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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Levin, Susan B., 1961– author.
Title: Posthuman bliss? : the failed promise of transhumanism / Susan B. Levin.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020016071 | ISBN 9780190051495 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190051518 (epub) | ISBN 9780190051501 (updf) | ISBN 9780190051525 (online)
Subjects: LCSH: Transhumanism.
Classification: LCC B842.5 .L48 2020 | DDC 144—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016071
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Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
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3. “Health” and “Public Health”: Relating
4. Transhumanists’ Display of Utilitarian Commitments and Their Sociopolitical Implications
4.1 An Expressly Utilitarian Rationale for Moral Bioenhancement
4.2 Transhumanists’ Broader Suggestion That We Should See, and Thus Value, Bioenhancement in the Light of Classic Public-Health Measures
4.3 Procreative Decision-Making: A Utilitarian Defense of Maximal Capacitation and Its Sociopolitical Implications
5. Resource Allocation
6. The Moral Permissibility of Using Reproductive
7. Conclusion
5. Creating a Higher Breed: Transhumanism and the Prophecy of Anglo-American Eugenics
1. Introduction
2. The Need for a Fuller Assessment of Transhumanists’ Claims about Earlier Eugenics
3. Human Agency Creates, Then Becomes, the Divine
4. Our Elevation with Respect to “Non-Disease” Conditions
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2.4 Wiener and Cybernetics
2.5 Watson and Crick’s Discovery of
2.6 Crick’s
2.7 Deciphering
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3. Persistence, Problems, Pitfalls
7. Living Virtuously as a Regulative Ideal
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Acknowledgments
In a post I wrote for Oxford University Press’s blog in the fall of 2014, I remarked that, beyond enriching bioethical debate over the practice and profession of medicine, ancient Greek philosophy “offers a fresh orientation to pressing debates on other bioethical topics, prominent among them high-stakes discord over the technologically spurred project of radical human ‘enhancement’ ” (i.e., transhumanism). In terms of my own research, this mention of the debate over radical enhancement was largely promissory. When I first encountered transhumanism during my bioethical research for the final chapter of Plato’s Rivalry with Medicine: A Struggle and Its Dissolution (Oxford 2014), the topic gripped me mightily, and I had intimations of how I could bring Greek philosophy to bear on the controversy.
From 2014 onward, I immersed myself in the interdisciplinary debate over radical enhancement. This absorbing and invigorating endeavor represents exactly the sort of commitment that being at Smith College, my academic home of more than a quarter-century, not only allows but encourages. As I published articles and essays on the advocacy of radical enhancement, the contours of a book emerged in my thinking. I offer here the result, a fundamental critique of transhumanism on philosophical and scientific grounds.
My colleague Jill de Villiers read most chapters in draft form, and I am grateful for her feedback. I also appreciate the comments of another colleague, Jeff Ramsey, on drafts of two chapters and helpful conversations we had about Kant. I wish, as well, to thank You Jeen Ha, who was my student research assistant during the summer of 2018.
My thanks go to the referees for Oxford University Press for very helpful feedback on the project. In addition, I appreciate the efforts and confidence of Peter Ohlin, my editor at Oxford. Further, I wish to thank Madeleine Freeman, his assistant, and Ayshwarya Ramakrishnan, who oversaw the book’s production, including preparation of the index.
Last but not least, I am grateful to Howard Dupuis for his support throughout my writing of this book.
Northampton, Massachusetts
S.B.L December 2019
Introduction
Optimally, would decisions be reached by reason alone? If you could spend a leisurely afternoon listening to Mozart or use that time to zip at lightning speed through half the contents of the Library of Congress, which activity would you choose? Would existence be better if we felt only pleasure, having excised the very capacity to experience anger, grief, and anything else deemed unpleasant? Are institutions and communities of a suitable kind required for our flourishing, or is freedom from constraints on individuals’ discretion ultimately decisive? Is genetic information largely responsible for the sorts of people we become, with “environment” playing a far less powerful role? Are the key societal challenges we face rooted in human biology, to which, therefore, we should look for solutions? Such questions point us to contending values, positions, and yearnings within the current bioethical debate over human enhancement.1
If the controversy over human enhancement were a purely bioethical affair, those outside the field might simply shrug and say, “I’ll leave them to it—this has nothing to do with me.” But it does, for the above queries are not distinctively bioethical: underneath the discrete threads of bioethical controversy over enhancement are answers, often presupposed, to questions about who we are as human beings and what makes for a flourishing life.
The focus of this book is the controversy over radical enhancement, or transhumanism.2 Its advocates press us to feature research aimed at the biotechnological heightening of select capacities so far beyond any human ceiling that the beings thus endowed could not simply be called “better humans”: the term used to designate them—whether “posthuman,” “godlike,” or “divine”—should instead signal their existence on a higher ontological plane. Their own, highly contentious priorities and assumptions about what makes for a flourishing life drive transhumanists’ insistence that we make this commitment.
