Humans are not really free moral agents when deciding on a balance between collectivism & individuality. Given their particular mechanism for reproducing, and given a particular society with a particular distribution of their genetic relatedness to the people they typically encounter, you can compute how much an average person in that society can be expected to value their own life, vs. the lives of others. An individual human can reason about it, and choose a different valuation; but they're then trying to act in a way inconsistent with their psychology, and a way that will lower their own genetic fitness.
I'm dubious of any moral claim, such as valuing vegetarianism or celibacy, that requires people to act contrary to their natures in a way that decreases their fitness. (Please do not respond with pointers to literature on how vegetarianism is healthy for you. For the sake of argument, presume you are a hunter-gatherer in a cold climate.) You can sit down and reason out that eating other creatures who have feelings and thoughts is bad, but when you then conclude that lions are evil for eating zebras, you've gone wrong somehow. I don't buy the argument that the rules are different for humans because they can reflect on the rules.
(Also, please don't respond by saying that genetic fitness shouldn't matter to thoughtful modern people. Genetic fitness matters, because a moral system must be evolutionarily stable.)
A designer of a posthuman society is free, in a way that a human is not, to choose that balance. The problem presented by this post is that the parameter they would adjust to choose that balance, is also one of the key parameters to adjust to choose an exploration/exploitation tradeoff. The former is an ethical issue; the latter is an optimization issue. How much weight do you give to ethics vs. goal attainment? Does it make any sense for, let's say, a singleton AI, to hold an ethical viewpoint that causes it to act less optimally?
I'm dubious of any moral claim, such as valuing vegetarianism or celibacy, that requires people to act contrary to their natures in a way that decreases their fitness. [...] but when you then conclude that lions are evil for eating zebras, you've gone wrong somehow. I don't buy the argument that the rules are different for humans because they can reflect on the rules.
(Emphases mine). Please settle on a set of applicable subjects. I'm with you that moral claims apply to "people". I don't think many here will claim that humans exhaust that space in theory, or that lions inhabit it currently.
You've all heard discussions of collective ethics vs. individualistic ethics. These discussions always assume that the organism in question remains constant. Your task is to choose the proper weight to give collective versus individual goals.
But the designer of transhumans has a different starting point. They have to decide how much random variation the population will have, and how much individuals will resemble those that they interact with.
Organisms with less genetic diversity place more emphasis on collective ethics. The amount of selflessness a person exhibits towards another person can be estimated according to their genetic similarity. To a first approximation, if person A shares half of their genes with people in group B, person A will regard saving their own life, versus saving two people from group B, as an even tradeoff. In fact, this generalizes across all organisms, and whenever you find insects like ants or bees, who are extremely altruistic, you will find that they share most of their genes with the group they are behaving altruistically towards. Bacterial colonies and other clonal colonies can be expected to be even more altruistic (although they don't have as wide a behavioral repertoire with which to demonstrate their virtue). Google kin selection.
Ants, honeybees, and slime molds, which share more of their genes with their nestmates than humans do with their family, achieve levels of cooperation that humans would consider horrific if it were required of them. Consider these aphids that explode themselves to provide glue to fill in holes in their community's protective gall.
The human, trying to balance collective ethics vs. individual ethics, is really just trying to discover a balance point that is already determined by their sexual diploidy. The designer of posthumans (for instance, an AI designing its subroutines for a task), OTOH, actually has a decision to make -- where should that balance be set? How much variation should there be in the population (whether of genes, memes, or whatever is most important WRT cooperation)?
A strictly goal-oriented AI would supervise its components and resources so as to optimize the trade-off between "exploration" and "exploitation". (Exploration means trying new approaches; exploitation means re-using approaches that have worked well in the past.) This means that it would set the level of random variation in the population according to certain equations that maximize the expected speed of optimization.
But choosing the level of variation in a population has dramatic ethical consequences. Creating a more homogenous population will increase altruism, at the expense of decreasing individualism. Choosing the amount of variation in population strictly by maximizing the speed of optimization would mean rolling the dice as to how much altruism vs. individualism your society will have.
In light of the fact that you have a goal to solve, and a parameter setting that will optimize solving that goal; and you also have a fuzzy ethical issue that has something to say about how to set that same parameter; anyone who is not a moral realist must say, Damn the torpedos: Set the parameter so as to optimize goal-solving. In other words, simply define the correct moral weight to place on collective versus individual goals, as that which results when you set your population's genetic/memetic diversity so as to optimize your population's exploration/exploitation balance for its goals.
Are you comfortable with that?