C Christopher Hook. Bioethics. Editor: Bruce Jennings, 4th Edition, Volume 6, Macmillan Reference USA, 2014.
At one time or another, most people have dreamed of having the ability to fly (without technological assistance), of never having to have to age or die, or of having bodies and minds that transcend human limitations. Yet in the end people move on with their lives, trying to learn to deal with the realities of finitude and mortality. This is necessary, given the lack of means to significantly alter biological constraints. Yet new technologies may soon begin to enable people to transcend such limitations. With such technologies, however, come questions about the appropriateness of actually pursuing and employing them to experience greatly extended longevity—perhaps even some form of physical immortality—and to reengineer the human body to expand its functional capacity. Transhumanism and posthumanism are world-views, or philosophies, that strongly favor an affirmative reply to these questions and that look forward to the day when Homo sapiens have been replaced by biologically and technologically superior beings.
Transhumanism has been defined as “the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities” (Humanity+ 2013). A posthuman would no longer be a human being, having been so significantly altered as to no longer represent the human species. Underlying this worldview is a core belief that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of the species’ development, but rather its beginning (Humanity+ 2013).
The tools transhumanists would use to achieve their ends include genetic manipulation, nanotechnology, cybernetics, pharmacological enhancement, and computer simulation. One of the more ambitious—and controversial—transhumanist visions involves the concept of mind uploading. According to proponents, advances in computing and neurotechnologies will, within several decades, enable individuals to completely read the synaptic connections of the human brain, enabling an exact replica of the brain to exist and function inside a computer. This simulation could then “live” in whatever mechanical body-form it desired (Kurzweil 1999, 2005, 2012). In his book The Enchanted Loom (1981), Richard Jastrow speculated about this future time: “At last, the human brain, ensconced in a computer, has been liberated from the weakness of the mortal flesh. … It is in control of its own destiny. … Housed in indestructible lattices of silicon, and no longer constrained in its span of years, … such a life could live forever” (166-67).
Origins of Transhumanism
While the terms transhumanism and posthumanism are very recent in creation, the ideas they represent are anything but new. The underlying philosophical ideals are fully those of the Enlightenment, imbued with a healthy dose of postmodern relativism. From the Enlightenment comes a fully reductionistic view of human life characteristic of that movement’s materialistic empiricism. In L’Homme machine (Man a Machine), written in 1748, the French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) wrote that humans “are at bottom only animals and machines” (1912, 143), while the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), another French Enlightenment philosopher, wrote that “no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of faculties … the perfectibility of man is unlimited” (1795, 11). These eighteenth-century ideas could be easily updated to recent transhumanist writings, such as Bart Kosko’s The Fuzzy Future (1999), in which he proclaims, “Biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature’s first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny” (256). Consider also Kevin Warwick’s declaration, written in 2000, “I was born human. But this was an accident of fate—a condition merely of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change” (145). Derived from other Enlightenment ideals is a fierce libertarianism, supported by a postmodern moral skepticism, that proclaims that each individual is the final arbiter of what is right and appropriate for his or her life or body. One also sees a precedent for transhumanist thinking in nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts on the will to power and the ubermensche (superman), particularly in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “man is something to be overcome” (1995, 12).
As a named movement, transhumanism started in the 1980s with the writings of a futurist known as FM-2030, with the term transhuman being shorthand for transitional human (Humanity+ 2013). Transhumans were “the earliest manifestation of new evolutionary beings, on their way to becoming posthumans” (FM-2030 1989). Within the first years of the 1990s, a whole series of groups emerged embracing transhumanist ideology, including the extropians, the transtopians, and the singularitarians, the latter group anticipating and working to bring about the technological “singularity” predicted by Vernor Vinge. Writing in 1993, Vinge predicted that the exponential increase in scientific and technical knowledge, coupled with feedback loops from artificial intelligence systems, would soon lead to a massive destabilization and transformation of all social structures, technical devices, and human beings, who would be transformed into superior beings. The idea that humankind should engineer the next phase of its own evolution, and that human beings should be augmented and altered, even to the point of losing their humanity, has captured the thinking of numerous faculty and leaders in the engineering and scientific establishment. This can be no better illustrated than through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) proposed plan for converging several technologies, including nanotechnology, biotechnologies, information technologies, and cognitive technologies (such as cybernetics and neurotechnologies), for the express purpose of improving human performance (Roco and Bainbridge 2002).
