Being all we can be
Jan. 30th, 2006 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylThe focus of today's Spotlight on the News feature is Madeleine Bunting's Grauniad article on the re-engineering of humanity, which was thought provoking, but distinctly limited.
The initial spiel about a hypothetical granddaughter left behind at school because, thanks to her neo-luddite parents, she lacks the more extreme enhancements of her classmates but who still loves Little House on the Prairy is all very Gattaca, but the trouble is, it seems to misses Niccol's key points: that no system is perfect and that the flaws that apparently make Vincent, the "natural" brother, unable to achieve his goal are the very things that cause him strive for it, while his "enhanced" brother Anton, relatively content with his superiority, becomes a policeman.
There then follows a nod to the Fukuyama view of transhumanism as a corrosion of the rights that make us human. Well, maybe, but only if you live in some kind of bizarre Hobbesian world where individuals basically want to screw each other over for personal gain but are only prevented from doing so by fear of what others may do to them, in which case the thought of some all powerful transhuman superman must induce a fit of fear and trembling. Actually, now that I think about it, that's actually pretty good description the basic neo-con position. No wonder they're so totally fearful about the whole thing — they think they've got everything to lose. If however, one subscribes to a more fundamentally optimistic set of moral beliefs, the absurdity of this position becomes clear. As Singer says, we don't treat people as equals because they necessarily are our equals in every respect, but rather we treat them in that way because we can ourselves into their position and give them equal consideration: "Equality is a basic ethical principle, not an assertion of fact." (see Ch. 2 of Practical Ethics for a more complete argument).
With something of a non-sequitur, the article then skips on to questions of privacy. If our thoughts can be manipulated, if our minds can be read, if we can have no reasonable expectation of privacy even within our own skulls, how will our notions of equality and ethics be affected? Surely, were that degree of tyranny to prevail, we wouldn't be able to function as moral beings in any true sense because we wouldn't be free, or even able, to make choices with moral implications. That's my basic take on the whole liberty thing: freedom of action and behaviour, within the reasonable limits of the Harm Principle, are necessary conditions for morality to prevail, however they are not sufficient to guarantee it. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the way it seems to me.
After returning to the original theme — enhanced cognitive abilities are just the intellectual equivalent of boob jobs, that research on the brain could be used to help people with Alzheimer's etc. — the article concludes with the belief that we should tread gently because there's no way to reverse large scale human re-engineering when it occurs and that we need to have a public debate over the issues before they become set in stone. It's a fair point: e should walk carefully, if only because science has shown itself possessed of a unique ability to turn around and bite us, just when we've think we've got it all locked down.
The initial spiel about a hypothetical granddaughter left behind at school because, thanks to her neo-luddite parents, she lacks the more extreme enhancements of her classmates but who still loves Little House on the Prairy is all very Gattaca, but the trouble is, it seems to misses Niccol's key points: that no system is perfect and that the flaws that apparently make Vincent, the "natural" brother, unable to achieve his goal are the very things that cause him strive for it, while his "enhanced" brother Anton, relatively content with his superiority, becomes a policeman.
There then follows a nod to the Fukuyama view of transhumanism as a corrosion of the rights that make us human. Well, maybe, but only if you live in some kind of bizarre Hobbesian world where individuals basically want to screw each other over for personal gain but are only prevented from doing so by fear of what others may do to them, in which case the thought of some all powerful transhuman superman must induce a fit of fear and trembling. Actually, now that I think about it, that's actually pretty good description the basic neo-con position. No wonder they're so totally fearful about the whole thing — they think they've got everything to lose. If however, one subscribes to a more fundamentally optimistic set of moral beliefs, the absurdity of this position becomes clear. As Singer says, we don't treat people as equals because they necessarily are our equals in every respect, but rather we treat them in that way because we can ourselves into their position and give them equal consideration: "Equality is a basic ethical principle, not an assertion of fact." (see Ch. 2 of Practical Ethics for a more complete argument).
With something of a non-sequitur, the article then skips on to questions of privacy. If our thoughts can be manipulated, if our minds can be read, if we can have no reasonable expectation of privacy even within our own skulls, how will our notions of equality and ethics be affected? Surely, were that degree of tyranny to prevail, we wouldn't be able to function as moral beings in any true sense because we wouldn't be free, or even able, to make choices with moral implications. That's my basic take on the whole liberty thing: freedom of action and behaviour, within the reasonable limits of the Harm Principle, are necessary conditions for morality to prevail, however they are not sufficient to guarantee it. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the way it seems to me.
After returning to the original theme — enhanced cognitive abilities are just the intellectual equivalent of boob jobs, that research on the brain could be used to help people with Alzheimer's etc. — the article concludes with the belief that we should tread gently because there's no way to reverse large scale human re-engineering when it occurs and that we need to have a public debate over the issues before they become set in stone. It's a fair point: e should walk carefully, if only because science has shown itself possessed of a unique ability to turn around and bite us, just when we've think we've got it all locked down.
