Is it all about human nature? Ethical challenges of converging technologies beyond a polarized debate

Abstract

This article seeks a better understanding of the debate on the ethical challenges posed by converging technologies in the two versions offered by the United States (NBIC) and Europe (CTEKS) and plans to achieve three things. First, I want to show that the reduction of the ethical challenges posed by these technologies to the question of human nature, creating a polarization of positions, has generated a sort of impasse from which it is difficult to escape. This has already been partly referred to by other authors. Second, I want to show that the European conception of CTEKS proposes a different way of framing the ethical questions surrounding converging technologies. Third, I want to provide a reason why we should follow the route indicated by the European approach and move away from the questions around human nature, being at the same time aware that this approach is only in its initial phase.

Keywords:

• human nature
• enhancement
• converging technologies
• nanotechnology

Acknowledgements

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the valuable suggestions and comments of Christopher Coenen, Jacquelyne Luce, Alfred Nordmann and two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. NBIC refers to the convergence of information technology, biotechnology, cognitive sciences and nanotechnology.

2. In the executive summary of the report, there is an explicit call for the participation of NGOs, the media and private research foundations in the discussion on ethical issues of NBIC convergence and on the implications of transforming human nature.

3. CTEKS stands for Converging Technologies for the European Knowledge Society.

4. As a matter of fact, in Ancient Greek philosophy the term “nature” was sometimes used as a synonym for “form”, indicating the essence of a being, i.e. its metaphysical place or characterization.

5. In premodern theories of human nature, human beings learn to live in accordance with the “natural” order by means of religious practice or ethics. The Greek concept of “hubris” or the Biblical concept of “sin” serve to indicate when human beings defy this order (Stevenson and Habermas, 2004).

6. The term “transhumanist” was used for the first time by the biologist Julian Huxley in his work Religion without Revelation (1927), indicating the desire of the human species to transcend itself by realizing new possibilities of and for human nature (Bostrom 2005a,b). The World Transhumanist Association (WTA) was founded in 1998 by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce as an international non-governmental association with the aim of promoting transhumanism. In 1999, the WTA adopted the Transhumanist Declaration (http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/declaration/), and in the document “Transhumanist FAQ” Transhumanism is defined as “(1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied Reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. (2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies” (Bostrom 2003b, p. 4).

7. Bostrom argues that “[t]ranshumanism has roots in secular humanist thinking, yet is more radical in that it promotes not only traditional means of improving human nature, such as education and cultural refinement, but also direct application of medicine and technology to overcome some of our basic biological limits” (Bostrom 2003a, p. 495).

8. One of the first authors to analyse the challenges of enhancement in the American context was the scientist W. French Anderson, a pioneer in gene therapy (Anderson and Fletcher 1980; Anderson 1984).

9. The traditional definition of enhancement regards it as something “beyond therapy” (cf. The President's Council on Bioethics 2003), as etymologically something that increases, intensifies, heightens and exalts some characteristics or functions. These descriptions entail the connotation of going “beyond” what exists at some moment.

10. The modern memetics movement dates back to the mid 1980s and was largely influenced by the selfish gene theory of Richard Dawkins, who coined the term “meme” to describe a unit of information as analogous to the gene that resides in the human brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution. (For further information see the broad and useful description on Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics.) In his article on “The evolution of semantic systems” Bainbridge (2004) claims that a proper scientific understanding of the structure and dynamics of culture can lead to a new kind of technology, memetics engineering, which lies at the convergence between biology and information and cognitive sciences. Just as the correct understanding of biology and the development of biotechnology have permitted manipulation of living beings, the understanding of the evolution of semantic systems will allow us to engineer culture (Bainbridge 2004, p. 174). Semantic systems are described by him as a set of concepts connected by meaningful relationships and include scientific typologies and ontologies, as well as naturally occurring subcultures.

11. Khushf highlights that the culture of social scientists and philosophers sounds fuzzy, reactionary and ambiguous to scientists, as a result of the premodern mind. As a consequence, scientists seem not to take into real and appropriate consideration the ethical issues advanced by the humanities (Khushf 2006, p. 274).

12. On the one hand, the World Transhumanist Association has many headquarters in Europe and many prominent European thinkers promote this or similar views on technologies (for example, the philosophers Nick Bostrom – the founder of the Transhumanist movement – and John Harris); on the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church, and in many cases also the Protestant Church, as well as other religious groups in Europe severely criticize specific modern technologies, especially in the field of genetic engineering and reproductive technologies (cf. Harris 2006, 2007).

13. “For us, today, assumed that we are blessed with good health and a sound mind, a flourishing human life is not a life lived with an ageless body or an untroubled soul, but rather a life lived in rhythmed time, mindful of time's limits, appreciative of each season and filled first of all with those intimate human relations that are ours only because we are born, age, replace ourselves, decline, and die – and know it” (The President's Council of Bioethics 2003, p. 337).

14. Hughes (2006) represents the current political sphere and the ideological positions as a sort of cube, determined by two opposite attitudes (conservatives and progressives) in the three directions of technopolitics, economic politics and cultural politics (Hughes 2006, p. 293).

15. In this paragraph, I am concentrating on the philosophical differences between the American and the European approach. For an account of the differences in policy see in particular Jasanoff (2003, 2005).

