The Promethean by Owen Stanley

Author:Owen Stanley [Stanley, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Castalia House
Published: 2017-08-19T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter XI

When they returned to Tussock’s Bottom, Harry was startled to find a letter from the EU waiting in his in-tray. It was from the President of the European Commission himself and was an endorsement of a proposed EU Directive on the extension of human rights to robots that was being circulated among all the governments of the EU for consultation. Harry’s copy had been forwarded by the Department of Culture which still had him on their mailing list. The Directive itself had been drafted by a certain Dr. Sydney Prout, Special Adviser on Human Rights to the European Union.

Dr. Prout had had a long and varied career as a champion of human rights but he had never really recovered from nearly being eaten by a cannibal tribe on a Pacific island, who did not appreciate his efforts to bring them enlightened self-government. The conclusion of his tenure as United Nations Special Commissioner on Elephant Island had been so traumatic, and had heaped so much humiliation and ridicule upon him, that he could no longer face the terrors of public office.

After that brutal experience, he preferred to aid suffering humanity in the form of theory rather than practice from the safety of his office in Brussels. Although he had retired, he was still a valued consultant at the EU and maintained a substantial office in the Berlaymont Building overlooking the Rue Archimède. Dr. Prout had been delighted by the success of gay marriage, not because he felt any special empathy with gays, but because the concept opened up so many new possibilities for the further extension of human rights. There were some fairly obvious marriage taboos that were immediate targets for reform. Monogamy, for example, clearly rested on nothing more than religious prejudice and could be dispensed with at once, especially as it was so contaminated with heterosexual and patriarchal norms.

But even though polygamy should replace it, gender equality obviously demanded that if a man could have more than one wife, a woman must be allowed to have more than one husband. Indeed, it occurred to him that it might possibly be a fundamental human right for groups of people of both sexes or even one to be allowed to marry each other—certainly an interesting topic for further research.

Meanwhile, the archaic prohibition of incest was another obvious violation of human rights. It was clearly irrational, a taboo inherited from humanity’s ancient tribal past which had no business in a modern liberal democracy that placed supreme value on the individual. Do we not, after all, refer to all those with whom we feel special sympathy and kinship as “brothers” and “sisters,” so how absurd it was to prevent real brothers and sisters from uniting in the bond of marriage! He could foresee some traditionalists objecting to mother-son marriage, but there was anthropological evidence for father-daughter marriage, and anyway, logical consistency forbade these petty distinctions between various types of relative. They were all human beings, were they not?

He had also had some

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.