Assessing Transhumanist Advocacy of Cognitive Bioenhancement

Though they condemn the “essentialism” of their critics, transhumanists themselves embrace rational essentialism. Transhumanists’ extreme version includes outright hostility to the nonrational in the form of “negative” affect, above all, emotion and mood. This dismissal reflects an impoverished picture of our mental life and problematizes transhumanists’ own investment in cognitive bioenhancement. Transhumanists link themselves to a rich philosophical tradition when foregrounding reason as the linchpin of our humanity. When considering its augmentation, however, they conflate “reason” and “cognition.” Since transhumanists define “cognition” in terms of information, forms of rational engagement not reducible to its possession and manipulation are unaccounted for. Practically speaking, transhumanists wrongly take supposed enhancing effects of existing psychostimulants as a clear harbinger of far more powerful cognitive bioenhancers. Even if we limit ourselves to what transhumanists envision under cognitive bioenhancement, their confidence in the direct, unadulterated heightening of cognition is misguided.

Why We Should Reject Transhumanists’ Entire Lens on the Mind and Brain

“Basic-emotion” and “dual-process” theorists, joined by transhumanists, view the mind as a set of compartments whose functionality is explained by dedicated areas or systems in the brain. The two theoretical approaches reflect core misconceptions and have been supplanted by “appraisal theory.” Beyond capturing well the entwining of reason and emotion in our mental operations, Klaus Scherer’s version of appraisal theory is compatible with mounting evidence of the brain’s complexity. Having developed a scientific line of argument against transhumanists’ lens on the mind and brain, the author turns to Aristotle’s rational essentialism. Wrongly invoked to support transhumanists’ extreme version, Aristotle’s rational essentialism incorporates a necessary role for nonrational faculties and intrapsychic harmony. While transhumanists’ lens on the mind and brain 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 an emerging picture of the brain’s complexity.

Utilitarian Commitments of Transhumanists and Their Sociopolitical Implications

Though transhumanists proclaim a bedrock commitment to personal autonomy, this commitment is undercut by evidence in their accounts of a utilitarian obligation to enhance. Their arguments invoke parallels with existing measures taken to promote the health and welfare of the public. Thereby, they reflect a current, broader tendency to extend the scope of “public health.” Their argumentative reliance on the sphere of public health manifests transhumanists’ willingness to defend their proposals on a utilitarian basis. Further, to avoid harming children-to-be, parents may be morally obliged to provide whatever bioenhancements are available when they make procreative decisions. Transhumanists’ notion that bioenhancement could be morally required, together with their utilitarian commitments, yields a strong concern that sociopolitical requirements would flow from the implementation of their agenda so as to put liberal democracy at risk. This risk has often been underappreciated by commentators across the spectrum of positions on bioenhancement.

Introduction

Optimally, would decisions be reached by reason alone? Would existence be better if we felt only pleasure, having excised the capacity to experience anything deemed unpleasant? Are key societal challenges we face rooted in human biology, to which, therefore, we should look for solutions? Such questions draw our attention to contending values and aspirations in today’s debate over human enhancement. The stakes of how this debate turns out are highest for transhumanism, whose proponents urge humanity’s self-transcendence via science and technology. In this introduction, Susan B. Levin states that Posthuman Bliss? The Failed Promise of Transhumanism will challenge transhumanists’ views of the mind, brain, ethics, liberal democracy, knowledge, and reality in a thoroughgoing and integrated way. Against the backdrop of this critique, the author will defend a perspective on living well that incorporates insights from Aristotle’s virtue ethics but is adapted to the ideas and promise of liberal democracy.

Evaluating the Debate Thus Far over Moral Bioenhancement

To avoid “ultimate harm,” or human extinction, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu maintain that a species-wide, biological upgrade of human morality is required. To support their claim that we already possess biological kernels of their featured, prosocial attitudes, they rely implausibly on evolutionary psychology. Further, they support “neuroessentialism” and misconceive what genetic manipulation could deliver regarding complex phenotypic traits. Alongside their talk of augmenting prosocial attitudes, Persson and Savulescu stress that, to forestall ultimate harm, what we ultimately require is the elimination of antisocial acts. Though presented as two interpretive lenses on one endeavor, their prosocial and antisocial focuses represent different agendas for our moral alteration. Further, from their utilitarian standpoint, if making antisocial acts impossible to perform were a streamlined route to avoiding extinction, then this is what we should do. Persson and Savulescu’s antisocial focus, in particular, reflects a willingness to forgo what makes human existence worth conducting.

Living Virtuously as a Regulative Ideal

Transhumanists accuse their critics of pessimism and defeatism, but they display these attitudes toward humanity itself. Marked improvements in our situation must stem from dedicated efforts to narrow the gap between reflectively affirmed human ideals and their worldly manifestations. Virtue ethics is well poised to serve as an umbrella for these efforts because it concentrates on who we are as people, integrating levels of concern, individual up through civic. 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 as things stand. In the United States, both virtue and core American ideals fit the bill. Recourse to the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. shows that virtue ethics and liberal commitments to justice and equality are compatible. The approach to virtue ethics whose cornerstones the author sketches in this chapter is rooted in Aristotle but adapted to America today.

Transhumanists’ Informational View of Being and Knowledge

What transhumanists see as context-independent truths involving knowledge and reality are actually holdovers from World War II and its aftermath: prior to the 1940s and 1950s, the informational view of reality and knowledge that soon appeared self-evidently true did not exist. The concept of information emerged unscathed by the failure of the earliest attempts to apply information theory to biology, firmly attaching to DNA, and human biology was deemed highly manipulable. Transhumanism channels this perspective on human biology, one that science itself shows increasingly to be outdated. Beyond their problematic informational frame, transhumanists fail to appreciate what it means for us to think or experience anything at all as human beings. Though Immanuel Kant is cited as a backdrop for their focus on humanity’s self-transcendence via rationality, extrapolation from his Critique of Pure Reason shows their confidence that human reason will spur the creation of posthumanity to be irrational.

Creating a Higher Breed

The bulwark of transhumanists’ defense against assertions of common ground between their views and prior eugenics is that it was state managed, while transhumanism features autonomy. That their rejection of substantive ties features this contrast shows their awareness of its pivotal role. When transhumanists distance themselves from eugenic history, Nazi eugenics is typically at the fore. Reference to it does not settle the matter, however, for an investigation of links between transhumanism and Anglo-American eugenics yields important connections that span notions of human agency, views of our mental faculties, utilitarian commitments, and their sociopolitical implications. Careful study of writings from both periods allows one to show how close the parallels between them are on the level of ideas and, in some cases, the very terms of their formulation. Knowledge of these connections casts unsettling light, indeed, on transhumanists’ yearning to realize what they deem perennial human ideals.