Sorry if the writing is a tad dry or if the formatting doesn't quite fit a blog motif, as this is a final paper for an essay-based class, produced here in its original state and its entirety. I would recommend looking at some of the sources given if you'd like to learn more. I especially recommend Citizen Cyborg, which covers how to have an equitable, "democratic transhumanism" with significantly more seriousness and detail than I did in this paper.
1)
Introduction
Transhumanism
is a movement to improve and enhance human lives and capacities through the use
of technological and scientific means. This can refer to modifications as
accepted and widespread as contact lenses and fertility treatments, or to
existing, but still highly experimental and controversial techniques such as
genetic modification. It even includes technologies that have only recently
been imagined, like uploading the content of the mind to a non-biological
brain. These opinions depend upon the technologies considered, people’s
political, religious, and social beliefs, and an individual’s level of
education and knowledge about such technologies.
This
paper explores views of transhumanism held by both those who actively oppose
it, such as bioconservatives like Fukuyama and Leon Kass, and those who are not
familiar with the movement or even the state of the science and technology upon
which it is based. It will address, from a transhumanistic perspective, the
common arguments put forth by transhumanism’s detractors. It will also dispel
some of the common myths and mischaracterizations that anti-transhumanists
usually make. Finally, it will look at the opinions held by society in general
[as well as the bioconservatives] about human enhancement.
2)
The Bioconservative Objections
A
bioconservative is someone “generally opposed to the use of technology to
modify human nature” (“In Defense of Posthuman Dignity” 202). Although this
term can be applied to all people who object to human enhancement technologies,
it is used to refer to those who are relatively educated about such
technologies and who actively speak against them in a professional capacity.
Despite the root word of the name, bioconservatives and the value systems upon
which they build their anti-transhumanist beliefs can come from the political
Left, such as environmentalist Bill McKibben, or from the Right, like Leon
Kass, chairman of George W. Bush’s President's Council on Bioethics. There
exists a diversity of supposed reasons as to why transhumanism will do more
harm than good, but both camps hold in common two fundamental fears about how
using technology to improve the human condition will actually undermine it.
They fear that changes to human nature are “dehumanizing” due to a loss of the
“mysterious essential human quality” (“In Defense of Posthuman Dignity” 209)
that will strip us of our “human dignity” (“History of Transhumanist Thought”
18), and that trans- and posthumans will necessarily “view the old ‘normal’
humans as inferior” (“In Defense of Posthuman Dignity” 207), which will lead
“to the destruction of the idea that humans are in fact equal” (Hughes 114).
The
idea that changes to people’s capacities is dehumanizing and that it strips us
of dignity, which implies that remaining ‘human’ is an ideal and a virtue,
stems from notions of determination of moral worth that James Hughes rightfully terms “human racism”.
Similarly to conventional racists that base their definition of citizenship and
moral status on biological differences between people of different heritages,
human racists pin the determination of moral standing upon the biological
differences between humans and other creatures. The superiority and clear
delineation of the human race would be challenged by modifications to humans,
as well as by nonbiological intelligences and a growing recognition of the
sapience of non-human animals. In a telling parallel between racists who decried
miscegenation and the human racists, bioethicist George Annas calls for bans
against “germline modification … human/machine cyborgs … artificial organs …
and brain alterations” by arguing that these should be considered “ ‘crimes
against humanity’ in the strict sense, actions that threaten the integrity of
the human species itself” (Hughes 79).
Instead
of avoiding enhancement technologies out of the fear that this will damage
human rights and status, transhumanists believe that we should determine citizenship,
moral standing, rights, and responsibilities based upon a notion of personhood
rather than humanness. Many of the arguments that were used in the past to attempt
to justify the oppression of minority groups such as women and blacks were
based upon the idea that the oppressed groups were less than human, or were
otherwise naturally inferior to white men by way of birth, rather than having
basis in their actual capacities. The visionaries who saw that a widened idea
of moral worth should not be based upon some irrelevant set of characteristics,
but as John Locke put it, “what person stands
for; which I think, is a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and
reflection” (qtd. in Hughes 81), are responsible for the current idea that all
people [currently understood, sadly, to only include humans] should be accorded
equal moral status. Transhumanists believe that this determination of status
based on reason and reflection should logically be extended to include any
intelligent being, whether that includes other animals with higher-order
thought such as the great apes and cetaceans, or enhanced humans, or
nonbiological intelligences such as strong AIs.
