Almost everyone these days undertakes some sort of
psychological self-improvement. From New Age to
neuroscience, do-it-yourself books on mind modification
weigh down bookstore shelves around the world. But in an
age when genetic engineering and pharmaceuticals promise
to allow mental reshaping far beyond anything possible
with Seven Habits, we're being forced to confront
the question of just how far we should go. It's one
thing to increase our physical and mental capabilities,
such as using genetic enhancement to extend our lifespan
or drugs to increase our cognitive powers. It's another
to make genetic or brain changes that alter our desires
and emotions, changing what we want to use those
enhanced capabilities for.

Arguably, the latter is a deeper change, one that
could have an even greater impact on our nature. This
thought is strengthened by bioethicist Erik Parens'
description, in his introduction to an anthology of
essays entitled

Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications.
The essays were the product of a seminar held at the
Hastings
Center in 1992. At the Hastings seminar, four
scenarios for human enhancement were discussed, the last
attracting the most heated opposition. The scenarios
were as follows:

1. Our ability to resist disease is increased (most
   participants thought this was ethically acceptable,
   as long as "we assume that all persons will have
   equal access to such a new form of prevention").
   
   


2. Our ability to stay alert and get by without
   sleep is enhanced.
   
   


3. Our long-term memory is enhanced.
   
   
   


4. A reduction is made in our more ferocious
   psychological tendencies, with a corresponding
   increase in our generosity.

The fourth of these does seem to be the most
challenging to our ethical thinking. It is not
surprising that it received the most resistance. But are
our desires and emotions sacrosanct?

Altered states

Human systems of morality are based, at least in
part, on the social reconciliation of species-wide
(though individually variable) desires and emotional
responses, inherited from our evolutionary ancestry. If
those desires and emotions changed, the conditions under
which we interact and cooperate in societies would
change as well. So would our various moral systems.

In his monumental study of the possible convergence
of scientific and humanistic knowledge,

Consilience,

Edward O. Wilson predicts that future generations
will actually recoil from redesigning human emotions and
the epigenic rules (or genetically-inherited
regularities) of human mental development, since these
elements, he says, "compose the physical soul of the
species."

"Alter the emotions and epigenic rules enough,"
Wilson continues, "and people might in some sense be
'better,' but they would no longer be human. Neutralize
the elements of human nature in favor of pure
rationality, and the result would be badly-constructed,
protein-based computers. Why should a species give up
the defining core of its existence, built by millions of
years of biological trial and error?"

Two initial points can be made in response to this.
First, it is not obvious why Wilson portrays the choices
as being between our current range of desires and
emotions and none at all—the life of a rational, but
emotionless, computer. It is certainly difficult to see
why we would want to turn ourselves into totally
emotionless beings, but this does not rule out changing
certain aspects of our emotions. The way Wilson
formulates this part of his argument, he is attacking a
straw man.

Second—and this is a deeper issue—it is not clear
what work the concept of "ceasing to be human" is doing
in the argument. Our nature could change considerably
without the outcome being that we were no longer human
at all. Alternatively, even if we thought it was no
longer appropriate to apply the word "human" to
ourselves (or our descendants), where does that point
lead us? Would we (or they) somehow have lost moral
worth?

Not necessarily. We should concede that some
imaginable changes would be for the worse. Perhaps there
is something especially valuable about having the
capacity for a wide range of emotions, including grief
as well as joy. As I have


discussed, we might well
be horrified at a society that found ways to flatten our
range of emotional responses. We don't want to turn
ourselves into beings of shallow experience, or (as in
Wilson's talk of "protein-based computers") without
subjective experience at all.

But what if we encountered a "lost race" of beings
almost like ourselves, yet with a slightly different
range of typical desires and emotional responses,
stemming from a different evolutionary history? Imagine,
for the sake of argument, that this species turned out
to be as keenly sentient and self-conscious as we are,
and slightly more intelligent. Imagine that it
communicated in complex languages, as we do, and had
built up a rich tradition of art and culture. Imagine
also that it was less disposed, by nature, to be
aggressive or to experience some forms of jealousy.

It is far from clear that we would be these beings'
moral superiors, or that a world which contained them,
rather than us, would thereby be worse than our own. To
make such judgments, we would need to know much more
detail. Even then, the value of the two worlds might
defy comparison.

If this is correct, there may be scope for
considerable changes in human nature (and culture)
without any diminution of our moral status, or any loss
of value in the world—even if the changes meant that we
could be considered, in a sense, nonhuman. Accordingly,
consideration of our moral status does not in itself
rule out even quite drastic steps to redesign human
nature. It is all a matter of what, exactly, would be
lost, and of what might be gained.

But why make changes?

Why seek to do any of this? Well, as individuals, we
might have good reasons to try to free ourselves from at
least some psychological traits that we have inherited
from our evolutionary past. They might not suit our
rational ideals of ourselves; or they might just be
inconvenient for life in our modern environment. As a
species, we might one day redesign ourselves on a wide
scale if some consensus could be reached on desirable
changes.

Take, for example, the fear of death. It is
reasonable enough to have projects, relationships,
commitments and interests that attach us to life, and
thus to wish to go on living. The mechanism of fear
might be useful to us in helping us stay alive, and a
genetic predisposition to fear death may well have
increased our evolutionary ancestors' inclusive fitness
(their capacity to pass on their genes to succeeding
generations). Granting all that, however, does the
degree to which we sometimes fear death—the sense of
nagging anxiety or even panic that the thought of death
can cause—actually contribute to individual or social
happiness? If we could reach into ourselves and rewrite
our own emotional code, in order to harmonize our
personalities with our rationally considered ideas of
what constitutes a happy life, might we not reduce our
fear of death in the abstract, while retaining fear
responses to situations of immediate physical danger?

