Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits

Truly Human Enhancement

Basic Bioethics

Arthur Caplan, editor

A complete list of the books in the Basic Bioethics series appears at the back of this book.

Truly Human Enhancement

A Philosophical Defense of Limits

Nicholas Agar

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Agar, Nicholas.

Truly human enhancement : a philosophical defense of limits / Nicholas Agar.

  pages  cm. — (Basic bioethics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-02663-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Medical innovations—Moral and ethical aspects.  2. Biotechnology—Moral and ethical aspects.  3. Genetic engineering—Philosophy.  4. Medical ethics. I. Title.

RA418.5.M4A33  2013

174.2—dc23

2013016659

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

d_r0

Contents

Series Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

1  Radical Human Enhancement as a Transformative Change

Transformative Change and Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The Rational Irreversibility of Some Transformative Changes

Positive and Negative Transformative Changes

Radical Enhancement as a Negative Transformative Change

2  Two Ideals of Human Enhancement

Defining Human Enhancement

The Objective Ideal of Human Enhancement

The Instrumental and Intrinsic Value of Human Capacities

Anthropocentric Ways of Evaluating Enhancements

3  What Interest Do We Have in Superhuman Feats?

The Value of Enhanced Marathons

Simulation and Meaning

Is Human Enhancement the Right Way to Pursue External Goods?

Is the Distinction between Internalizing and Externalizing Enhancement Philosophically Principled?

4  The Threat to Human Identities from Too Much Enhancement

Two Psychological Accounts of Personal Identity

A Threat to Identity from Life Extension

Radical Enhancement and Autobiographical Memory

How Does Autobiographical Memory Work?

An Asymmetry in Our Attitudes toward Past and Future

The Tension between Enhancement and Survival

The Analogy with Childhood

Why Radical Enhancement Is More Psychologically Disruptive Than Growing Up

The Regress Problem: The Tragedy of Unending Enhancement

5  Should We Enhance Our Cognitive Powers to Better Understand the Universe and Our Place in It?

Understanding the Consequences of Cognitive Enhancement for Science

Two Ways in Which Human Science and Radically Enhanced Science Might Be Fundamentally Different

Differences in Idealization as Fundamental Differences between Human and Radically Enhanced Science

Idealizations That Enhance the Power of Scientific Explanations

Mathematics as a Bridge between Human and Radically Enhanced Science

Human Science, Radically Enhanced Science, and the Theory of Everything

Dawkins and Haldane versus Deutsch on the Limits of Human Science

How Different Idealizations Generate Different Theories of Everything

Valuing Human Science and Radically Enhanced Science

Radical Enhancement Reduces the Intrinsic Value of Our Cognitive Faculties

What of Scientific Enhancement’s Instrumental Benefits?

6  The Moral Case against Radical Life Extension

Two Kinds of Anti-Aging Research

The SENS Response to the Seven Deadly Things

Is Aging Really a Disease?

The Testing Problem

Why WILT (and Other SENS Therapies) Will Require Dangerous Human Trials

Where to Find Human Guinea Pigs for SENS

Will Volunteer Risk Pioneers Help Out?

Ethical Anti-Aging Experiments Not Now, but Some Day?

7  A Defense of Truly Human Enhancement

The Ubiquity of Human Enhancement

Enhancement and Heredity

Defining Genetic Enhancement

The Interactionist View of Development

Six Ways in Which Genetic Enhancements Could Turn Out to Be More Morally Problematic Than Environmental Enhancements (but, in Fact, Do Not)

The Ideal of Truly Human Enhancement

8  Why Radical Cognitive Enhancement Will (Probably) Enhance Moral Status

Enhancing Moral Status versus Enhancing Moral Dispositions

Why It’s So Difficult to Enhance the Moral Status of Persons

A Justification for (Talking about) Moral Statuses

Three Obstacles to Moral Enhancement

(1) The Problem of the Logic of Thresholds

(2) The Problem of How to Improve upon Inviolability

(3) The Problem of Expressing Moral Statuses Higher Than Personhood

Three Attempts to Describe Higher Moral Statuses

DeGrazia’s Dispositionally Superior Post-Persons

McMahan’s Freer, More Conscious Post-Persons

Douglas’s Enhanced Cooperators

Criteria for Higher Moral Statuses and the Expressibility Problem

Why Cognitively Enhanced Beings Are Probably Better Than Us at Judging Relative Moral Status

Why Sufficiently Cognitively Enhanced Beings Will (Probably) Find That Cognitive Differences between Them and Us Mark a Difference in Moral Status

Two Hypotheses about Higher Moral Statuses

9  Why Moral Status Enhancement Is a Morally Bad Thing

Some Assumptions

Why a Change in Relative Moral Status Is Likely to Lead to Significant Harms for Human Mere Persons

Why Post-Persons Will Probably Identify Many Supreme Opportunities Requiring the Sacrifice of Mere Persons

What Complaint Can Mere Persons Make about the Harms They Suffer in Mixed Societies?