Given
this knowledge of how transhumanists would actually determine the equality and
values of persons, the second fear of bioconservatives looks not only absurd,
but appear to be a hypocritical projection of their negative values onto the
enemy. It is the bioconservatives who would limit citizenship and moral value
to a narrowly defined, arbitrary group. Why would those who want “to create a
global society in which all persons, on the basis of their capacity for thought
and feeling, can participate as equal citizens” (Hughes 82) have any desire to
harm people for remaining unenhanced humans, or to treat them as inferior
simply because of a difference in ability? The idea that increasing the amount
of people that would be included as full moral agents would somehow lessen the
status of some humans is grounded in the incorrect notion
that instead of the famed ‘expanding
moral circle’, what we have is more like an oval, whose shape we can change but
whose area must remain constant. Thankfully, this purported conservation law of
moral recognition lacks empirical support. The set of individuals accorded full
moral status by Western societies has actually increased, to include men
without property or noble decent, women, and non-white peoples. It would seem feasible
to extend this set further to include future posthumans, or, for that matter,
some of the higher primates or human-animal chimaeras, should such be created –
and to do so without causing any compensating shrinkage in another direction (“In
Defense of Posthuman Dignity” 209-210).
3.)
Religious Objections to Transhumanism
Criticism of transhumanistic goals
based upon one’s religious beliefs is one of the places where the Left and
Right bioconservatives have different opinions, and the Right finds shared
ground with the common person. Although some individual Left bioconservatives
may have religious reasons for rejecting human enhancement, it is not as much
of a part of their collective narrative as it is for the “Right, [which]
correctly sees transhumanism as the latest manifestation of humanism” and for
whom “human reproductive and enhancement technologies are seen as violating the
divine prohibition on hubris” (Hughes 110). Many Christian Americans hold
similar views, saying things such as “You are messing with God's work and his
plan for you” (Bainbridge 96) when asked their opinions about enhancement
technologies.
The religious reject transhumanism
both for its striking similarities to and vast differences from their own faith
systems. Transhumanists and the religious both desire to transcend the human
condition. Faced with the realization [in the case of the transhumanists] or
the notion [in the case of the religious] that “humans [are] moderately smart,
moderately conscious ... mortal animals participating in an ongoing
evolutionary process absent any grand purpose or design,” both groups reject
this destiny and work towards a higher state of being. (Hopkins 13) This is in
contrast to the “secular humanist” view, held by many of the Left bioconservatives,
that “there is nothing wrong or even disappointing about being the sort of
creature described by the animal account” (Hopkins, 14).
However, this similarity is also one of
the reasons that many religious see transhumanism as “against everything [they]
believe in” (Bainbridge 96). To achieve transcendence, “the typical ... Western
religious stance [is] to accept certain beliefs, doctrines, and moral practices”
(Hopkins 16). This starkly contrasts with the approach by transhumanists to “aggressively
pursue the physical practices, the technologies that could make transcendence a
reality” (Hopkins 17). Transhumanism is very different from religion because it
aims to use technology, rather than faith and the power of a god, to improve
both our mental and physical state beyond what is considered natural. Its
improvement of the corrupted human state is seen as “stealing one of God's
supposed prerogatives” (Bainbridge 95). At best, transhumanism is seen as “[a]
waste [of] time, money, and energy” because “the transcendence that
transhumanists may be seeking is only available through God,” and at worst, it
is “seen as a movement that draws people away from God to “ ‘worship’ at their
own self-aggrandizing Tower of Babel” (Hopkins 24).
These
sentiments are not simply projections based upon knowledge of religious
beliefs. Nor are they isolated examples that cannot be replicated and therefore
can be ignored. They are borne out by statistical studies of religious people,
who make up the vast majority of the American population. According to the Pew
Forum on Religion & Public Life, 83.1 percent of Americans are religious,
with 78.4 percent identifying as Christian (“Statistics on Religion in America”).
At least in the short term, it is clear that the political and social future of
human enhancement in the US is likely to be strongly affected by Christian
opinions on transhumanism.
