Letter from Agar to Danaher on latest IEET articles: Ethics of human enhancement

Articles by IEET Affiliate Scholar John Danaher on Agar's works:

Hi John,

Thanks for prompting me to further elaborate on my views about the relationship between identity and enhancement. Some of your questions have fairly straightforward answers. But I suspect that others point to genuine philosophical disagreements between us.

You say “Somewhat annoyingly, Agar goes on to suggest that adults can, of course, make bad decisions about life plans and some children can be quite mature and settled, but this still doesn’t mean that the adults lack the requisite authority and that the children have it. I say this is “annoying” because it makes it unclear to me whether the analysis of childhood and adulthood rests primarily on the capacities of the individuals at the respective stages or on the notion of “authority”. If it’s the latter, as I suspect it may be, then I think the analysis is problematic.”

I opt for the first of those disjuncts. My analysis of adulthood invokes rational capacities. These, in turn, give rise to an authority over the direction our lives take. It’s the possession of the capacities that’s key. Beings that possess a capacity may often fail to exercise it. Normal human adults have the capacity to make good decisions over the direction that their lives take. But they can also make choices that are improperly informed by their rational capacities.

This has implications for the prudential significance of growing up. Children should be prevented from making choices that predictably conflict with the future choices of their adult selves. Responsible parents shouldn’t permit eight-year olds to get married or to join the army even if the children give pretty persuasive reasons for wanting to do these things. That’s because we acknowledge the desires of the future adult self as better informed and we worry that it would reject these earlier choices.

Children could avoid the authority of their future adult selves by resolving not to grow up. I take it, however, that most human children do want to grow up. They love their toys but they’re also excited about the prospect of doing the kinds of things that mum and dad do, things that require adult capacities. This is a contingent claim about human children. The same would be true of adult humans who expect to undergo radical cognitive enhancement. Their current choices should be viewed as prudentially good or bad depending on information available to some future enhanced self. But it’s not true for adult humans who do not expect to undergo radical enhancement. We can be justified in rejecting the authority of some putative cognitively enhanced judge who would assess our deepest commitments – the love for a spouse, a life-long passion for the fiction of Jane Austen etc – as worthless or valuable only if they contribute to the ends of future posthuman selves.

I think that the costs of radical enhancement are systematically underappreciated by its advocates. Many of the experiences and achievements that matter most to us assume human-level capacities. We care about Austen’s fiction because of what it tells us about human beings. We care about the distinctively human ways in which we relate to our nearest and dearest. An evaluative interest in identity is one way to express these losses from radical enhancement. It makes a future existence less valuable to us.

You say “I don’t really see why we couldn’t transition gradually to a radically enhanced, posthuman state. Agar seems to assume that any such change would be radical and discontinuous (e.g. full upload of the mind to a computer). And that it is this radical discontinuity that leads to the disintegration of identity. But why couldn’t the change be much more gradual and partial than that, with each stage in the transition retaining a strong link to the previous one?”

There is something intuitively more frightening about an abrupt change than about a gradual change. But a gradual transition can still be something that you might reject and resist. Consider the state of dementia. There’s something terrifying about abruptly becoming demented. But to the extent that dementia is undesirable you should also seek to prevent it even if it occurs gradually. I’m all in favour of technologies that prevent dementia.

You say “Agar also doesn’t give weight to radically discontinuous forms of enhancement that would bypass the concerns he raises. I speak here, in particular, of enhancement achieved through germ-line genetic manipulations. In those cases, children would be born into a posthuman form of existence. They would not have to worry about their future radically enhanced selves having different life plans and desires, or about the troubling second childhood that Agar outlines.”

You’re right about children born into a society of posthumans. There’s nothing objectively inferior about being posthuman. Actually, I think that there’s nothing objectively inferior about being a chimpanzee. My particular values make it prudentially wrong for me to become a chimpanzee. I think they also make it prudentially wrong for me to become a posthuman.

Moreover, there’s nothing wrong in preferring to have human rather than posthuman children. Some humans may prefer to have children who will predictably view them as contemptibly primitive. But others will view at as an obstacle to a worthwhile parent-child relationship. There are some interesting fictional explorations of the idea of children cognitively far beyond their parents – the case of human parents failing to relate to radically enhanced children in John Wyndam’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos, for example. Of course, if having posthuman children is the only way to avoid the apocalypse, then I say go for it.

You say “radical enhancement might be the only way of avoiding death. If that’s the case, then whatever the risks to identity, the decision to radically enhance will seem a lot more prudentially wise than Agar makes it out to be.”

I argue that radical enhancement poses a threat to human identities. This makes it prudentially irrational for the vast majority of us to radically enhance. But there are certainly circumstances in which it’s reasonable to accept a risk of death. You and Angra Mainyu describe a case in which it seems right to accept a risk of death to avoid a still greater risk of death. It’s appropriate to risk death by throwing yourself from an out-of-control car if the car is speeding toward the edge of a cliff. I take it that it is still appropriate to have a preference for surviving as moderately enhanced versions of what we currently are over undergoing radical enhancement. This particular argument offers no grounds for rejecting radical life extension.

- Nick Agar