Though the responses of transhumanists and their critics to the above queries diverge, for both, what we commit to going forward will reflect what we value most and the basis on which we do so (Levin 2014b, 4). The human stakes of how we respond are immense both because transhumanists urge humanity’s own self-transcendence via science and technology and because their arguments state or suggest that bioenhancement may be morally required.3
In critiques of transhumanism thus far, outcomes—as distinct from core convictions of its advocates—have often been the focus of critical assessment.
Challenging transhumanism based on possible results of the availability of radical-enhancement technologies, such as increased social inequality, is certainly important. But it has limited range, by which I mean that if consequences identified as undesirable could be alleviated or forestalled via regulation and subsidies, then moral objections to transhumanism would be met.
The paramount area of moral concern, right now, should not be how we respond if and when immensely high-tech interventions become available but instead whether we may—let alone must—commit massive resources to the targeted pursuit of radical enhancement at all. Opponents give transhumanists an unearned argumentative edge when they allow the focus to be on outcomes, with the associated back and forth over what regulations and subsidies, if any, should be put in place to forestall increased social inequality and permit all who are thus inclined to make good on what Nick Bostrom depicts as “the birthright of every creature” to a vastly augmented existence—“a right no less sacred for having been trampled upon since the beginning of time” (2019, 5).
Though prior critics have addressed transhumanists’ fundamental claims about what we are and should become, discrete disputes, for example, contention over whether there exists a “human nature,” have often taken center stage. Transhumanists’ overarching commitments have received valuable consideration, but contesting transhumanism at its roots requires that one tackle advocates’ overarching commitments in a more thoroughgoing and integrated way than has occurred thus far. In Posthuman Bliss? The Failed Promise of Transhumanism, I reveal transhumanists’ notion of humanity’s self-transformation into divinity via science and technology as pure, albeit seductive, fantasy. I do this by unmasking grave weaknesses in their views and assumptions about the mind and brain, ethics, liberal democracy, epistemology, and ontology. My arguments unite philosophical with scientific challenges to transhumanism based on current findings in fields including cognitive psychology, genetics, and neuroscience. By proceeding in this way, I strengthen an existing case for our needing to reject it.
Philosophically and, to a great extent, scientifically, I proceed in sharp contrast to transhumanists themselves. They deny all intrinsic merit to human values, priorities, and aims—indeed, to humanity itself—without making the requisite philosophical arguments, which could then be subjected to the light of day. Vintage philosophical inquiry is even eschewed (Bostrom 2014, 58–59, 256). Contra transhumanists, in taking up the gauntlet that their push for categorical enhancement and associated technologies throws down, we have never needed philosophy more.
Transhumanists may appear to be philosophically engaged when, at times, they assert continuity with august figures, including Plato, Aristotle, and Immanuel Kant, but these claims are decontextualized and self-serving. My
extensive, prior research in Greek philosophy gives me a distinctive platform on which to critique transhumanism and propose an alternative. In addition, my background in the broader history of Western philosophy enables me to draw where relevant on other figures, above all, Kant.
Insofar as my arguments against transhumanism are philosophical, their conclusions stand apart from the technological feasibility of what advocates propose. It turns out, however, that “the factual premises upon which the entire . . . project is built are false” (Rosoff 2012, 174). On scientific grounds, we are justified in opposing transhumanists’ presumption that pertinent developments, if properly resourced, will occur. They, of all people, should root their claims for what I term theoretical and practical “proof of concept” in extensive familiarity with cognitive psychology, neuroscience, molecular and evolutionary biology, and genetics. In reality, not only do transhumanists tend to neglect deep engagement with these sciences, but my examination of current findings shows that they often rely on questionable or outdated claims. At pertinent junctures, my arguments go into a good bit of scientific detail because that level of engagement is needed to counteract the visceral appeal of transhumanism, together with advocates’ thin provision of supporting evidence.
Chapters 1 to 3 elucidate and critique transhumanists’ views of the mind and brain, as illustrated by their advocacy of cognitive and moral bioenhancement. Chapter 1 shows that transhumanists are rational essentialists, of an extreme sort, whose conviction of boundless prospects for self-creation is folded into that essentialism.
Crucially, transhumanists conflate reason and cognition, defining the latter faculty and its upgrading informationally. Taking reason/cognition to operate in a self-contained, or “modular,” way, they presume that the brain reflects this circumscription; as a result, their cherished capacity could be singled out from the rest for heightening. Not only is this construction of reason vastly constrictive, but research on psychostimulants, which transhumanists cite as practical proof of concept for more dramatic augmentation, undermines their view that our cognitive operations are segmented, self-contained, and upgradable as such.