Why a Loss of Relative Status Is Unlikely to Be Adequately Compensated

10  A Technological Yet Truly Human Future—as Depicted in Star Trek

Notes

Index

Series Foreword

I am pleased to present the forty-first book in the Basic Bioethics series. The series makes innovative works in bioethics available to a broad audience and introduces seminal scholarly manuscripts, state-of-the-art reference works, and textbooks. Topics engaged include the philosophy of medicine, advancing genetics and biotechnology, end-of-life care, health and social policy, and the empirical study of biomedical life. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged.

Arthur Caplan

Basic Bioethics Series Editorial Board

Joseph J. Fins

Rosamond Rhodes

Nadia N. Sawicki

Jan Helge Solbakk

Preface

Our humanity marks the point of convergence of increasingly powerful transformative technologies. Some of these technologies will modify human genetic material. Others will attach cybernetic implants and prostheses to human brains and bodies. This book is a philosophical exploration of the moral and prudential limits on the use of these technologies—specifically on their use to enhance human beings. It presents human enhancement as a good thing, but one that it’s possible to have too much of.

I endorse moderate enhancement—the improvement of significant attributes and abilities to levels within or close to what is currently possible for human beings. I reject radical enhancement—the improvement of significant attributes and abilities to levels that greatly exceed what is currently possible for human beings.

Chapter 1 introduces the notion of a transformative change. Transformative changes alter the state of an individual’s mental or physical characteristics in a way that warrants a significant change in how that individual evaluates his or her experiences, beliefs, or achievements. A human being who undergoes a transformative change may find that experiences properly viewed as very valuable prior to the change are significantly less valuable after the change. And vice versa. One gets a false impression of the significance of a transformative change by asking how a subject will feel about the change once he or she has undergone it. I use the process of body-snatching in the iconic movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers as an example of a transformative change. Body-snatching is a transformation rightly feared by humans even when told that they will be very happy to have undergone it. I present certain enhancements as species of transformative change.

Chapter 2 explores some motives for human enhancement. It presents two ways in which we can assign value to enhancements. What I call the objective ideal assigns prudential value commensurate with the degree to which a given modification objectively enhances a human capacity. As far as the individual who is a candidate for enhancement is concerned, more is always better. I contrast this with the anthropocentric ideal, which allows that some enhancements of greater objective magnitude are more prudentially valuable than enhancements of lesser magnitude but insists that some enhancements of greater magnitude are less valuable than enhancements of lesser magnitude. Such assessments are appropriate for enhancements of our capacities to levels significantly beyond human norms. Both the objective and anthropocentric ideals endorse human enhancement. I argue that the objective and anthropocentric ideals correspond to two different ways to assign value to human capacities. Our capacities’ instrumental value corresponds to the objective ideal; our capacities’ intrinsic value corresponds to the anthropocentric ideal.

Chapter 3 explores the different verdicts on the radical enhancement of our physical and cognitive abilities recommended by the objective and anthropocentric ideals. I argue that we can resolve the apparent tension between interventions that preserve our capacities’ intrinsic value while forgoing increases in instrumental value and interventions that sacrifice intrinsic value in pursuit of increases in instrumental value. We should focus on making nonhuman technologies more instrumentally valuable. Chapter 4 advances philosophical considerations that are, in effect, the inverse of those presented in chapter 3. It focuses not on the feats enabled by radical enhancement, but instead on radical enhancement’s consequences for the identities of those who undergo it. I argue that too much enhancement undermines human identities. It makes our survival over time more precarious.

