In the final stretch of this exciting conference on “Transforming Humanity” we start with an excellent overview of the enhancement debate by Ronald Lindsay the new director of the Center for Inquiry, a lawyer and bioethicist, and author of Future Bioethics.
He is speaking on The Ethics of Enhancements: Spurious Concerns and Genuine Uncertainties.
He starts with Michael Sandel’s argument that enhancement is part of a destructive drive for control and mastery, at the expense of appreciation of giftedness. He doesn’t really make the case for giftedness over mastery, nor does he convince us that enhancement will ever free us from the need to “be open to giftedness,” contingency, the uncontrollable. We will never have complete control over the conditions of existence or the world as individuals.
A second objection, the Kassian one, is that our sense of achievement will be destroyed by enhancement. No matter what one’s capabilities we will still have to apply our knowledge and skill. Be more capable of acheivement may in fact increase our sense of achievement, or at least encourage us to set higher and more difficult goals.
The third objection, Fukuyama and McKibben’s, is that enhancement is unnatural. This assumes that there is a human nature. In the short-term, however, enhancement will only change individual natures not the nature of the population of humans. We would have to change most humans to chage human nature, if there is such a thing. Even if we change humanity on the whole that becomes the new nature of humans: the human normative nature will change with the spread of enhancements. But there really isn’t anything wrong about changing our “natural” inherited characteristics. We do not have an optimal set of characteristics. Chance is not morally superior to choice.
Oral contraceptives are an example of a recent enhancement which has had a largely positive effect. It is unlikely that the consequences in the near term will approach the social impact of oral contraceptives, which we militantly resisted but which turned out to be liberatory for most women.
However, assessing the cost/benefit ratio will be a more complex problem for researching and developing enhancements than it has been for therapies. The FDA is focused on drugs that mitigate or treat diseases. The assumption is that an enhancement’s risks would be far more damning since the person treated is already “well” than the same risk would be treated if it was weighed against a disease. (I think this calculus is flawed however, and is an example of the status quo bias. Why does adding ten years of life from 100-110 count less than ten years from 60-70? We may want to prioritize therapies over enhancement because we want to create a more equal society and consider the claims of the diseased and disabled more heavily than those at the norm. But the risk/benefit ratio is not different.) The private sector will not invest in enhancement research until the regulatory framework is adjusted to accomodate research on enhancements.
Our regulations are also organized on the premise that drugs need to be organized for the benefit of individuals, and long-range effects on society are explicitly not to be evaluated in determining the acceptability of a therapy. Internal enhancements are also more complex than external enhancements and prosthetics. Its a lot harder to recall a dangerous pacemakers than it is a dangerous hearing aid.
Lindsay then turns to the fear that the enhanced with come to dominate the unenhanced, and see themselves as a separate species. He thinks transhumanists like Nick Bostrom have fed into this by being over-enthusiastic about the abilities of the future enhanced
Two presumptions about equity of access to enhancement short of posthuman levels: (a) enhancements should be widely available, and (b) that even if they aren’t widely available that is not a reason to forbid them for the few who do have access. There may be enhancements which pose inequality challenges so great that they should be banned, but we can’t judge that ahead of time, but only in context in the future. We should already be reducing the gap between the wealthy and the poor, and that isn’t changed by enhancement.
Regarding posthumanity would domination of the unenhanced by the enhanced be unjust? The relations of humans and posthumans may however lie outside of justice, just as the relationship of humans to animals may be obliged to be “humane” but is not a question of our treating them justly. Just as giving animals a vote is meaningless, giving humans equal rights with posthumans may be equally meaningless. Humans and posthumans aren’t likely to be part of the same community or share the same ideas of justice. Was human’s probable role in extinguishing the Neanderthals unjust?
Enhancements are essential similar to most other technological innovations. Each needs to be weighed carefully as they become available, but will in general offer benefits.
Read George’s notes on the talk here
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