"Isn'tapundit" (not to be confused with the established brand, and who really needs to get more readable colors on his site) aka Tom "Dipnut" Perry, has posted a much more detailed analysis of Fukuyama's latest, in which his slam at libertarians as Simon Legrees is the least of the problems.

Continuing the thread from earlier:

Rand,

Isn'tapundit does a good job of setting up and knocking down a strawman in the post you linked to. It's apparent to me that Isn'tapundit hasn't read Fukuyama's book, and I wonder if many of the other critics have.

I have read the book, and while I'd appreciate Fukuyama more if he treated this issue less as an intellectual exercise, and made a more practical contribution, pointing to the dangers of human biotechnology is some little bit of service to the debate. Fukuyama's problem, it seems to me, is that he runs the risk of being labeled a philosophical Jeremy Rifkin (or, worse yet Paul Ehrlich) if he were to offer more specifics, since he lacks the scientific background to do like Drexler and start a think-tank for dealing with anticipated problems of a powerful future technology.

People scorned Bill Joy too, when he was offering his warnings about the posthuman future a while back. It's important to have the debate, and not keep metaphorically "shooting the messenger" whenever a heretic of the Western belief in technological progress arises.

In answer to your earlier post, you're right that there's nobody claiming that clones won't have the same rights as the rest of us once born. It's just where on the continuum between embyro and baby is the line granting some legal protections to be crossed? And what if there were artificial wombs, so the rights of the mother wouldn't enter into the calculation?

I'm not an anti-abortion radical, but I'd say that the prospect of human biotechnology throws the political debate over that issue into even sharper relief, and makes it more urgent to reach a tenable compromise on the question of the legal status of unborn human life, so that the potential benefits of things like stem cell research, or even cloning, can proceed.

Isn'tapundit seems critical of Fukuyama's even raising the issue at this stage, since the nightmare scenarios are all some distance off. On the contrary, this fact means we should be doing something like a Foresight Institute now for the implications of this technology, because (we think) we have the luxury of time with which to sort it out.

Hey, don't knock Isntapundit's site design.

It isn't easy being green.

To Glenn:

Glad you've finally mastered the intricacies of my comments section (does it have anything to do with the fact that we're now using the same blogging software?

To Ken:

There are legitimate concerns about where the technology leads us. I wish that Mr. Fukuyama would do exactly as you suggest, because these issues do need to be discussed. Unfortunately, like Rifkin, and unlike Drexler, he has decided to take the media low road, and to pontificate on subjects of which he apparently knows not of, and to attempt to simply shut down any forward motion, because he doesn't understand it.

This actually is not an unreasonable thing for Foresight to take up, because these issues, and the ones that Foresight addresses, are inextricably linked. But because (based on my readings of his writings and interviews) Mr. Fukuyama would be out of his depth in even talking to the likes of the people who run Foresight, this is probably an unlikely scenario as well.

I think that, to the degree that this is a legitimate concern, it would be better to talk to Foresight folk directly (such as, e.g., Professor Reynolds), rather than to expect anything sensible from Mr. Fukuyama...

Now it's one thing to say that Francis Fukuyama is writing about things outside his field of expertise, and quite another to imply he should just be quiet because he's "out of his depth".

One of the basic assumptions of the democratic process is that J. Random Politician can write public policy about subjects beyond his or her educational specialization (which is usually law), or that J. Random Citizen can responsibly vote for someone to write public policy about such subjects after a few weeks of being informed about the issues involved by professional journalists who (like as not) also lack an educational background for reporting on such issues (the usual majors for journalists being English and journalism).

If one is to indict Prof. Fukuyama for his limited technical understanding of biotechnology, at least he's made the effort to put that sketchy outline of the subject in a somewhat more impressive framework of philosophizing about the nature of man and human rights. I'm not going to pay too much attention to his explanation of what is possible or likely in biotechnology, but the most important aspect of the book for me is the part that he does have expertise in, and that's his views on political philosophy.

I personally don't have the background to tell how much of his argument there is derivative, but seemed to me to be rather effective.

I think I missed the part where I said he "should be quiet because he was out of his depth." He can be as noisy as he wants. And he can expect to be lambasted by people who have given it more, and better thought, than he.

All I said was that it would be pointless for him to talk to the Foresight people. He is welcome to start his own institute to discuss this. I'll do nothing to either stop, or discourage him.

Fukuyama's arguments, for good or for evil, are flowing directly into the ear of George Bush. He and Leon Kass, the Bioethics Czar, are embarking on a strange anti-science crusade. The problem: you guys are all living too long. Check out the article at: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/06/18/stem_rant/index.html