In the decade since the publication of the last edition of this encyclopedia, singularity thinking has become more mainstream. Located in Silicon Valley, Singularity University has begun offering intensive summer classes and graduate-level programs for leaders in the business, scientific, technology, and governing communities for the purpose of stimulating accelerated technological systems change and social integration. The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies has become one of the central stimulators and purveyors of transhumanist scholarship.
Fundamentals of Transhumanism and Posthumanism
The first assertion of transhumanist thinking is a rejection of the assumption that human nature is a constant (Humanity+ 2013). There is nothing sacrosanct about nature in general or about human nature in particular. Criticisms of attempts to modify nature as “playing God” or as the ultimate human hubris are therefore rejected as inappropriate.
N. Katherine Hayles, in her book How We Became Posthuman (1999), describes four characteristic posthuman, or transhuman, assumptions. First, information patterns are more important or essential to the nature of being than any “material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life” (2). Second, consciousness is an epiphenomenon. There is no immaterial soul. Third, the body is simply a prosthesis, albeit the first one a person learns to use and manipulate. Consequently, replacing or enhancing human function with other prostheses is only a natural extension of human beings’ fundamental relationship with their begotten bodies. Lastly, the posthuman views the human being as capable of being “seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (3).
Ethical Issues
One of the first significant ethical issues relating to transhumanism and posthumanism is the question of enhancement or augmentation: should human beings augment or enhance themselves and future generations? This is not a simple question to answer, although humans have made a practice of augmenting and enhancing themselves throughout recorded history. This is the nature and explicit goal of all tool use and education. Yet there are some implicit boundaries that transhumanist modifications challenge.
As an example, consider correction of vision. The use of glasses or contact lenses to correct vision is an example of a commonly employed augmentation. Yet this intervention is only correcting a deficiency, returning the individual’s function to species normal levels. It is thus a healing intervention more than an enhancement. The goal of visual lenses is to restore vision to biological norms, not to augment or improve function beyond normal. Similarly, prosthetic limbs replace those congenitally absent, malformed, or traumatically severed or injured. Pacemakers replace the electrical pacing of heart contractions lost through injury, aging, or disease. In this context, new tools to restore sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and movement and normal function to the lame or paralyzed are tremendous advances fully in keeping with the traditional goals of medicine (healing, restoring, palliation, and prevention of injury). Yet is it always so easy to distinguish between healing and reengineering?
The difficulty lies in trying to define a clear line of demarcation between a disease state and normal structure and function. It is sometimes easy to pick out extremes of phenotype, particularly if an underlying pathophysiological mechanism for the deviation can be demonstrated. Examples include hemophilia, congenital dwarfism, and impaired vision. Other situations raise difficulties, illustrating that many times the definition of disease or abnormality can be socially, rather than objectively or scientifically, determined. How much deviation from ideal body weight is within the bounds of normal variation, and when does the deviation become pathologic? While anorexia nervosa and morbid obesity are clearly pathologic in that they can influence survival and other health issues, a significant number of individuals are on the edges of the norms, where the threshold of pathology is unclear.
A striking example of the cultural variation in the definition of disease is evident in the response of many congenitally deaf individuals to the suggestion that they are afflicted and in need of therapy. Rather than seeing deafness as a disability, many deaf individuals view their absence of hearing as a trait that allows them membership is a special community of other deaf individuals. Many deaf parents of deaf children have refused to allow their children to receive cochlear implants to correct the deafness because this would remove the children from the deaf community. In a survey undertaken at a 1997 conference of deaf individuals, only 16 percent of the delegates said they were interested in prenatal diagnosis for deafness, and, of that group, 29 percent indicated that they would use prenatal diagnosis to select for deafness in the child (see Middleton, Hewison, and Mueller 1998).