Chapter 5 tackles a significant rationale for radical cognitive enhancement—the improvement of our species’ capacity to do science. More intelligent scientists should be better able to invent technologies that improve our lives. In addition, they should be better able to satisfy a deep and enduring curiosity about the universe and our place in it. This scientific curiosity is held by some to be the defining virtue of our species. I distinguish the science done by unenhanced human scientists from the science done by radically cognitively enhanced scientists in terms of the idealizations that they use. Idealization is an indispensable feature of science. One of its purposes is to simplify reality to make it tractable by cognitively limited explainers. There’s good reason to expect a systematic difference between the idealizations of radically enhanced scientists and those used by unenhanced scientists. I argue that we are entitled to place a greater value on unenhanced science. Furthermore, forgoing the degrees of cognitive enhancement that would enable us to do radically enhanced science entails no necessary limit on what we can explain about the universe and our place in it.

Chapter 6 switches focus to the very different topic of radical life extension. My primary example here is work of the dissident gerontologist Aubrey de Grey. De Grey aspires to give humans millennial life expectancies. My criticism of this form of human enhancement differs from those advanced in the previous three chapters. I present a moral argument against the experiments required to make radical life extension a reality. I predict immoral experimentation on the poor and disempowered.

The chapters thus far have focused on the prudential and moral dangers of too much enhancement. Chapter 7 presents a case for moderate forms of human enhancement. I argue that attempts to show that there is something inevitably dangerous about moderate enhancements that involve genetic modification or selection fail. Many valid complaints presented as concerns about how humans are enhanced are better understood as directed at the degree of enhancement.

The primary concern of chapters 8 and 9 is that of enhancements of the moral status of human beings. Beings with higher moral status have a greater entitlement to benefits and stronger protections against harm. I find the prospect of beings with a moral status higher than persons frightening. By radically enhancing human cognitive capacities we may inadvertently create beings whose entitlements to benefits and protections against harms are systematically greater than ours. This will be bad news for the unenhanced. Chapter 8 responds to an argument by Allen Buchanan that it is impossible to enhance status beyond personhood. I present an inductive argument for the possible existence of statuses superior to personhood. Chapter 9 presents an argument that it is wrong to risk producing beings with moral status higher than persons. We should look upon moral status enhancement as creating especially morally needy beings. We are subject to no obligation to create them in the first place. We avoid creating their needs by avoiding creating them.

I conclude this book with a chapter that presents a vision of the human future. This vision embraces technological progress. Perhaps Gene Roddenberry had it right in the original series of Star Trek. Here, recognizable human beings use fabulous technologies to travel the universe. They view these technologies very differently from the way they view their brains and bodies. The technologies that transport humans across the universe are radically improved. Human brains and bodies are recognized as grounds of valuable experiences and are preserved.

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to many people who provided intellectual and emotional support during the writing of this book.

Stuart Brock, Felice Marshall, and Cesar Palacios read the entire manuscript and offered very many philosophically valuable suggestions. Edwin Mares and John Matthewson helped enormously with chapter 5, greatly enhancing my understanding of current debates in the philosophy of science. Mark Walker offered especially cogent advocacy of radical human enhancement that forced me to improve many of my arguments for moderation. David Wasserman helped with the argument in chapter 3. Email exchanges with Allen Buchanan and Tom Douglas improved my argument for the possibility of moral status enhancement presented in chapters 8 and 9. I received valuable comments from Simon Keller and Sondra Bacharach. I’m very grateful to Jan Agar—her careful reading of the final manuscript helped me to avoid many typos (and thinkos). I’d like to thank MIT Press’s Phil Laughlin, who was a model of editorial efficiency, Judith Feldmann for her excellent copyediting, and an anonymous referee for the Press, whose comments led to numerous improvements of my arguments.

Finally, I’d like to thank my wife Laurianne, and my sons Alexei and Rafael, who somehow managed to put up with me throughout.

Sections of chapter 3 taken from Nicholas Agar. Sport, simulation, and EPO. In The Ideal of Nature: Debates about Biotechnology and the Environment, ed. Gregory E. Kaebnick. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Sections of chapter 7 taken from Nicholas Agar. There is a legitimate place for human genetic enhancement. In Contemporary Debates in Bioethics, ed. Art Caplan and Robert Arp. Forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapters 8 and 9 largely based on two pieces in the Journal of Medical Ethics:

Nicholas Agar. Why we can’t really say what post-persons are. Journal of Medical Ethics 38 (2012): 144–145.

Nicholas Agar. Why it is possible to enhance and why doing so is wrong. Journal of Medical Ethics (forthcoming).

