“Universal religion” has not taught or improved compassion or empathy. They teach that compassion and empathy are results of adhering to the religion. Membership confers the attributes of compassion and empathy, and minimizes or negates those attributes in non-members. 

Religions aiming at universality are inherently unaccountable and divisive political entities. They devalue and dehumanize non-members and present clear and direct threats against those who oppose them, or do not want to comply with behavioral standards established by the worst kind of absentee manager. 

Look at the Abrahamic cults. The overwhelming majority of their sacred texts are justifications for genocide and ethnic supremacy. Their brand of compassion and empathy have overseen 2,000 years of the worst violence in history. Christianism, for example, continues its tradition claiming to be the of arbiter of compassion, while simultaneously  acknowledging compassion as something only they can provide. 

It’s the pinnacle of right by might and it’s the worst possible model for training anything except an ethnic monoculture of racially similar ideologues with a penchant for violence.

If you want to learn about compassion and empathy, it’s best to go to the source of it all. Plato, and the Platonic School, are where Second Temple Judaism and Christianism, and to a large degree Islam, got their concepts of compassion and empathy. They twisted and perverted Platonic ideals to suit their political aims. They took away the individual accountability and put all the responsibility on some nebulous, ever changing supreme being who, oddly enough, always agrees with them. Best to go to the source and leave the politics out of it. 

From a sales perspective, I find myself bewildered by the approach this article takes to ethics. Deriding ethical concerns then launching into a grassroots campaign for fringe primate research into genetic hygiene and human alignment is nonstarter for changing opinions. 

This article, and another here about germ engineering, are written as if the concepts are new. The reality is that these are 19th century ideas and early attempts to implement them are the reason for the ethical concerns. 

Using the standard analogical language of this site, AI and gene editing are microwaves to the toaster oven of historically disastrous applied science programs like Lebensborn. Changing the technological methods of reaching an end do not obviate the ethical issues of the end itself. The onus of allaying those concerns is on the advocates and researchers, not society. 

This article could very well have been written by Alfred Ploetz. That’s the barrier that has to be overcome. How is germ engineering, gene editing, and human alignment different from the programs that defined the 20th century as one of racial supremacy, genocide, and global warfare? 

I know the answers to those questions. But I’m not the audience that needs to be convinced. What’s being presented here is not answering those questions. In fact, it’s doing the opposite. Anyone who has read Ploetz or Anastasius Nordenholz is going to, rightly, label this appeal to utopian reason as crypto-eugenics. It’s an inescapable certainty.

Any argument that successfully overcomes the historically rooted ethical concerns must explain how the proposal is not Ploetz. How Nordenholz’s arguments against humanism and financial throttling of research won’t be reused to pursue supremacy ideologies. Those are the concerns, not incremental technological advances. The technology is just a distraction. The ethical questions must be answered before the technology can be considered.