Additional confusion enters the discussion when various interventions that would better be described as proper care and stewardship of normal physiological function are incorrectly labeled as enhancements. A classical example can be found in the following oft-quoted claim about vaccination by LeRoy Walters and Julie Gage Palmer:
In current medical practice, the best example of a widely accepted health-related physical enhancement is immunization against infectious diseases. With immunizations against diseases like polio and hepatitis B, what we are saying is, in effect, “The immune system that we inherited from our parents may not be adequate to ward off certain viruses if we are exposed to them. Therefore we will enhance the capabilities of our immune system by priming it to fight against these viruses.” … From the current practice of immunization against particular diseases, it would seem to be only a small step to try to enhance the general functioning of the immune system genetics means. (1997, 110)
Walters and Palmer have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and function of the immune system. As C. Christopher Hook stated in a 2007 contribution:
We are not born with ready-formed antibodies to the specific antigens that occur on infectious agents. Our antibody immune surveillance structures evolve through environmental and infectious exposures. Unless one is born with a congenital defect in the immune system, such as common variable immunodeficiency, preventing us from doing so, each and every one of us must “train” our immune system over the course of our lives. Getting chicken pox, or mumps, or even polio [as a disease] stimulates the development of antibodies that prevent subsequent infections should we survive the [initial] infection. A vaccination is simply a means of training the immune system in a manner that hopefully avoids the morbidity and mortality that may accrue from an actual infection. Vaccinations are not “enhancements” or re-engineering, they are good, responsible stewardship that depend on normal, endogenous mechanisms of our body. So are sufficient rest, exercise, a healthy diet, education, good oral hygiene, and other things that have been labeled in these discussions, erroneously, if not dishonestly, as enhancements. Exercise and education, like vaccinations, depend on the underlying anatomy and physiology of the body to work as designed, and train them to optimal function. They do not re-engineer the underlying substrate, which, in contrast, is what nanotechnological replacement of normal cellular and extracellular structures, genetic engineering for other than repairing genes that do not support species level norms of function, and other [human re-engineering technologies] would do. (350)
Cognitive and neurological function, the areas most impacted by cybernetic and some pharmacological technologies, raise additional challenges to the human re-engineering/enhancement project, in part because certain deviations from the norm may impart certain functional advantages in addition to social or behavioral liabilities. For instance, while attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism are diseases, many of the individuals who have these conditions also manifest significant brilliance and creativity in mathematics, music, art, science, and engineering. Both the positive and negative manifestations are part of the same disease entity, and what degree of negative manifestation requires treatment becomes subjective. The treatments employed may suppress the undesired manifestation, but they may also impair the desirable expressions. The situation becomes even more complex when these challenges are extended to a measure of cognitive function such as memory, mathematical calculation, musical ability, or language processing. Who does not think of himself or herself as being deficient in cognitive abilities or able to benefit from enhancement of cognitive function? But what may be the costs or losses associated with attempts to “enhance” these attributes? The word enhancement itself becomes problematic because, while the term means a net benefit, such a conclusion is more assumed than proven. For most, if not all, of the transhumanist technologies, the benefits-burdens and social consequences calculus has not been performed, making use of the term enhancement in current discussions presumptuous, in essence promising the net benefit, when such promises cannot be claimed. Because of this, the more neutral term reengineering technologies or interventions would be far more accurate and appropriate, particularly in bioethical and lay discussions.
