If humanity believes that it should continue, then it should also ensure that a better human survives, thrives
Published Date – 12:30 AM, Wed – 15 March 23
By PRAMOD K NAYAR
Hyderabad: It is taken for granted that humans-as-parents will provide the best possible future for their children. Some argue that parents should have the best possible children, and hence the emphasis on proper diet, medication, exercise and such during the gestation period — as a means of ensuring that the child born will be in the best of health. We also seek to improve the quality of our current lives, and that of our progeny, with medicines, prosthesis, dietary regimes, education (surely education is an established mode of human enhancement), etc.
Best Life Possible
One of the key texts of the modern era, the American Declaration of Independence, besides making seriously questionable, and hypocritical, claims about the inherent equality of all men, stated that all humans ‘are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.
The pursuit of a better life, then, is a right granted to all humans (we shall at this point not puncture this claim by mentioning race, gender, the nonhuman and others). Therefore, if this better life is possible through an enhancement of the human form, abilities and qualities, such an enhancement may be deemed to be a foundational right of all humans.
When we dwell on this foundational right within the context of human enhancement, we run into interesting and challenging questions and concerns.
If better life is defined as the freedom from pain, debilitating conditions, developmental problems, chronic disease, senescence, cognitive disability and such, then any enhancement — mechanical, biochemical or germline — is integral to the potential of a better life. To adopt the language of rights, if a human has the right to avert existential risks in the pursuit of a better life, it follows that any measure to avert such risks is a right too. If we can select non-disease genes or delete disease inducing, mutated genes, would that not be in the pursuit of a better life, and if so, who can argue that a human has the right to take such decisions over gene selections?
Further, if qualities like compassion, altruism, appreciation of the arts, a tranquil disposition, mathematical reasoning and empathy can be enhanced, would not such a person be a better person for everyone else in the society as well? That is, an enhanced human with a greater potential for happiness and contentment could also be a better member of the society, and if such an enhancement can be extended to more and more members, would that not make a peaceful society overall?
The Nature of Nature
Those critical of human enhancement argue that it is not ‘natural’. But, other than the fact that the very idea of Nature is itself a human notion, we have another problem.
We have no consensus as to what ‘natural’ means, given that bodies are shaped, trained, fed to ensure a better life and be a better cultural ‘fit’ into society. Likewise, all traits — gait, posture, manners, skills — are constructed through cultural training and are not ‘natural’. If any aspect of our bodies is ‘improved’ through training, would that make the human less or more human?
What, in short, is the nature of a ‘natural’ body? Is there such a thing?
The chess player, the sportsperson, the musician trains for hours daily, weekly. While there may be a latent talent — a person born with an ear for music, for example – all talents require honing to become skills. The trouble with this debate against enhancement is that we accept as given established modes of enhancement such as training and education, but draw the line at pharmacological and genetic enhancement, particularly the latter.
Passing on the Best Life
Now we come to a trickier problem: do we as parents and as a collective have a moral responsibility to ensure that the future generations have all the chances of a better life? (For this, we will first have to fix the planet, of course, but that is a different debate.)
In a 2001 essay in Bioethics, Julian Savulescu, bioethicist and philosopher at Oxford, proposed a novel principle which aligns closely with the questions above. Savulescu argued for what he termed ‘Procreative Beneficence’, defined thus: “couples (or single reproducers) should select the child, of the possible children they could have, who is expected to have the best life, or at least as good a life as the others, based on the relevant, available information.”
If parents strive to provide the best life for their children, as noted, then it follows that humans should bring into existence those progeny who have the best prospects of leading the best life in the world. Savulescu argues:
• some non-disease genes affect the likelihood of us leading the best life
• we have a reason to use information which is available about such genes in our reproductive decision-making
• couples should select embryos or fetuses which are most likely to have the best life, based on available genetic information, including information about non-disease gene…
If humanity believes that it should continue — although, judging by evidence, there is no reason why it should — then should it also ensure that a better human survives, thrives? The answer, stemming from all the above, is ‘yes’. As the Spanish philosopher Jon Rueda writes in a recent essay: “The moral duty to direct the enhancement of the human and transhuman species towards the creation of a posthuman existence that is substantially more valuable than its predecessors”. This is what Rueda terms the ‘Principle of the Best Interests of Posthumanity’.
Rueda thus moves from the duty and aspiration of individual parents to ensure the best life for their progeny, to speaking of the collective when he writes: “humanity could assume the duty to create a successor species, of the possible successor it could have, who is expected to have the best life”. Rueda is speaking of the control of human evolution so that the next generation(s) will have a better life if we think collectively as a species-parent.
If, among the collective responsibility, moral and ethical but also political, of humanity is the responsibility to safeguard the planet, then surely it follows that we should be equipping the next generation to be morally and ethically enhanced to put collective interests and principles above individual ones. Such a generation, engineered for the best possible lives and best principles in the best interests of the planet, requires a move towards such a reproductive beneficence.
The future ought to belong to posthumans.
