Although I have used a version of utilitarianism to argue for both transhumanism and social democracy, and for the technoprogressive hybrid of the two, research in hedonic psychology and emerging neurotechnologies make utilitarianism an unattractive moral logic. Instead, I now argue that a version of Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach better supports the technoprogressive endeavor. The capabilities approach argues for both social and technological enablement of human abilities. When the capabilities approach is combined with the idea that virtues are social capabilities, one conclusion is that “moral enhancement,” the use of neurotechnologies to enhance moral sentiment, cognition and behavior, is a social obligation. A schema of virtues to be enhanced, and relevant therapeutic morally enhancing neurochemicals, are discussed.
When I was 17 I was part of a six week summer seminar at Cornell on the theme of “the individual and the community.” A dozen of us nerdly teens read an intensive diet of John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, under the tutelage of two philosophy professors. After that I was a determined socialist who relied heavily on Mills utilitarianism for my ethics, even after I became one of the spokespeople for transhumanism.
My first book, Citizen Cyborg, was an attempt to sketch out a left transhumanist perspective on the ongoing biopolitical debates. Under Bush we transhumanists had a bête noir in the President’s Council on Bioethics, headed by the determinedly anti-enhancement Leon Kass, and aided by Frank Fukuyama and the vast right and left-wing conspiracy of people freaked out by a smarter, healthier, longer-lived future. In the book I started from what I thought was a hybrid left Millsian-transhumanist proposition, but which was really just a core Enlightenment tenet, that the more control we have over our lives, individually and collectively, the happier we will be.
I devoted a chapter to parsing ways that individual freedom, social egalitarianism, and neurotechnologies like SSRIs have made and will make us happier. I didn’t interrogate the concept of happiness deeply. I discussed the control of physical pain and the treatment of mental illness. Then I discussed the evidence that our happiness set-point is genetically determined, and suggested that it will be possible to chemically or genetically increase the average level of happiness without negatively effecting motivation.
After Citizen Cyborg I started a second book project, Cyborg Buddha, and began wading into the quickly moving stream of neuroscience research to investigate how we may use neurotechnologies to improve moral behavior and spiritual experience. I’m still hip deep and struggling with the torrent of social neuroscience research. I also began teaching a course on “Happiness and Public Policy” at Trinity College, and began educating myself in the growing happiness literature. As a result, six years later I am much less enamored of my earlier attempts to rationalize either social democratic politics or transhumanism, or the “technoprogressive” syncretism of the two, with the utilitarian pursuit of happiness. Instead I’ve been drifting toward some kind of postmodern, and posthuman, Buddho-Aristotleianism, much to my own chagrin.
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Fascinating. I completely share your position on meta-ethics. On your ethical choice I have some misgivings, but it’s certainly one of the strongest arguments so far that there is an ethical system that I might actually find more attractive than utilitarianism.
The emphasis on flourishing and virtue over “happiness” mirrors developments in my own personal approach to life, but I have usually tended to see this as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
Gradually, though, the creeping realisation has been growing in my mind that I don’t actually value happiness above all else: I do actually value some virtues for their own sake, and also homeostatis, which I interpret broadly to include mental homeostatis.
There is a counter-argument, though. We might consider a future of wire-headed cyberpunks to be dystopic, even if the cyberpunks themselves are very happy (and even if one or more of them can reasonably be considered to be our future self/ves), but how much do we really like a future that in which we flourish and are supremely virtuous, but are also to some extent miserable? If ethics is indeed a matter of choice, and not of truth, then why would we want to make this choice.
In the short term the differences between these approaches is almost certainly too subtle to make much of a practical difference. The important thing is to just get on and apply them (not least by urgently increasing the resilience of the global system, which is at risk of collapse over the next two to three decades). But I agree that if we do manage to get through the bottleneck then we will need to clarify these issues. Otherwise we will end up fighting over them.