A normative position is embedded in any proffered construction of human nature. By definition, rational essentialism treats nonrational faculties (i.e., those besides reason proper) as subordinate to reason, but this relative valuation does not itself settle the question of whether faculties other than reason also have necessary roles in a life well lived. Committed to extreme rational essentialism, transhumanists deem it irrational to support anything short of a maximal heightening of rational/cognitive ability. Purportedly, reason/cognition operates best when unchecked by nonrational/noncognitive activity. Thus, alongside their advocacy of cognitive bioenhancement, transhumanists propose to weaken and even eliminate the capacity for “negative” affect, including emotions such as
anger. Once again, they evince a view of the mind as composed of faculties that can be discretely assessed and manipulated per their evaluations.
Chapter 2 extends the argument of Chapter 1 by directly contesting transhumanists’ entire picture of the mind and brain. Across the board, they fail to appreciate the complexity of our mental operations. Centrally in this regard, transhumanists are on the losing side of a decades-long dispute about the nature of emotion: on the merits, “appraisal theory” has superseded “basic-emotion” and “dual-process” views, whose proponents, like transhumanists, view the mind as a set of compartments whose functionality is explained by dedicated areas or systems in the brain. Klaus Scherer’s version of appraisal theory is especially promising, for it integrates well the insight that “cognition” is not a separately identifiable aspect of our mental operations; distinguishes clearly between wide and narrow senses of “cognition”; and accommodates the subtlety of human emotion. Further, it is compatible with mounting evidence of the brain’s complexity.
Regarding the mind, what is problematic is not rational essentialism per se but transhumanists’ version. Here, comparative discussion with Aristotle is instructive. Bostrom wrongly views his and Aristotle’s versions as compatible (2008, 130), for only the latter incorporates a necessary role for nonrational faculties and intrapsychic harmony. By Aristotle’s lights, insisting that maximal augmentation of reason is the sole “rational” course testifies to one’s irrationality. Philosophically speaking, I heartily agree. What’s more, concerning the mind and brain, my investigation unearths a powerful alliance between Aristotle, writing in the fourth century bce, and the present day. While transhumanists’ lens is at odds with contemporary findings, Aristotle’s view of the mind shares important commitments with Scherer’s appraisal theory and is broadly compatible with mounting evidence of the brain’s complexity. Thus, in the trio comprising Aristotle, transhumanism, and contemporary science, transhumanism is the outlier!
Though its typical focus is augmenting rationality/cognition, transhumanist discourse also addresses moral bioenhancement. One might hope that a richer picture of our nonrational faculties would emerge when this occurs. Regrettably, as I argue in Chapter 3, this is not the case. The most visible advocates thus far of moral bioenhancement are Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, who trace the threat of “ultimate harm,” or human extinction, to inadequate prosocial motivation. Since a species-wide upgrade is needed, on utilitarian grounds, our use of bioenhancers to augment their favored attitudes, altruism and “a sense of justice,” could be compelled. As elsewhere, transhumanist faith in the manipulability of favored mental targets reflects a commitment to “neuroessentialism” and to the strength and precision of what genetic adjustments could deliver regarding complex phenotypic traits (Racine et al. 2005, 160–61; FitzGerald and
Challenging transhumanists’ views of the mind and brain is quite important, but a thorough assessment of transhumanism also requires that its guiding, often tacit, ethical commitments be made transparent so that they—and their sociopolitical implications—can be scrutinized. In Chapter 4, I argue that transhumanists’ avowed commitment to personal autonomy in decisions about bioenhancement is undercut by evidence in their accounts of a utilitarian obligation to enhance, well beyond the moral domain of Persson and Savulescu, that could jeopardize liberal democracy.
At first, this may be surprising since routine claims of a bedrock commitment to autonomy, often combined with libertarian propensities, frame transhumanist advocacy of bioenhancement. When these assertions are taken at face value, transhumanists are critiqued for a lack of concern with broader welfare. In fact, they evince a driving concern with broader welfare, at the species level.
Though Persson and Savulescu’s utilitarian rationale for bioenhancement is explicit, it is far from unique in transhumanist discourse. When arguing for their agenda, transhumanists give evidential import to parallels with existing measures taken to promote the health and welfare of the public. In so doing, they reflect a current, broader tendency to extend the scope of “public health” beyond familiar initiatives. They forge these ties, however, without flagging the backdrop as that of public health, let alone owning the utilitarian justification that anchors measures instituted on that basis. Since what transhumanists trumpet in decisions about bioenhancement is individual autonomy, we might not even register pockets of argumentative reliance on the sphere of public health as sounding a countervailing note. But we should, as they are signs of transhumanists’ willingness to defend their proposals on utilitarian grounds.