In addition, necessary cognitive function may be very task or profession specific. Should individuals who would be considered cognitively normal be allowed to receive enhancing technologies to permit them to pursue a career otherwise beyond their intrinsic ability? And, as these technologies become available, should professions that demand high levels of cognitive excellence be allowed to require the use of enhancing technologies? Given that books and computers are forms of information-exchange enhancement that are currently required for education in the professions, one could argue that the only thing that has changed is the intimacy of the enhancing method. Yet because these technologies may intrinsically carry certain risks (such as surgical complications, infection, bleeding, undesired neurological stimulation or dysfunction, and immediate physical or psychological risk from device hacking or dysfunction) that are absent from current information technologies, it could be claimed that such means should never be mandated but available only by free choice. The reality, however, is that competition with peers will serve as a strong coercive force to pursue reengineering interventions.
An additional concern for some arises when the augmentation or enhancement in question potentially exceeds the function that could be achieved by the finest specimens of Homo sapiens trained in the most rigorous fashion. People accept the use of some augmenting technologies, such as telescopy or microscopy, which may be used for a time, and for a specific purpose, but cannot become a permanent fixture of the human being. They remain tools rather than becoming attributes. Thus, it is acceptable to use a computer or a smart phone, which can be separated from the user, but permanently reengineering the brain with cybernetic connections or brain implants seems to critics to cross a boundary that should not be violated. Why is this so?
Two criticisms of such permanent modifications are that (1) they are unnatural and (2) they engage in activities that should be the sole purview of the deity—“playing God” is a frequent aspersion thrown at human reengineering technologies. While the wisdom of the existing form of human beings, whether evolved for survival or designed by a creator is an important issue, the rhetoric used in the critique is a distraction from the legitimate concerns about the appropriateness, personal and social consequences, and wisdom of pursuing the proposed modifications.
Transhumanists, however, dismiss the claim of unnatural because most of what human beings do with any technology is unnatural, if natural is understood as the pure biological world without human artifacts. Human creativity is part of human nature, and human artifacts are frequently accepted as benefits, not harms. As to the second argument, many, if not most, transhumanists are agnostic or atheists, and thus engaging in a supposed Promethean rebellion against the gods is not to them a legitimate concern. The issue is one of great concern to theists, however, although the way the argument is commonly expressed comes close to violating their own basic theological tenets. Can God be so easily dethroned? Can the creature really act outside the permissive will of the creator? Further, many theologians assert that part of the Imago Dei, the “image of God,” that humankind is said to bear, is the creative impulse just mentioned.
The real issue of concern to those who object to or are wary of transhumanist goals is that human beings are engaging in activities that may have a profound impact on the individuals involved, as well as on the surrounding environment, without the counterbalancing forces of evolution or the divine wisdom that might minimize possible negative consequences of such activities. From the environmental, or naturalist, perspective, the changes are occurring too swiftly and too dramatically for ecosystems or individual creatures to evolve appropriate safeguards. From the more theistic perspective, these changes are occurring without proper understanding and respect for God’s initial designs and plan, and certainly without God’s foresight or wisdom. In the end, both arguments are expressing concern for the great harm that these interventions could potentially induce, calling into question activities that presuppose a significant degree of knowledge, foresight, and wisdom that may, and most likely will, be lacking. Hubris, therefore, not ingenuity or even a passion for change, is the fundamental concern.
For others, however, even if such enhancements would not be tried until there was careful prospective evaluation for, and protections against, undesirable consequences, any intervention intended to move function beyond species-normal levels would be rejected. This leads to the next series of concerns: the social consequences of transhumanism. The pursuit of transhumanist goals could lead to individuals and communities possessing significant differences in the type and extent of biotechnological modifications. One consequence of these disparities would be the likelihood of discrimination—against both the enhanced and the unenhanced, as each community may feel threatened by the other. Claims of unfair competitive advantage are probable, potentially leading to attempts at restrictive legislation. Yet it is doubtful that such restrictions would find sufficient consensus to be passed, let alone prevent the enhancements from taking place. Freeman Dyson, a British physicist and educator, argued in his 1997 book Imagined Worlds that
the artificial improvement of human beings will come, one way or another, whether we like it or not, as soon as the progress of biological understanding makes it possible. When people are offered technical means to improve themselves and their children, no matter what they conceive improvement to mean, the offer will be accepted. … The technology of improvement may be hindered or delayed by regulation, but it cannot be permanently suppressed. … It will be seen by millions of citizens as liberation from past constraints and injustices. Their freedom to choose cannot be permanently denied. (205-6)
Particularly powerful—especially in the United States, a country founded on the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—is the argument posed by the transhumanist Anders Sandberg (2001) that freedom to pursue enhancing technologies is a fundamental matter of the right to life.
