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It's a real danger of movements and systems that they want to self-perpetuate. Any animal's first instinct is to keep itself alive. Any religion's first rule is "copy the book exactly". More generally, the primary goal of any system is to protect the system, because without that the system can't do anything else. That's well and good, but it often leads to systems whose non-survival goals aren't relevant anymore, or that have no other goals than self-perpetuation.

In biology there is a process called apoptosis, where a cell deliberately dies (as opposed to being killed by injury or another cell). Far from being a bad thing, apoptosis is vital in development and disease prevention. Despite the obvious biological imperative, it's important that cells only live for as long as it makes sense to do so. A lack of normal apoptosis is implicated in many autoimmune diseases, autism, and cancer.

Similarly, I think systems built for a purpose also need to be built with a mechanism to terminate themselves when that purpose is achieved or irrelevant. If you start the Cure AIDS Foundation, its articles should include a "good work everyone, we cured AIDS, let's shut down" provision – and what a happy day that would be! On the other hand, suggesting that we should terminate people, and even sometimes animals, who have achieved their purpose is a pretty horrifying proposition. In that case, we value the system, the life itself, more highly than we do its purpose.

In the case of people, we have a moral imperative, presumably one that springs from our own parallel desire for self-perpetuation. However, it seems dangerous to me that we so easily extend the right to self-perpetuation to other systems. To put it another way, once we have a system whose primary goal is self-perpetuation, how is it different from an animal? Built from different materials, perhaps, but still out there fighting for survival like the rest of us.

When we give primary self-perpetuation to a system we give it personhood, and we shouldn't be surprised that it keeps trying to exist even when it's no longer fulfilling any other purpose.