1

Radical Human Enhancement as a Transformative Change

This is the age of human enhancement. Students and pilots swallow pills to enhance their powers of concentration while preparing for exams or operating stealth bombers. Cosmetic surgeons enhance people’s appearances. Olympians use artificial means to enhance their sporting performances. These are but a few ways by which human beings signal our dissatisfaction with our evolved (or God-given) abilities.

According to some of its advocates, human enhancement is nothing new. We’ve been enhancing human capacities ever since we first taught algebra to our children and forced them to eat their sprouts. What’s new is the intensity and deliberation with which human enhancement is being pursued. Early twenty-first-century humans enhance themselves in many different ways and by many different means. Technicians of enhancement use scalpels, DNA probes, dietary supplements, and experimental educational techniques to improve our appearances, resistance to disease, rate of aging, and intellects.

The seeming ubiquity of human enhancement doesn’t make it right. There’s a vigorous debate among philosophers and social critics about the moral acceptability of any kind of human enhancement. But the fact that enhancement seems to have become an entrenched feature of affluent early twenty-first-century liberal democracies does suggest the need for a moral inquiry that differs from one directed at the category of human enhancement as a whole, an inquiry sensitive to possible moral differences between human enhancements.

The principal focus of this book is the significance of differences in degree of human enhancement. Its guiding idea is that human enhancement is a good thing, but one that it’s possible to have too much of.

A philosophical interest in degrees of human enhancement is timely. A variety of technologies promise human enhancements vastly more powerful than those provided by any pill, injection, supplement, or genetic modification available in the early years of the twenty-first century. Advances in genomics are uncovering genes that influence intelligence, longevity, and many other traits that we may want to enhance. Agricultural biotechnologists modify the genes of our crops and livestock to better suit them to our needs. Similar techniques may boost human intelligence and extend human life spans. Would-be enhancers of humans are not restricted to genetic technologies. Some of them look to cybernetic technologies to enhance by fusing machines to human brains and bodies. The profoundly deaf can now be made to hear, with the attachment to their auditory nerves of cochlear implants. The recipients of these devices would be content to have normal human hearing. But there is no reason that future cochlear implants should not endow them with auditory powers far beyond those conferred by normal biological cochlea. The same goes for any function performed by the human brain. Research into brain–computer interfaces may soon yield implants that dramatically increase our powers of memory or analytical reasoning.

These are exciting prospects. But are they truly desirable? I argue that some ways of enhancing our cognitive powers or of extending our life spans are undesirable specifically because they enhance these attributes to too great a degree. This is so even when lesser degrees of cognitive enhancement or life extension are good. We must distinguish between moderate and radical degrees of enhancement.

Radical enhancement improves significant attributes and abilities to levels that greatly exceed what is currently possible for human beings.¹

Moderate enhancement improves significant attributes and abilities to levels within or close to what is currently possible for human beings.

This book endorses some moderate enhancements but rejects radical enhancement. I call the resulting ideal—a rejection of radical enhancement combined with an endorsement of some moderate enhancements—the ideal of truly human enhancement.² It accepts human needs and interests as guides in selecting among possible ways to make humans better.

The distinction between moderate and radical enhancement admits of vagueness. Consider the enhancement of our cognitive powers. The futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil envisages adorning human brains with increasingly many, increasingly powerful electronic implants, soon generating an intelligence about one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.³ This is radical. A mind that powerful has intellectual capabilities far beyond those of any current human. It’s possible to think of cognitive enhancements that fall into a region of vagueness. The Guinness Book of World Records credits the Korean civil engineer and former child prodigy Kim Ung-Yong with the world’s highest IQ—an intimidating 210. Suppose that IQ is a genuine measure of intelligence. Would an education program that boosted students’ IQs to 250 moderately or radically enhance intelligence? Should a human being with an IQ of 250, on the assumption that IQ is a genuine measure of human intelligence, be credited with powers of intellect that greatly exceed what is currently possible for human beings? Perhaps the best thing to say is that it falls into a region of vagueness between moderate and radical enhancement. Vagueness is an obstacle to the adjudication of certain cases. But it doesn’t invalidate the categories of radical and moderate enhancement. There are hirsute people and bald people in spite of the lack of a precise boundary between the hairy and the hairless. A degree of vagueness need not prevent good understanding about what makes an enhancement radical and what makes an enhancement moderate. Once we know what to say about the clear cases of radical or moderate enhancement, we should have the intellectual tools needed to tackle the vague cases.