It
is therefore disheartening for transhumanists that a study on religious
opposition to human enhancement found an inverse association between confidence
in religion and approval of human enhancement (Bainbridge 96). One of the most
numerically striking examples is that 83% of those who professed that they felt
no doubt about God’s existence agreed with the statement “There should be a law
against cloning human beings”, while only 38% of those who had such doubts
thought likewise (Bainbridge 98). The acceptance rate of the seven different
enhancement scenarios that were examined in the study can be seen in Table 1.
Clearly, the percent of people who accept a given enhancement technology is
much lower for those who are strongly religious than those who are not, with a
double digit difference in acceptance for every scenario except “record[ing]
all of one's experiences, which could be a step toward cybernetic immortality
but was described blandly enough that it did not provoke negative reactions”
(Bainbridge 94).
Table
1: Percent Saying the Idea is Good by Belief in God (Bainbridge 95).
Saying the Thing is Good
|
||
No Doubt
God Exists
|
Doubt about God's Existence
|
|
Cryonic
suspension
|
13%
|
28%
|
Recording
all one's experiences
|
77%
|
81%
|
Having
one's mind scanned in
|
10%
|
28%
|
Uploading
a human personality
|
22%
|
34%
|
Cloning
oneself
|
5%
|
19%
|
Nanites
inserted into blood stream
|
46%
|
57%
|
Send
personality to distant planet
|
11%
|
27%
|
Average
of 7 stories
|
26%
|
39%
|
These
religious objections are of a nature that they will not be changed by outward
reason or by taking precautions in how the technologies are built and implement,
but only by inward changes in what it means to someone to hold Christian or
religious values. This clearly shows that achieving acceptance of transhumanism
in America will require more than simply working out the bugs in the
technologies and preparing the legal system for the technological shift.
Rather, it will be necessary to spend time and effort convincing people that
such advancements are not an affront to God. This will require study into which
specific aspects of the technologies cause people to feel that God’s authority
is being usurped. Exposure over time to the technologies, in much the same way that
early objection to CPR as against God’s authority over death have disappeared,
may also allay these fears.
4) Objections Based on
Safety, Societal Impact, and Equitable Access to Technology
A common argument against developing human
enhancement technologies that seems logical on its face is that the resources
should be dedicated to helping people who do not even have the basic
necessities. In a review of Fukuyama’s Our
Posthuman Future in the self-identified as liberal journal American Prospect, George Scialabba
argued that “the best reason of all not to press forward into the posthuman
future ... [is] that the enormous resources required could be put to much
better use helping the many people who do not now enjoy a human present”
(Scialabba).
However,
there are a myriad of Western wastes of resources that would be vastly less
beneficial to the Third World than human enhancement. Genetic research can be
used to improve the staple foods of impoverished regions, which lack necessary
vitamins and nutrients. Golden rice,
engineered to have high levels of vitamin A, can help to prevent disease in the
125 million children who have a deficiency in this chemical (Barry). Scientists
funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are engineering cassava, a
staple in sub-Saharan Africa that “lacks most protein, nutrients and vitamins”
to provide essential nutrients and vitamins (Specter). Even research that is
aimed at improving the health of the First World will have some benefits for
those in need. Intelligence enhancement provides us with a wider, more
productive pool of ideas, which can be used to attack the root of the problems
that cause us to have a world split into Worlds in the first place. Life extension
will encourage people to care more about the environment and the stability of
the world’s nations. Scialabba points out that “UN estimates that all
these needs [of the world's poor] could be met, at a basic level, for a yearly
expenditure equal to 10 percent of the recently proposed U.S. military budget
-- or slightly less than Americans and Europeans spend annually on pet food and
ice cream,” but Hughes counters “why start by banning … human enhancement
medicine, which might eventually benefit the poor, instead of American pet food
and ice cream, which will never benefit the world’s poor?” (Hughes, 130)
Similarly,
there are fears that transhumanistic technologies will exacerbate the rich-poor
divide that still exists in the West. This is a physically possible scenario,
and we will likely see this to some extent in the early adopter phase of these
technologies, but it is unlikely to be a sustained state. Most technologies
start out at a price that makes them accessible to a rich few, but as the technologies
improve, they become cheaper and more advanced at the same time. In the early
1990s, a cell phone was an unwieldy status symbol of wealth and business power.
