The human enhancement debate and disability: new bodies for a better life

Backed by the premise of continuous scientific progress, technology is presented time after time as the cure for disability. Most recently, the so-called emerging technologies, such as cloning or genetic engineering, feed these narratives. Proponents of human enhancement, similarly to previous utopians, reinvigorate simplistic and highly problematic notions of disability that ignore both the actual well-being and experiences of disabled people. It is therefore an important and welcome development to see a selection of studies that explores how bioethics and disability studies can influence each other to ask new questions.

The Human Enhancement Debate and Disability consists of an interview and 11 original studies, ranging across the disciplines of philosophy, history, anthropology, science studies, sociology and film studies. While retaining depth, the book can serve as a useful starter guide for those new to the field of human enhancement. The Introduction and the first part, ‘Norms and Body’, clarify the main concepts and problems of the debate, and Schües’ philosophical–historical reconstruction traces enhancement, and its entanglement with the notion of human, within European intellectual heritage.

How should these technologies be used, if they materialise in future? What is the ethical basis to make such decisions? On the one hand, the so-called bioconservatives argue that the use of new technologies should be limited for normalising treatment, while transhumanists and liberal eugenicists call for ‘perfecting the human’. Both positions, as we learn from the book, are problematic: the former because it translates historically contingent notions of normalcy into an ethical category; and the latter because of its potential social and political consequences.

Rehmann-Sutter’s interview with Scully indicates much of the difficulty of connecting ambiguous medical interventions with the neat categories of bioethics. Addressing this problem, as Scully argues, requires thinking through the body and its variations. This points to an important aim of the book: at present one can only speculate what shape emerging technologies will take, if they come to life. This abstract debate, as the editors argue, can be critically grounded by disability studies, which engages with disabled people’s experience, and provides more adequate conceptions of disability and well-being.

The second part of the book, ‘Case Studies’, demonstrates this point well: appreciating the intricacies of actual bodies and existing technological interventions provides important analytical tools to approach the complexities of human enhancement futures. The historical account on castrati, by Piotrowska, demonstrates that body modification in a given society is guided by a multitude of norms, training and institutional and family ties. Contemporary discourses on Alzheimer’s disease and on ‘successfull aging’, as Bülow points out, inform the narratives of cognitive enhancement in future. Bosteels’ and Blume’s discussion of the cochlear implant shows that the implementation of a technology relies on scientific authority and strategies, changes in parenting and specific notions of well-being. Further, it calls attention to the role of media, which transforms rather modest claims about the benefits of cochlear implants into sensationalist statements about ‘bionic ears’. Mulemi’s work on cancer rehabilitation conveys both the selective nature of prosthetics and how artificial body parts become entangled with one’s life story and social environment, creating further ambiguities.

Part III, ‘Utopian Ideas and Real Embodiment’, departs from real technologies and focuses on how narratives of human enhancement are woven by bioethicists, as cultural commentators, and Hollywood. The focus of Klohs’ analysis is how bioethical dilemmas are rehearsed as questions of how technology affects individual and collective human life.

With the exception of Forsberg, who discusses how opponents of mood enhancement rely on the notion of authenticity, Part III reflects how transhumanists’ visions problematise and transform the normative content of what, and who, counts as human. This takes its clearest form in Dickel’s discussion, which traces how the natural or the perfect body are reconstructed as the body that can be infinitely further perfected, based on the assumption that death and aging can be controlled.

Transhumanism’s new ideal of ‘human’ is the result of distinct normative interventions. In the work of the transhumanist John Harris (1993, 2000), as Franssen points out, this takes the form of a certain asymmetry: Harris, on the one hand, argues that normalcy, as it shifts by historical and cultural contexts, is morally irrelevant; while maintaining that being disabled is objectively a ‘harmed condition’, and therefore it is rational to strive for ‘possible (better) functioning’. On the other hand, Harris fails to acknowledge that his notions of ‘rationality’ and the ‘possible functioning’ are also shaped by social forces.

Similarly, Münch finds that, posing enhanced states as better is dependent on particular conceptions of the body and subjectivity. He deploys phenomenology to critique the transhumanist notion of ‘uploading’ (Bostrom and Sandberg 2008) and its anti-biologism. Franssen and Münch both indicate how transhumanism claims to identify the true human. For Bostrom, true human is the calculating mind that enjoys primacy over the body; for others, it is the ideal of unfettered progress and those driving it. The question is, of course, what happens to those not sharing these transhumanist ideals of humanity?

Although it is clear that the discipline of bioethics, interested in general principles, requires the concept of human, the notion remains a troubled one, carrying the double-edged sword of inclusion and exclusion. The ‘human’, the central concept throughout the book, just like nature or normal, is tainted by power. It is not clear who counts as (more) human in a particular historical or social context, and the label conceals differences in ability, class, race and gender. Albeit the figure of the cyborg (Haraway 1991) could address some of these problems, it remains almost entirely absent throughout the book. Similarly, one could see transhumanism’s romance with the ‘emerging technologies’ of biosciences as the reverberation of posthumamism and artificial intelligence (Hayles 1999). With such historical perspective at hand, we could learn what is essentially new in the human enhancement debate compared with previous techno-utopias.

Human enhancement, as Shakespeare notes in his foreword, is about phantoms. Before dismissing them, however, one should consider that our present lives are governed by representations; the normate (Thomson 1997) leaps down from the architects’ drawing desk and leaves its footprint in every public building. Biotechnologies are transforming our lives, but one needs to distinguish between scientists and philosophers, ideal and living humans, future visions and real technologies. Making this distinction is an important asset, which is reflected both in the structure of the book and in the individual author’s assessment of human enhancement.

By connecting disability studies and bioethics, The Human Enhancement Debate and Disability achieves three important tasks. Firstly, it defines a shared area of activism and academic interest. Secondly, it demonstrates how the knowledge of real bodies and technologies can interrogate visions that seem to wield scientific authority. Questions of what technology can and cannot do, what are its unintended side effects, are crucial, especially for those, willing to become subject of these interventions on an experimental basis. Thirdly, by unpacking its limitations, the book traces how transhumanism, while it seemingly addresses future issues, promotes intervention to reconfigure the normative content of human in our neoliberal present. This book is recommended for all those interested in scientific interventions and bioethics, disability futures and wider cultural issues about disability.

Peter Fuzesi
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
[email protected]
© 2015, Peter Fuzesi
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1020640