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Bailey on Transhumanism and the Limits of Democracy
Posted: Apr 30, 2009
George Dvorsky writes: Reason Online‘s science correspondant Ronald Bailey has published a paper he presented at the Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict Workshop on Transhumanism and the Future of Democracy last week.
 The workshop addressed such questions like, how does the enhancement of human beings through biotechnology, information technology, and applied cognitive sciences affect our understandings of autonomy, personhood, responsibility and free will? And how much and what type of societal control should be exercised over the use of enhancement technologies?
In his paper, Bailey argues that a number of democratic transhumanists, including James Hughes, have “fetishized” democratic decision-making over the protection of minority rights. Instead, argues Bailey, transhumanism should be accepted as a reasonable comprehensive doctrine that should be tolerated in liberal societies by those who disagree with its goals.
Bailey, who is one of the movement’s most vociferous advocates (although I doubt he’d refer to it as a “movement”), is largely arguing on behalf of the libertarian perspective. What he describes as ‘democracy’ in this context is any kind of collective or institutional interference against what he considers to be our civil liberties. In other words, Bailey feels that morphological, cognitive and reproductive liberties need to be protected against the reactionary masses and bureaucratic interference. “Technologies dealing with birth, death, and the meaning of life need protection from meddling—even democratic meddling—by those who want to control them as a way to force their visions of right and wrong on the rest of us,” writes Bailey, “One’s fellow citizens shouldn’t get to vote on with whom you have sex, what recreational drugs you ingest, what you read and watch on TV and so forth.”
In addition, Bailey illustrates the problems of democratic authoritarianism by detailing some of the history of legal interference with reproductive rights. He also analyzes the various arguments used by opponents of human enhancement which they hope will sway a majority into essentially outlawing the transhumanist enterprise.
Read the entire article.
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COMMENTS
When Bailey writes “One’s fellow citizens shouldn’t get to vote on with whom you have sex, what recreational drugs you ingest, what you read and watch on TV and so forth” I find it hard to respond. On the one hand I can’t argue, and on the other hand, if a brothel or crack-house or porn shop wanted to open up on my street, I would want my neighbors and myself to have the ability to vote them out of there. Tough call, at least for me.
I think it’s one thing to have zoning laws which restrict the types of businesses (if any) which can be located in a particular area, and another to say that you and your neighbors can vote to not sell property to (and thus keep out of your neighborhood) people of various racial, sexual, or religious preferences. Protecting the minority requires that some things be left out of the realm of popular consent.
Although Bailey is commonly thought of as a libertarian, I don’t find anything especially libertarian in his paper. He seems to take his stand squarely on Rawlsian liberal principles. Rawls would certainly not want a minimal state without a socio-economic safety net, but he would not want reasonable comprehensive systems of thought to be crushed by the state. I don’t really agree that “transhumanism”, as such, is a comprehensive system of thought, but that doesn’t really affect Bailey’s argument - there are probably numerous such systems that attach to various transhumanists.
I think that introducing the Rawlsian framework of reasonable comprehensive systems overly complicates things. I’d rather argue more directly from the Millian harm principle.
James Hughes may feel that Bailey misrepresents his position (though I have no idea whether he does). From one viewpoint, that would matter. But it still doesn’t affect the positive argument.
In the end, Bailey is quite correct that much of the opposition to emerging technologies has been illiberal (where “liberal” refers to the tradition of political philosophy associated with the likes of Locke, Mill, and Rawls ... not some other meaning that it might have in day-to-day US politics). While there may be nit-picks, I think it’s a good article.
A Rawlsian framework is applicable only if we suppose a common framework of social primary goods. If we do this, Bailey’s reasoning is sound. This restriction probably holds as long as we restrict the domain to germ-line or somatic enhancements to strength, health, speed, general intelligence, etc. But I’m not convinced that posthumanists are entitled presuppose a shared set of primary goods common to humans and all variants of posthumans. For example, posthumans might be altered to the point at which they no longer need a modern health system (clearly a possibility if the posthumans are wholly or partially non-biological). However, posthumans might require forms of sophisticated technical infrastructure that humans don’t. If the universe of SPG’s fragments then we cannot employ an argument from the Original Position or regiment the distinction between political and comprehensive doctrines.
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