As transhumanists’ foremost concern is the capacities of future beings, they are necessarily invested in the content of procreative decisions. In their handling of this topic, we witness a key tension between transhumanists’ usual proclamation that choosing bioenhancement is simply one legitimate expression of personal autonomy and the tacit, utilitarian undergirding of its valorization. More specifically, their commitments fit with an “ideal” form of utilitarianism, devoted to maximizing featured, “objective” goods. Further, while utilitarianism usually instructs us to give equal weight to current and future beings, transhumanism gives such precedence to the latter that it “assign[s] . . . moral responsibility to the present generation for the potential harms caused to all future generations” (Buchanan et al. 2000, 231).
Ethical stances always have sociopolitical implications, and every politics presupposes an ethical position (Nagel 1988, 171). But the link between ethics
and politics is especially tight for utilitarianism, whose supporters have tended to think that the justification for utilitarian political governance is more powerful than that for such decision-making by individuals (Williams 1973, 136). Transhumanists’ notion that bioenhancement could be morally required, conjoined with their utilitarian commitments, yields a strong concern that sociopolitical requirements would flow from the implementation of transhumanists’ agenda so as to put liberal democracy at risk. This risk has generally been underappreciated by commentators across the spectrum of positions on bioenhancement.
The bulwark of transhumanists’ defense against claims of common ground between their position and eugenic history is that prior eugenics was state managed, while transhumanism features freedom of choice. To preserve this line of defense, transhumanists must make a strong case that personal discretion would steer decisions relating to enhancement. That their rejection of substantive ties to earlier eugenics zeroes in on this point of contrast shows transhumanists’ awareness of its pivotal role.
When transhumanists distance themselves from eugenic history, Nazi eugenics is typically at the fore, either directly or by implication. Reference to it does not settle the matter, however, for an investigation of links between transhumanism and Anglo-American eugenics, conducted in Chapter 5, yields important connections that span notions of human agency, views of our mental faculties, ethical commitments, and deleterious implications for democracy as we know it.
Since ethical imperatives are only as strong as their epistemological and ontological underpinnings, in Chapter 6, I identify and critique those that steer transhumanism. Addressing central weaknesses in advocates’ handling of the mind, brain, ethics, and politics, prior chapters dealt, to some degree, with transhumanists’ ontological and epistemological commitments. Here, I critique directly their equation of the real and knowable with information.
Both transhumanism and Anglo-American eugenics are “totalizing visions,”4 meaning that scientific positions on what is and can be known are supposed to reflect the unfiltered findings of reason and are seen, on that basis, as the guideposts for ethical decision-making. Having previously addressed transhumanists’ ethical commitments, I challenge the ontological and epistemological prongs of their totalizing lens. In crucial respects, what they take to be context-independent truths involving information that will be fully fleshed out with continued research by biologists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists are actually problematic holdovers from a particular historical and cultural setting, World War II and its aftermath: prior to that time, the informational vantage point that came to seem self-evidently true was nowhere to be found. The lens on human biology anchored in information theory, cybernetics, and Francis
Crick’s Central Dogma, questioned from the start, increasingly recedes today in favor of “developmental systems theory.”
Once we reject an informational vantage point on reality and knowing, the question becomes: Are we capable of arriving at any ontology and epistemology whose context-independent rightness we could confirm? We have good reason to conclude that the answer is “no,” for not only does scientific realism “[commit] one to an unverifiable correspondence with the world” (Fine 1984, 86), but also—as Kant saw long ago—how humans approach anything at all stems from the way in which our minds work, indeed, must work for us to think, experience, and imagine anything at all. Evelyn Fox Keller brings the scientific and broader points together well:
By what mandate is the world obliged to make sense to us? Is such an assumption even plausible? I would say no, and on a priori grounds. . . . The human mind does not encompass the world; rather, it is itself a part of that world, and no amount of self-reflection provides an escape from that limitation. . . . The mind—along with its capacity to make rational sense—is itself a biological phenomenon. . . . The need for understanding, as for explanation, is a human need, and one that can be satisfied only within the constraints that human inquirers bring with them. (2002, 295–97)
Transhumanists fail utterly to glean this unbreachable human scenario, citing Kant as a backdrop for rationally steered pursuit of humanity’s selftranscendence. His Critique of Pure Reason does, indeed, bear on transhumanism. It does so, however, by showing as irrational advocates’ insistence that human reason will spearhead a project requiring fundamentally more of it than reason, as a capacity of ours, could shoulder.
