FutureTAG and IEET

Jeff Medina is a philosopher and technology consultant based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He is a staffperson for the Future Technologies Advisory Group and a consultant to AT&T. In his capacity as a teacher, trainer, and public speaker, Jeff has taught and spoken on topics as diverse as ethics, physics, human rights, computer science, mechanical engineering, and poetry at institutions like the University of Washington, the University of Toronto, and the University of Delaware. As a technologist, Jeff focuses on object-oriented architecture and design. Jeff has studied at Harvard University, the University of Delaware, UC Berkeley, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of London.

Personhood ethics in its most widespread form typically holds as a key criterion of personhood that a being’s thoughts be sufficiently complex.  Previously, this had been found acceptable, with human thought considered an exemplar of complex thought against which to compare other, nonhuman candidates for personhood.  But complexity is an entirely relative term.  Although humans meet the complexity criterion and qualify as persons in their own view, to a suitably enhanced being, human thought won’t be complex at all, instead seeming as simplistic to them as the aforementioned fish and insects seem to us.  This leads us to a dilemma, neither horn of which will nor should be appealing to personhood-ethics advocates or human enhancement advocates; either enhanced beings really won’t be compelled to consider humans morally significant even if they maintain a personhood-based moral philosophy, as suggested by a number of critics of human enhancement, or personhood theorists must modify the “sufficiently complex” criterion, defining it to include current human complexity.  The former option would give much ground to the counter-enhancement interlocutors, while the latter option would make personhood ethics as arbitrarily “human-racist” as the species-based ethical views personhood theory is held up as having overturned and improved upon.  Personhood-based ethics must find a way to resolve this problem, or a new approach to ethics must be found to supersede the personhood view, just as personhood ethics itself overturned its anthropocentric predecessors.