More generally, the particular range of desires and
emotions that human beings currently have may not be the
optimum for our happiness as individuals, or for useful
social cooperation in modern environments. It was never
designed for those purposes.

When I refer to our happiness as individuals I do not
mean simply superficial feelings of pleasure. We might
want far more than this. For example, as many
philosophers have suggested, we might want to live in
touch with reality, have deep feelings, create beauty,
achieve remarkable things, exercise or challenge our
physical and cognitive abilities, and so on. But there
is no reason to think that our current range of desires
and emotions is the most effective possible for helping
us to achieve happy lives in this sense.

After all, to the extent that we have a species-wide
repertoire of desires and emotions it has an
evolutionary explanation. Presumably this repertoire
promoted our ancestors' inclusive fitness in the
environment of evolutionary adaptation. However, what we
most care about, whether as individuals or at the social
level, is not the passing on of our genes. Some people
have even made conscious decisions not to have children.
We all have plans and projects that are far more
important to us than maximizing our inclusive fitness,
which is quite simply not a conscious goal for most
people. Surely this is not what consciously motivates
people to have children.

To take another example, it seems clear that human
beings as a species are inclined to be largely, but not
entirely, monogamous. We are more monogamous than
chimpanzees or bonobos, but it is a cliché of
evolutionary biology that men are genetically
programmed, at least to some extent, to stray into
polygamous ventures. In his provocative book

The Red Queen, Matt Ridley argues that women are
also predisposed, to some extent, to extramarital
liaisons. But at the same time, men and women are
predisposed to sexual jealousy.

All of this causes much strife for individuals and
our society. Might we not be better off if people were
more perfectly monogamous? Alternatively, in a world of
fairly reliable contraception, childless-by-choice
couples, and greater intellectual sophistication about
these things (from reading books by Matt Ridley, for
example), might we not be even better off if people were
less predisposed to sexual jealousy? Either way, our
current mix of propensities does not seem optimal for
our happiness, much as it may be explicable in Darwinian
terms.

A more prosaic example is our love of sugar-rich
foods. This was doubtless of benefit to our evolutionary
ancestors, and helped them to pass on their genes, in an
environment where sugar was relatively scarce. It is now
positively damaging to our health, in a dramatically
different environment where sugar is easy to produce and
available in abundance. Perhaps we should change our
psychology so that we have a greater desire for fibrous,
vitamin-rich foods, and a lesser desire for sugar.

Alternatives and implications

Of course, we have many alternatives. We could
cooperate socially to reduce the availability of sugary
foods, or to make them less of a temptation by imposing
advertising restrictions. As individuals, we can make
conscious decisions not to act on our desire for sugar,
or to do so only as an occasional treat. Still, the
problem would be easier to solve if we had less desire
for sugar in the first place.

In short, there is nothing fundamentally wrong about
changing our psychology. The inherited repertoire of
human desires and emotions is not inviolable. Perhaps
the desires and emotions that should be preserved are
those which we would endorse if we fully understood our
own psychology and its evolutionary genealogy. There is
no Archimedean point to which we can step, somewhere
entirely out of our own desires and emotions, but we can
at least look at what we really want in the environment
that we now find ourselves in, and try to bring some
elements of our desires and emotions into line with our
rationally endorsed values and goals.

The difficulty is that we lack both the scientific
knowledge and—let us face it—the wisdom to start all
over again. In that light, some methods of changing
ourselves would surely be more trouble than they are
worth, and are not currently justifiable. If, for
example, we tried to make inheritable changes to human
psychological nature through germline genetic
modification, we would be running monstrous risks. Genes
typically have many effects (are pleiotropic), while
even far simpler phenotypical characteristics than our
psychological predispositions are affected by the
cooperation of many genes (such characteristics are said
to be polygenic). For the foreseeable future, the
complex interactions of genes and human psychology may
rule out the genetic redesign of the latter.

This also suggests that designing the custom-made
personalities of individual children may never be
feasible, and may to be too risky to be attempted. That,
in turn, may limit the other kinds of enhancements that
we should make to children, since there is the risk in
any individual case of a mismatch of alterable
capabilities and practically unalterable psychological
dispositions (Nicholas Agar is one philosopher who has
discussed similar issues; hopefully he will take them
further in his new book

Liberal Eugenics). When we are thinking about
genetic modification, it seems rational to focus on
increasing our resistance to aging and disease—and
perhaps on increasing our general cognitive
abilities—before we start tampering with our desires and
emotions themselves, or giving our children individual,
custom-made talents.

However, if our happiness as individuals is impeded
by desires and emotions that we want to disown, there
are more everyday ways to try to change ourselves than
using genetic modification. Perhaps we are best off if
we can make the changes we desire through individual
self-examination and insight, associating with people
who already seem to have the kind of species-atypical
psychological makeup that we aspire to, reading books
about the experiences of such people, and so on.

Yet some of the desires and emotions that we want to
disown might be too deep for us to reach by these
methods. In this case, I see nothing wrong in principle
with more direct physical changes to ourselves, such as
if we can design safe, effective drugs that help reduce
our craving for sugar (or our fear of death, and so on).

The point of this debate, then, should not be that
there is a general moral rule against tampering with our
inherited nature. Indeed, such tampering might be
justified. Rather, we need to acknowledge that it would
necessarily be a piecemeal, iterative process. It would
begin with efforts by individuals to change those
aspects of themselves that they rationally disapprove
of. At one end of the spectrum of possibilities, a
program of genetic alteration of the personalities of
our children would be undesirable. All that said, there
is no overriding objection to using technological means
to modify our own personalities, and ultimately to
reshape human nature. After all, self-help books are a
type of technology too.