H+ and Hughes in Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Hastings Center Report

Riffing off a talk on transhumanism being given by Marquette University philosopher Keith Bauer, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had this to say about transhumanism:

Although many Americans don’t realize it, a major debate is under way over transhumanism - a movement that endorses using new technology to expand the capabilities of the human mind and body.

Supporters say that we’ve always sought ways to extend life and improve the human species and that to do otherwise would be to cede our destiny to the slowly grinding wheels of evolution.

As James Hughes, executive director of the non-profit Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, put it: “We’re not doing anything natural these days. Modern life is entirely different from what life evolved to be. We evolved to wander the savanna for four hours at a stretch.

“You can either try to live as if we’re still on the savanna, or try to design the human body to live in the circumstances we’re in now.”

The May/June issue of the venerable bioethics journal The Hastings Center Report meanwhile is publishing a very nice review, by New Zealand philosopher Nicholas Agar (who we interviewed in 2006), of the growing literature on transhumanism, from Greg Stock’s Redesigning Humans and Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future to Ron Bailey’s Liberation Biology and my book Citizen Cyborg. Agar is generally appreciative of the H+ POV but takes us to task for giving insufficient attention to the conflicts between valuing both enhancement and procreative liberty (what if parent’s use their liberty to not enhance, or even to impair children?), and for positing that a non-anthropocentric valuing of personhood as the basis of citizenship is incompatible with valuing humanness for other reasons. The article, “Whereto Transhumanism? The Literature Reaches a Critical Mass” should be available on the Hastings Center website in a couple of weeks.