For transhumanists, humanity is gravely and irremediably flawed, but salvation is achievable if we would but dedicate ourselves to creating posthumanity. All together, Chapters 1 to 6 strongly support the view that transhumanists’ vision is misguided, on philosophical and scientific grounds. If dramatic, salutary change involving the human occurs, it will stem from our dedicated efforts, individually and collectively, to narrow the gap between reflectively affirmed human ideals and their worldly manifestations. This view reflects a hopefulness for humanity that is absent from transhumanism. In this way, it is far more optimistic. If we sign on to transhumanism, beyond endorsing fantastical claims about what will be, we are accepting that we should no longer see human goods and flourishing as having intrinsic worth. In the book’s closing chapter, I propose that Aristotle’s virtue ethics, adjusted to accommodate liberal commitments reflected in America’s founding documents, is well worth consulting as we consider how best to move forward.
Virtue ethics is presented as a “third way—an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist approaches that dominated modern moral philosophy until very recently” (Farrelly and Solum 2008, 1). This characterization is misleading, for, strictly speaking, the three approaches are not competitors for the same role. Unlike utilitarianism and deontology, virtue ethics foregrounds “the importance of the agent’s life as a whole, and, relatedly, the importance of moral education and development” (Annas 2006, 519). Virtue ethics is holistic, too, because it builds in the ethical value of commitments to other people; incorporates and integrates levels of human concern, individual up through civic; and defuses the thought that in any situation, we must choose between pursuing our own and others’ good.
In my view, virtue ethics can help America frame a way forward amidst its struggles with illiberalism. Quite apart from the impossibility of our mapping ancient notions wholesale onto the present, the attempt would be detrimental because our vision of how to proceed must incorporate liberal commitments to justice and equality; hence, I sketch cornerstones of an approach that is rooted in Aristotle but adapted to America today. With the reinvigoration of liberal democracy in view, a potent way to mobilize people is to tap into what many already care substantially about but whose opportunities for cultivation and expression are constricted by our present milieu. On my account, virtue and core American ideals fit the bill, and the latter can be accommodated under the umbrella of virtue ethics.
There is no proxy for the thought and practical engagement involving human goods and flourishing that must be done in the present, but we have emerged from and belong to philosophical and political traditions that richly repay our consultation. My belief that we can shoulder this work reflects my view that human capacities promise a great deal more than transhumanists appreciate. Not only do their arguments fail, but transhumanism fails to do us justice.
1 Assessing Transhumanist Advocacy of Cognitive Bioenhancement
1. Introduction
According to Savulescu and Guy Kahane’s Principle of Procreative Beneficence, parents are obliged “to create children with the best chance of the best life” (2009) or, per John Harris, to optimize “possible functioning” (2010, 53). Central to this pursuit, as advocates conceive it, is profound cognitive enhancement. If the Principle of Procreative Beneficence were implemented regarding cognitive enhancement, the result would be highly impoverishing.
To see this, we must lay out what cognitive bioenhancement would allegedly augment and, correspondingly, what transhumanists devalue about our mental life, even favoring its extirpation.1 Though transhumanists critique their opponents’ human essentialism while denying their own, they embrace a version of rational essentialism (Sections 2 and 3.1). Reason, they assert, is the heart of what counts about us, and, suitably heightened, it would both enable the emergence of posthumanity and anchor posthuman existence. Although transhumanists align themselves here with a grand Western tradition extending back to Presocratic philosophy, avowedly, their particular tie is to the Enlightenment, where our rational faculty was to be the Ariadne’s thread allowing us to sidestep lairs and dead ends represented by religion, tradition, and nonrational faculties undergirding our reliance on them.
By definition, rational essentialism treats other faculties as in some way subordinate, but this relative valuation does not, of itself, preclude their also having necessary roles in a flourishing life. In the present work, the nonrational domain of interest is “affect,” broadly construed to cover emotion, mood, and desire/ motivation. As I show in Section 3.2, transhumanists’ version of rational essentialism includes outright hostility to the nonrational in the form of “negative” affect, spanning desire, emotion (e.g., anger), and mood (e.g., sadness). Quite apart from the impoverishment of our mental life that such a picture embodies, this dismissal turns out to be problematic for transhumanists’ own investment in cognitive enhancement.
Though transhumanists link themselves to a rich philosophical tradition when foregrounding reason as the linchpin of our humanity, when they directly
consider how this treasured faculty would be augmented, “reason”/“rational” and “cognition”/“cognitive” are conflated (Section 4). Transhumanists, like cognitive neuroscientists, operate with an informational construction of the “cognitive” in “cognitive enhancement.” This means that forms of rational engagement not reducible to informational manipulation—including the creativity required for fresh scientific discoveries and philosophical insights—are not included. Notwithstanding this conflation, because “cognitive enhancement” is standard rubric within the enhancement debate and scientific accounts, I use it without comment when presenting claims and findings from those milieux. In addition, I treat “reason”/“cognition” (or “rational”/“cognitive”) as a unit in order to distinguish it from what transhumanists lodge under nonrational/noncognitive faculties. I differentiate reason and cognition expressly, however, when showing how transhumanists’ conflation helps to render their picture of the mind untenable— a notable illustration being that, per cognitivist theories of emotion, considered in Chapter 2, emotion is nonrational yet importantly cognitive.