How might enhancements of greater degree be less valuable than those of lesser degree? This book offers a variety of responses to the radical enhancement of human capacities. I will offer moral criticisms of some radical enhancements—they impose significant, unjustified costs on others. My arguments here tend to support legal bans on technologies or uses of technologies that lead to certain varieties of radical enhancement. Here, I am principally concerned about enhancements that alter our moral entitlements to various benefits and our moral protections against various harms. Modifications that risk altering our basic moral worth should be banned because they expose unenhanced humans to quite significant harm.

I criticize other radical enhancements from the perspective of prudential rationality. The proponents of radical enhancement present it as very prudentially valuable. According to them, the radical enhancement of human mental or physical abilities greatly promotes the well-being and interests of those who undergo it. I argue that radical enhancement will disappoint. We value possible experiences within and slightly beyond the normal human experiential range because we humans can properly engage with them. Possible experiences far outside of the normal human range are less meaningful for us because we’re less able to engage with them. They are less prudentially valuable than the experiences that they would replace. We place a lesser value on knowledge enabled by radical cognitive enhancement because we view that knowledge as less effectively extending a distinctively human understanding of the universe and our place in it. Such obstacles either do not exist in respect of lesser enhancements or are significantly reduced. These claims stand in need both of an account of what it means to engage with the experiences and knowledge brought by enhancement and a theory about why successes or failures of engagement should be so important.

The claim that certain kinds of radical enhancements are immoral suggests a response that differs from that supported by the claim that it is prudentially irrational to radically enhance. Laws may be required to prevent immoral radical enhancements—those that impose significant, unjustified costs on others. Radical enhancements that are prudentially irrational may not require legal prohibitions. The law permits individuals to perform a variety of imprudent acts, such as always eating only ice cream and investing large sums of money in astrological divinations. So perhaps citizens should be permitted to enhance themselves in ways that are predictably bad for them. But the imprudence of many radical enhancements does suggest the need for public advisories. Laws may be required to protect children whose legal guardians procure radical enhancements for them in the mistaken belief that they will be good for them. Laws may also be required to counter distorted representations of radical enhancement by its purveyors.

Why write about radical enhancement now? One reason is that it may be imminent. According to some commentators, we’re on the verge of quite extreme enhancements of human capacities. For example, Ray Kurzweil proposes a law of accelerating returns according to which the advancement of enhancement technologies follows an exponential path.⁴ A feature of this ever-increasing pattern of improvement is that it can deliver dramatic improvements quickly. The law seems particularly well suited to advances in information technologies. Kurzweil predicts that improvements of information-processing technologies will lead humans to fuse with machines. Perhaps he’s exaggerating. Perhaps the technologies of human enhancement are not becoming more powerful at an exponential rate. Nevertheless, our humanity is at a point of convergence of a wide variety of technologies. Human enhancement has become a guiding focus for many of those developing genetic and cybernetic technologies. We see evidence for this in the science sections of our newspapers that carry increasingly many stories about technological advances that may lead to enhanced humans. It would be a serious mistake to just assume a scenario in which enhancements arrive in small increments with plenty of time for us to adjust between each installment.

Advances in ethical understanding conform to a very different schedule from that kept by technological advances. There is something necessarily time-consuming about the proper moral appraisal of a technological novelty. A skilled mathematician may rapidly and efficiently deploy her mathematical understanding to address a genuinely soluble novel mathematical problem. Ethical expertise differs in drawing on a very wide and diverse collection of sources of information.⁵ Questions about the morality or prudential advisability of human enhancement draw on information about how enhancement technologies will work, how they will be tested, the resources required for their manufacture, and their likely cost. This information must be considered in light of the needs and interests of the individuals and collections of individuals who are the subjects of enhancement or are indirectly affected by enhancement. There are no shortcuts in a proper ethical evaluation. Too cursory or casual an evaluation of a key line of evidence can lead to erroneous conclusions. A widely acknowledged tendency for technological progress to outpace ethical understanding reflects differences in the natures of the tasks. Those engaged in improving a technology are able to focus their attention on the specifics of its design, whereas ethical evaluation is necessarily broad. Each new iteration of an enhancement technology potentially changes what it means for affected individuals and collections of individuals. All of this strongly suggests the need to get underway our ethical evaluation of possible future enhancements as soon as possible.

Transformative Change and Invasion of the Body Snatchers