Today, even though they have many more functions than the bag phone carried by
businessmen, cell phones are used widely in developing regions which could not
support the infrastructure necessary for the traditional landline phone, such
as Sub-Saharan Africa, and are beginning to supplant the landline in the United
States (Kurzweil 469). Banning human enhancement technologies would actually backfire,
because rich people would be able to circumvent the bans, and it would take
longer for the technologies to move past the early adopter state and
proliferate throughout society (Hughes 115).
As
with any new technology, there are fears, both justified and not, that
transhumanistic technologies, such as genetic modification or nanotechnology,
are unsafe. Early experiments into somatic [not affecting reproductive cells]
genetic modification to cure severe combined immunodeficiency, or bubble boy
syndrome, were brought to a halt when some of the recipients of the treatment
developed leukemia. It is necessary that genetic modifications go through
rigorous clinical trials, and early on, the techniques should be restricted to
serious genetic diseases. However, there are opponents to germline genetic
modification [modifications which would be passed on if the recipient
reproduced] who argue that it should be banned so that future generations
aren’t stuck with the genetic effects of our choices.
Future
generations are already stuck with the genetic ramifications of the choice
their parents made in their mate, a selection which is usually made without
thought as to how it will affect their possible children. For example, if dad
chose to marry a young, beautiful woman with no care for her smarts, his
daughter or son is stuck with this incremental decrease in genetic
predisposition to intelligence. Not only would genetic traits that are
handpicked in the child’s best interests be better than traits acquired simply
because of one’s mating preference, any society that is capable of making
germline genetic changes to unborn children is capable of changing someone’s
genetics for them when they get older. Even if the techniques create
unanticipated disadvantages that can’t be detected until the technology has
been used for years, such as increased susceptibly to cancer in one’s old age,
“we won’t be selecting genomes for all time, but starter genomes for a child’s
first twenty years or so” (Hughes, 140).
3.)
Conclusion
The
technological advancements that will be made in the coming century will force
us to ask serious questions that would have seemed like science fiction
scenarios even within my lifetime. We will be able to enhance ourselves,
improving our experience and understanding of our lives. In return for this
wonderful gift, we will have to be willing to reject our notions of human
exceptionalism and embrace a wider personhood. We will have to convince, most
likely by example, our Christian and other religious companions that human
enhancement is not an affront to their god(s). Most importantly, we have to
look past the seemingly common-sense nature of the often emotional arguments
that bioconservatives use to paint transhumanism as a detriment to society, and
inspect their impact from a rational point of view. We are in for an
awe-inspiring culmination of the forward march of technology and human
ingenuity, but it is up to those of us who realize and accept this future to ensure
that it is realized as safely, equitably, and beneficially to society as
possible.
Works Cited
Bainbridge,
William S. "The Transhuman Heresy." Journal of Evolution and
Technology 14.2 (2005): 29-43. JET Press, Aug. 2005. Web. 15 Apr. 2010.
Barry,
Gerard. "Golden Rice Fact Sheet." The Golden Rice Project.
International Rice Research Institute, July 2005. Web. 4 June 2010.
Bostrom,
Nick. "A History of Transhumanist Thought." Journal of Evolution
and Technology 14.1 (2005): 1-25. JET Press, Apr. 2005. Web. 4 June 2010.
Bostrom,
Nick. "In Defense of Posthuman Dignity." Bioethics 19.3
(2005): 202-14. OhioLINK. Web. 15 Apr. 2010.
Hopkins,
Patrick D. "Transcending the Animal: How Transhumanism and Religion Are
and Are Not Alike." Journal of Evolution and Technology 14.2
(2005): 13-28. JET Press, Aug. 2005. Web. 4 June 2010.
Hughes,
James. Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the
Redesigned Human of the Future. Cambridge, MA: Westview, 2004. Print.
Kurzweil,
Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York:
Penguin, 2006. Print.
Scialabba,
George. "Our Posthuman Future." The American Prospect. 02 June
2002. Web. 04 June 2010.
Specter,
Michael. "Fear of Science Will Kill Us." CNN.com. 13 Apr.
2010. Web. 04 June 2010.
"Statistics
on Religion in America: Summary of Key Findings." Religion in American
Culture. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2008. Web. 04 June 2010.
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