Section 5 considers reasons for transhumanists’ conviction of the promise of cognitive enhancement, the first of which is their paramount investment and confidence in our rational capacity itself to spearhead the endeavor. In addition, transhumanists extrapolate from what they treat as an established finding that cognitive bioenhancement already occurs, viewing that as a clear harbinger of far more powerful technologies to come.
I close the chapter (Section 6) by showing why transhumanists’ fixation on “cognition” and conviction of its direct, unadulterated augmentation are misguided with respect to aspects of capacity and function that they want—and need—to see upgraded. Sure that psychopharmacological agents successfully deliver cognitive enhancement, they take this as promissory evidence of more powerful technologies to come. Pace transhumanists, however, research findings involving cognitive tradeoffs, baseline-dependent effects, and creativity show that psychostimulants’ delivery of cognitive upgrades is far from clear (Section 6.1). Such findings are in keeping with the existence of strong neuroscientific support for the complexity of our mental operations generally. Unsurprisingly, therefore, early research on transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation suggests the potential for cognitive tradeoffs and baseline-dependent effects.
Neuroscientific findings for psychostimulants also challenge transhumanists’ presumption that sound cognition operates apart from noncognitive factors, for improvements in cognitive functioning, such as they are, may be indirect, with the primary impact being on affect, specifically, motivation (Section 6.2). Finally, I cite neuroscientific evidence that positive affect, here, mood, can actually diminish cognitive effectiveness, while a negative mood augments it (Section 6.3). Such findings suggest that dampening, not to mention eliminating, our very
capacity for negative affect would likely make our overall cognitive functioning less, not more, effective.
2. The (Unsuccessful) Essentialism of Enhancement Critics
Concepts of human nature are indispensable to both transhumanists and their opponents (Hauskeller 2009). Transhumanists, however, do not see the matter thus, insisting that only their critics are what we can call “capacity-,” or “faculty-essentialists.” Typically, if transhumanists directly concede that anything constitutes our nature, being as such nonnegotiable, it is an unquenchable drive to surpass the level of attainment that we have achieved at any given time. Among philosophers, this is a nontraditional way of construing what is crucial about us, and transhumanists apparently assume that operating thus will allow them to sidestep the charge of essentialism that they level at opponents— misleadingly termed “bioconservatives” since critiques come from the political left and right (Parens 2015, 52). As I will argue, however, transhumanists are essentialists, focusing—like so many philosophers in the Western tradition— on rationality: though transhumanists routinely accuse their critics of upholding the status quo, on this very important matter, they are traditionalists. Transhumanists and their opponents, then, do not differ on whether they embrace a human nature in a way that qualifies them as faculty-essentialists, but instead based on what that essence is and how we may or even must endeavor to augment it.2
Critics tend to be unabashed essentialists: there is something—whether it be called “Factor X” (Fukuyama 2002), “dignity” (President’s Council on Bioethics 2003), or “giftedness” (Sandel 2007)—that is the core of being human. Further, seeking to alter defining human features or capacities, we would jeopardize those precious characteristics, at our peril. This is not to say that our level of actualization of what is essential is rightly frozen for all time, for these critics make clear that individuals and communities could often do more to narrow the gap between fitting ideals and their enactment.
When assessing transhumanists’ express handling of essentialism, one must distinguish between their (1) deeming critics’ defenses of our nature untenable, a position that the present section affirms, and (2) unsuccessful attempts to distance themselves from opponents by claiming that the latter alone are facultyessentialists, to be addressed in Section 3. To illustrate how these defenses of human nature have thus far come up short, I consider the positions of Francis Fukuyama and the President’s Council on Bioethics, whose conceptual vagueness hampers their efforts to show what is essential to us that should, as such, be retained.3
In his attempt to specify our essential feature, Fukuyama uses the term “Factor X” as a placeholder for what would fit the bill: “What the demand for equality of recognition implies is that when we strip all of a person’s contingent and accidental characteristics away, there remains some essential human quality underneath that is worthy of a certain minimal level of respect—call it Factor X” (2002, 149). As “the human essence, the most basic meaning of what it is to be human,” Factor X “etches a bright red line around the whole of the human race and requires equality of respect for all of those on the inside” (150). The sociopolitical outcome of denying this essence is potentially disastrous, for “we need to be the same in some one critical respect in order to have equal rights. . . . [If] the clear red line around the whole of humanity could no longer be drawn, the way would be paved for a return to a much more hierarchical ordering of society” (153, 155).
