, and Dr Pip Hayes, a general practitioner from Exeter, pointed out that ‘each UK birth will be responsible for 160 times more greenhouse gas emissions … than a new birth in Ethiopia’ ((Guillebaud and Hayes 2008): 576). As a way to mitigate climate change, they proposed that Britons should consider having no more than two children per family.

(China, ick hör Dir trapsen!)
Und wie soll man das machen? Nun, da zieht man natürlich den "Frauen, die Kinder bekommen, sind grützdumm"-Joker:

In fact, there seems to be a link between cognition itself and lower birth-rates. At least in the US, women with low cognitive ability are more likely to have children before age 18 (Shearer et al. 2002). So, another possible human engineering solution is to use cognition enhancements to achieve lower birth rates. Like education, there are many other, more compelling reasons to improve cognition, but the fertility effect may be desirable as a means of tackling climate change. Even if the direct cognitive effect on fertility is minor, cognition enhancements may help increase the ability of people to educate themselves (Sandberg and Bostrom 2006), which would then affect fertility, and indirectly climate change. We shall shortly consider the effectiveness of such an indirect strategy for tackling climate change.

4.) Durch pharmazeutische Stimulanz von Altruismus und Empathie (!)

While altruism and empathy have large cultural components, there is evidence that they also have biological underpinnings. This suggests that modifying them by human engineering could be promising. Indeed, test subjects given the prosocial hormone oxytocin were more willing to share money with strangers (Paul J. Zak et al. 2007) and to behave in a more trustworthy way (P. J. Zak et al. 2005). Also, a noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor increased social engagement and cooperation with a reduction in self-focus during a mixed motive game (Tse and Bond 2002). Similar effects have been observed with SSRIs in humans and animal experiments (Knutson et al. 1998). Furthermore, oxytocin appears to improve the capacity to read other people’s emotional state, which is a key capacity for empathy (Domes et al. 2007; Guastella et al. 2008). Conversely, testosterone appears to decrease aspects of empathy (Hermans et al. 2006) and in particular conscious recognition of facial threats (van Honk and Schutter 2007). Neuroimaging work has also revealed that one’s willingness to comply with social norms may be correlated with particular neural substrates (Spitzer et al. 2007). This raises the likelihood that interventions affecting the sensitivity in these neural systems could also increase the willingness to cooperate with social rules or goals.

Das Paper geht an sich noch weiter und fabuliert über Mögliche Bedenken etc. - aber das lassen wir mal bleiben, das kann der interessierte Leser ja sich zu gemüte führen.

So, also fassen wir zusammen: S. Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg und Rebecca Roache wollen den Klimawandel durch Sedierung und Selektion aufhalten. Global sollen Leute durch Chemikalien zu netten Menschen gemacht werden (was mich an Lobotomie erinnert), sollen durch Variation des Fleisches (was auch global passieren muß!) den Genuß desselben vermiest bekommen, durch Selektion bzw. Hormonpräparaten sollen die Menschen kleiner werden und wieder durch chemische Stimulanzien die Wahrnehmungsfähigkeit von Frauen erhöht werden - mit dem Ziel, daß sie weniger Kinder bekommen, was außerdem durch eine Politik im Sinne von China (reduktion auf zwei Kinder) erreicht werden soll.

Sie sind also für eine weltweite Diktatur, die auf Abtreibung, Geburtenkontrolle und chemische Stimulanzen setzt.

Man sollte vielleicht noch dazu sagen, daß das nicht das Werk eines drogen nehmenden Kollektivs ist, was seine Freizeit mit Kunstwerken aus Exkrementen verbringt, sondern die Schreiberlinge mit der New Yorker Universität bzw. der Universität von Oxford affiliiert sind. Und daß das Paper in "Ethics, Policy and the Environment" veröffentlicht wurde.

Soll ich noch irgendwas zu dem Paper bzw zu den Autoren sagen? Vielleicht nur noch, daß ich auch ein Paper plane:

"Preventive Violence and crappy ethics papers"

Articles about so-called ethics are arguably one of the biggest problems that confront us today. There is ample evidence that these articles are likely to affect adversely many aspects of life for all people around the world, and that existing solutions such as regulating laws might be too risky and ordinary arguments based on pure reason might not be sufficient to change the minds of these so-called experts in Human ethics. In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to crappy ethics papers, what we call preventive Violence, which involves hard slaps against the heads of ethics professors and shouting "WHY SO STUPID" so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to more reasonable forms of human ethics. We argue that preventive violence is potentially less risky than regulating laws and that it could help arguments based on reason succeed in mitigating crappy articles about ethics. We also consider some possible ethical concerns regarding violence such as its safety, the benefits of violence against ethics professors for our children and for the society, and we argue that these concerns can be addressed. Our upshot is that preventive violence deserves further consideration in the debate about crappy ethics papers.
Addentum: This discussion is of course, as the preceeding discussions about after birth abortion purely academical. The authors would never, never ever explicitly say that certain ethics "professionals" have to get beaten. But, on the other hand, people are upset about the ideas stated in the presented article, they lack the ability to discuss about ethical matters on a reasonable basis. So, for short, as in the case of Guibilini et al people who are upset by our hypotheses are themselves just violent, mean people who are fundamentalistic.