Nevertheless, a general right to life, which is a negative right against having an individual’s life deliberately or carelessly destroyed by others, is not the same as a positive claim demanding access to any and all means possible to extend the duration of life. There are finite financial, scientific, and medical resources available but many needs to protect human lives. According to data from the World Health Organization, almost one-third of deaths each year around the world are still the result of infectious diseases (many treatable), dirty water, malnutrition, exposure, and poor hygienic conditions (World Health Organization 2006). It is difficult to justify expending substantial financial, research, and medical resources, particularly as these resources are dependent on shared public monies and institutions, for the reengineering of the well and normal, when so many are suffering from lack of access to the simplest yet effective remedies. Justice may require that third-party health care dollars not be used to cover the costs of human reengineering technologies and services. This raises concerns that access to enhancement technologies will be accessible only to those who already possess economic, educational, and technical advantages, further widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. As some members of society become incrementally enhanced and plugged in to cybernetic communities, these individuals will share less and less in common with the unenhanced, fragmenting society—potentially generating decreasingly compatible, or even competing, separate societies.
This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, for technologies have created boundaries between social groups in the past, the Amish and some Native Americans being notable examples. The difference is that the Amish have always wished to remain a distinct society, whereas some individuals who wish to reject personal enhancement may still desire to participate in and access the goods of the larger social structure. Deliberate efforts to maintain tolerance of individuals and groups who choose to forgo the use of certain technologies must be pursued if democratic/republican ideals are to be preserved, and inclusive means of communication must remain available to all members of society. But as some groups may choose lesser degrees of enhancement they may run the risk of becoming ghettoized or restricted from other goods of the larger society that they may still desire. While some transhumanists are quite clear that they do not wish to force their desires for enhancement onto others (Humanity+ 2013), as a group, or even as individual scholars, they have not satisfactorily resolved how tolerance will be maintained both within and outside their communities of choice. In fact, some transhumanists already display belligerent attitudes against skeptics and dissenters (Dvorsky 2002; Shropshire 2002; Smith 2002).
This fact itself acknowledges one of the fundamental flaws of transhumanist, or any other, Utopian thinking: the failure to understand the darkness, the fears, and the unpredictability of each human heart. The lessons of the twentieth century, such as the experience with eugenics, fascism, and communism, should have been to beware the power of Utopian dreams to enslave, destroy, and demean, rather than provide the promised justice, freedom, and human flourishing. Now the transhumanists offer yet another form of human contrivance to provide salvation for all. This time the Faustian bargain is with technology—what John McDermott (1969), a professor emeritus in labor studies at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, has referred to as “the opiate of the intellectuals”—rather than with economic or political systems.
Technology is not inherently evil and has in fact been the source of much good (as well as harm). It is but a tool, and as a tool it must be carefully examined and carefully used. Transforming oneself into one’s tool in the hopes of achieving immortality is an illusion. Decay cannot be forestalled indefinitely. If one must change the underlying substrate of the body to “live,” then it is really something else that exists, not the original being, and death will still need to be confronted. Extended life may be achieved but at what social cost? How will people deal with greatly enhanced life spans? What will be the impact on economic structures, the workforce, and reproduction? These questions are all, as yet, unanswered by the transhumanists. While it is doubtful that consensus could ever be reached on enhancing or augmenting technologies, humankind must engage prospectively in a full and open dialogue concerning the coming technologies and their implications.