Fukuyama’s indication of why Factor X needs defining is clearer than his unpacking of it, for he simply identifies a number of traits, claiming that what is distinctive of humans is the collection in its entirety: “Factor X cannot be reduced to the possession of moral choice, or reason, or language, or sociability, or sentience, or emotions, or consciousness, or any other quality that has been put forth. . . . It is all of these qualities coming together in a human whole that make up Factor X” (171). It may appear that Fukuyama has simply given up the attempt to define our nature in the vein of his initial framing of the quest (149–50). He continues, however, to reach for a unifying core, anchoring Factor X in “a genetic endowment . . . that distinguishes a human in essence from other types of creatures” (171).
According to Fukuyama, what “we want to protect from any future advances in biotechnology . . . [is] the full range of our complex, evolved natures. . . . We do not want to disrupt either the unity or the continuity of human nature, and thereby the human rights that are based on it” (172). Although the key formulations here—“we want to protect,” “We do not want to disrupt”—are descriptive, their force is strongly normative. I am untroubled by the fact that Fukuyama’s collection of traits is empirically unverifiable, for, as Michael Hauskeller observes, no conception of human nature could be confirmed (or refuted) in such a way (2016, 7). Genuine difficulties include the fact that Fukuyama’s account of Factor X provides no direction concerning relative priorities among listed items or what would count as exemplariness. In addition, what Fukuyama ultimately wants to preserve is a certain phenotype. Consequently, rooting his favored nexus of traits in a particular “genetic endowment” (Fukuyama 2002, 171) is an incomplete strategy at best.4 Further, if what need safeguarding are features that, phenotypically speaking, could themselves be interwoven more fruitfully than is often currently the case, then unflinching allegiance to a certain genetic profile may
actually be counterproductive—assuming, per impossibile, that it could be enforced (Juengst 2009, 50).
What is more, Fukuyama may have opened the door to enhancements of the sort that Nicholas Agar calls “moderate” because they do not surpass the upper bounds of the human range (2010; 2014). Unless we are prepared to claim that the most exceptional human beings (e.g., Plato, Einstein) are themselves posthuman, enhancements “that shift[ed] someone outside the range of normality might not always undermine the basis for human dignity and human rights” (Kaebnick 2014, 172); that is to say, they need not jeopardize the role of Factor X to preserve “equality of recognition” (Fukuyama 2002, 149). Rather, enhancement “would seem to pose a problem only when it occurs often enough and dramatically enough to pull apart the statistical curves that describe normal ranges of human traits” (Kaebnick 2014, 172–73). In other words, “If human nature is a dispositional, selective population concept, then interventions, whether genetic or not, cannot alter human nature simply by moving some individuals within the range of traits already thought part of human nature” (Daniels 2009, 36). Fukuyama’s “equality of recognition” might be impaired only at such time that some were denied opportunities to “moderately” enhance themselves that had previously been seized by fellow-citizens no more entitled in the abstract than they; at that point, to preserve equal recognition, society might need to commit to augmentation for the rest.
“Dignity” is the President’s Council on Bioethics’s counterpart to Factor X. One indication that the Council’s framework is essentialist is its dependence on a number of salient Aristotelian ideas, mostly from the Nicomachean Ethics. Though Aristotle is mentioned expressly (2003, 196, 210 with 271n1), the Council’s reliance on him is largely tacit. Parallels of note include a teleological orientation, with flourishing construed as the ultimate goal of everything we humans do (205, 215; Nicomachean Ethics I 7 [Aristotle 1894]). The Council also avows that the state of one’s soul “implicates or points to something final and all-embracing” from a human standpoint (205; Nicomachean Ethics I 7, 13) and that repeated acts of a single type give rise to corresponding habits and character traits (236; Nicomachean Ethics II 1–2). In addition, flourishing for each of us is “a lifelong being-at-work exercising one’s human powers well” (293; Nicomachean Ethics I 9). Further, “Happiness of the soul is inseparable from the pleasure that comes from perfecting our natures” and from developing “our capacity to satisfy the desires that by nature make us happiest” (270, 269; Nicomachean Ethics II 3, X 4–5). What’s more, we flourish not as isolated individuals but only in communities (151, 192; Politics I 2 [Aristotle 1957b]), within which we should strive for human excellence, not that of god/the divine (149, 308; Nicomachean Ethics X 6–9 with Whiting 1986).
Though the parallel is far from perfect, for the President’s Council on Bioethics, dignity is the closest functional counterpart to Aristotle’s reason, the distinguishing feature of our nature and overall key to our flourishing (Nicomachean Ethics I 7, 13). The Council, chaired at the time by Leon Kass, is deeply concerned that biotechnological enhancement of “our . . . bodies, minds, and performance” would alter or jeopardize “the dignity of human activity” (2003, 105); it would, for instance, damage “the dignity of human sport” (143). More encompassingly, the Council channels Kant, specifically, his Kingdom of Ends formulation of the Categorical Imperative (1911, IV 433–35), when claiming that we “cannot ignore the great achievement of liberal society in its concern for the dignity of the individual person—for seeing individuals not simply as useful and expendable means to society’s ends, but as ends in themselves” (266). Moreover, we cannot flourish absent “the dignity of our own embodiment,” and, by affirming mortality, we commit ourselves to “a dignity beyond all disorder, decay, and death” (149, 200).