16. In their literature study assessment on converging technologies, STOA (2006) analyse the current debate by taking the three scenarios of Garreau (2005) into consideration and identifying the “Prevail” scenario in line with the European perspective (STOA 2006, p. 30). However, there is, in my opinion, a slight difference between the two perspectives: although the European approach explicitly calls for a sober look at technological development and criticizes many speculations about the future, Garreau, describing the “Prevail” scenario (2005), explicitly refers to the concept like the curve of exponential growth (p. 206) or a future of radical evolution, pointing out that the difference between this scenario and “Heaven” and “Hell” consists of the recognition of human beings’ creative role in shaping the impact of technological development on society and nature; yet he does not de facto question the hype surrounding converging technologies. Garreau writes: “For all previous millennia, our technologies have been aimed outward, to control our environment. Starting with fire and clothes, we looked for ways to ward off these elements. With the development of agriculture we controlled our food supply. In cities we sought safety. Telephones and airplanes collapsed distance. Antibiotics kept death-dealing microbes at bay. Now, however, we have started a wholesale process of aiming our technologies inward. Now our technologies have started to merge with our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny and perhaps our soul. Serious people have embarked on changing humans so much that they call it a new kind of engineered evolution – one that we direct for ourselves.” (Garreau 2005, p. 6). In the European report there are no similar descriptions of the future (Nordmann 2004).

17. At a meeting of the European Commission in September 2005 – organized by the Directorate Research conference on Key Technologies in Brussels – Green took this credo to express the favourable conditions for technical research and development in Europe (see Nordmann 2006).

18. The cause of the universe for Plato is a divine craftsman, the Demiurge, who has taken the world of ideas, the eternal and perfect one, as the model for the universe. Lacking the capability to create things ex nihilo, the Demiurge was able only to organize the universe to a limited extent, despite imposing mathematical order on a pre-existent chaos to generate an ordered universe (kosmos). See Zeyl (2000).

19. This differentiation finds interesting interpretation in the German tradition of philosophical anthropology at the end of the last century, which was centred around the question of the essence of the human being with respect to the contraposition of nature and culture, i.e. the question of the place of man in the world, nature and history. For Max Scheler, the real essence of the human being exists in her spiritual essence, in the fact that she tends to transcend (Transzendenz). The human being is a being who looks for God, who is essentially “theomorphic” (theomorph), because to build up his real essence, man has to detract from his materiality, to give up his reality (entwirklichen). For Arnold Gehlen, the human being is, by nature, a “deficit being” (Mangelwesen), lacking specific instruments to adapt to the natural environment, which tries to supply its deficits through the development of culture and technology: man is “by nature a cultural being”. For Helmut Plessner (1928), the human being is characterized by an “eccentric positionality” (exzentrische Positionalität), because he is simultaneously placed within the boundary between his body and a corresponding environment, but is also open to the world, falling outside this boundary. In accordance with this eccentric position, humans must establish artificial borders and embody them.

20. The naturalistic fallacy was originally described by G.E. Moore as indicating the attempts to prove claims in ethics by using natural properties. In other words, it represents an identification of the natural with the inherently good or with righteousness. Sometimes, the naturalistic fallacy is also referred to as the “is–ought problem” – originally described by David Hume in the third book of the Treatise of Human Nature – that represents the efforts to draw ethical conclusions (normative level) from natural facts (descriptive level). Hume criticized those thinkers who maintained that the world is good as it stands and needs no improvement, i.e. who claimed that just because something is the way it is, it ought to be that way. A broader discussion of this topic would go beyond the scope of this article.

21. Critics of enhancement see these technologies as threatening our efforts to achieve authenticity. In contrast, the proponents of these technologies see them as tools to achieve our authenticity (Parens 2005).

22. In his theory, “metaphysical” refers to non-falsifiable assumptions, i.e. assumptions which cannot undergo an empirical test. In the “Metaphysical Epilogue” to his work Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics (1992), Popper points out that, in nearly every phase of the development of scientific metaphysical ideas, not only are the problems of explanation we choose to attack determined, but also the kinds of answers we consider satisfactory and as representing improvements (Popper, 1992, p. 161).

23. Dupuy (2007) has described the origin of this knowledge's view in the principle of verum factum by the Italian philosopher, Gianbattista Vico (formulated initially in 1710 as part of the work De Italorum Sapientia). The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not through observation. Originally, this principle was understood as a symbol of human finiteness, particularly in comparison to God's wisdom (only God can entirely know nature because he created it), but this assumed a positive connotation, meaning that what human beings can do can be rationally understood – despite their finiteness. The definition of technoscience dates back to the postmodern works of Bruno Latour (1987) and Donna Haraway (1997) in the sociology of science, and it indicates a new modality of conceptualizing science. While “classical” science is interested in the theoretical representation of nature and its understanding, technoscience is more oriented toward the fabrication of tools and devices. In this conception, technology and science, i.e. transforming the world and knowing it, are inextricably interrelated. Currently there is an ongoing debate about the technoscientific character of emerging technologies, in particular, nanotechnologies (cf. Nordmann 2005).

24. The core of cybernetic credo is the idea that every behaviour that is unambiguously describable in a finite number of words is computable by a network of formal neurons (Dupuy 2000). In this programme, nature is conceived as an artefact.

25. Indeed, Dupuy believes the cognitive sciences provide the guidelines for NBIC convergence (see, in particular, Dupuy 2000).

26. For example, Dupuy (2007) points out that the idea of defeating death (i.e. of eliminating pain and diseases and becoming immortal) relies on a wish to go beyond the human condition of finitude, which is determined by nature.

27. Dupuy quotes Arendt's description of the unanswerability of the Augustinian question on human nature and on the opportunity of analysing human self-made conditions (see Dupuy 2006).

28. The claim of transhumanists that enhancement is in some way presupposed from the imperfection of our body is problematic for Nordmann (2007c), because, in contrast, awareness of the frailty of the body is a reason for some people to decide to undergo cosmetic surgery, for example. These people accept an enhancement technology without being committed at the same time to a notion of technological transcendence of human limitations.