Though no clear picture of dignity emerges, the term is closely associated, even interchangeable, with “excellence,” “worthiness,” and “admirability,” and tethered to traits, activities, and conduct deemed nature-befitting. Thus, augmented performances would jeopardize “the dignity or excellence of human activity” (123). More generally, every activity whose purpose is not the meeting of a human need “has a distinct character and excellence, and each retains a dignity unique to itself. . . . Even those activities necessary for life . . . can be done in a way that is dignified or undignified, human or dehumanizing. . . . What matters is that we produce the given result . . . in a human way as human beings” (153). For the Council, this means that embracing bioenhancement brings “the danger of violating or deforming the nature of human agency and the dignity of the naturally human way of activity” (292). Overall in its report, “dignity” operates as a sort of unexplained explainer, with diminutions of fuzziness about its meaning due largely to its association with other terms, centrally including those noted above.5
As Jonathan Glover observes, “In searching for essential characteristics, we seem to be looking, not for some fact, but for a definition” (2006, 84). I thus imagine Socrates posing, right about now, a “What is F-ness?” query. Socrates himself wrote nothing; by scholarly consensus, Plato’s early dialogues are the place where we get the best sense of his mission and methodology. When articulating his renowned questions regarding values, for instance, courage, Socrates seeks an account of the essential feature that all things courageous share and that serves to distinguish courage from closely related values, such as justice (Euthyphro 5d, 6c–d, 12c–e, 15c–e [Plato 1995]; Laches 190c–191e [1903]).6 The definitional assays of Socrates’s interlocutors in Plato’s early dialogues always fail. This is not tantamount, however, to the failure of Socrates’s philosophical methodology: its
use should leave no doubt, at least for readers, that uses of terms like “courageous” and “just” are not self-justifying, requiring instead an independent defense of the crux of each concept under whose explanatory umbrella all these uses fall.7
From a Socratic standpoint, the position of the President’s Council amounts to something of the form, “All things dignified are excellent and nature-befitting,” which does not serve to distinguish the subject from other sorts of things to which “excellent” and “nature-befitting” also apply. This situation harks back to the Euthyphro, where the dialogue’s eponym defines the pious as “what all the deities love” (9e); this offering from Euthyphro does not differentiate piety from other values that are god-beloved, nor does it explain what it is about the pious that makes it lovable (10a–11b). Furthermore, as “dignity” appears to be synonymous (or virtually so) with “excellence” and “nature-befitting,” any of the three could function as subject, with the other two as predicates. To offer a genuine defense of what is precious about us, we would have to depart from this circumscribed orbit.
Although reference to Socratic method helps to bring out what is lacking in such provisions of our essence, addressing that lack necessarily takes us beyond it. Plato himself flags this for us in the Republic. After a series of futile attempts to define justice (dikaiosunē) in the dialogue’s initial book, he opens the second by having Glaucon ask whether Socrates wishes to produce only the appearance of having persuaded his auditors that a just life is superior to an unjust one, as opposed to actually convincing them (357a–b [Plato 2003]). To Socrates’s affirmation that, of course, he wants the latter, Glaucon archly replies, “Well, then, you aren’t accomplishing what you wish” (357b). Needful as it may be for clearing the ground of flawed and inconsistent beliefs, intuitions, and so on, that fail to survive rational scrutiny, once the task becomes defending conceptions of values and priorities that bear directly on our flourishing, Socratic method must give way to sustained philosophical inquiry and the fruits that only it can yield. Structurally, the Republic is built around Plato’s investigation of individual and communal justice, expansively construed (Annas 1981, 13) in terms of overarching values, aspirations, and worthy endeavors. Plato’s methodology here evinces his recognition that, to be genuinely convincing, one’s philosophical defenses must focus on these, not definitional specifications.
Invocations of “Factor X,” “dignity,” and the like not only do not but cannot bear the explanatory heavy lifting required of them (see also Buchanan 2009a; Nielsen 2011, 28–30; Glannon 2015, 1255).8 The spotlight is wrongly put directly on them as the hinge of what matters about us, as such terms are placeholders for whatever it is that is precious and must allegedly remain intact (Levin 2017a, 298). This stance is reinforced when one fully appreciates that, like justice in Plato’s Republic, Factor X, dignity, and equivalents are normative notions: once
