Two characteristics of the ongoing debates concerning the loosely labeled “human enhancement” movement can help position Michael Hauskeller's new book on the matter. One is seen in the widely varied and colorful terminology designating the “pro” side of the debate, not only “enhancement” but “transhumanism”, “posthumanism”, “cyborgism”, and even the PR-resonant “Humanity +” – reminiscent of the French television channel “Canal +”. This variety reflects assumptions and overt philosophies in the pro camp, which is not quite as monolithic as some supporters may like or detractors fear. Curiously, the less-pro side does not seem to label itself, although some pro members have called those outside their camp “bioconservatives”.
The other characteristic is that much of the debate, happening in bioethics and technology ethics journals, has been largely a matter of: Should we (whoever exactly “we” is) allow full deployment of these techniques, should we be cautious, or should we bar most of them? The great diversity of possible future techniques makes it difficult to treat these ethical issues as unified.
Hauskeller handles these two characteristics of the debate, adroitly if not explicitly. He examines a wide range of techniques, some or all of which have been promoted by the (broadly) pro group, and he analyzes them both ethically and through a wider philosophical lens. He unifies his approach by attempting to answer a general question pertinent to the range of techniques: Is “bettering” humanity logically possible? This theme, running throughout the book, constitutes his major tool for understanding the project of human enhancement.
The central challenge for the project, then, is well reflected in the book's title. Better Humans? questions what it means to be better, and to know when something is better, we must know what it is to be good – and, in this case, when the entire species may be at stake, definitively so. We cannot hope to be only somewhat right about what is good for humans and succeed for a scant 50% or 60% of them. Hauskeller helps bring out the complexity of this problem, which may look simple at first blush – after all, do not we know what is good about the species? – by breaking down the question into several parts. These correspond to many angles of human life that the enhancement movement (EM) focuses on: intelligence, morality, sense of well-being, control over nature and oneself, longevity, physical appearance, and health. In each of these areas, the EM as a whole seems to assume that there is an empirical or universally agreed-upon standard of good, and also that accentuating this good (say by increasing a measurable quantity) leads to something recognized as better. Much of Hauskeller's book challenges the validity of these two assumptions.
Take intelligence. The EM anticipates increasing it substantially either by drugs or electronic implants and brain-machine interfaces – and perhaps one day by “uploading” minds into machines where they supposedly can multiply their intelligence by orders of magnitude. Yet, as Hauskeller identifies, there are matters demanding attention before one can legitimately understand people so enhanced as better. One is the question of why individuals should be compelled to amass massive intelligence. The justificatory argument runs: Individuals traditionally seek education to amass intelligence; education is thus a (traditional) enhancement technology; and consequently individuals should have no qualms about seeking to amass massive intelligence by other techniques, such as uploading their brains or taking neurotropic drugs. Hauskeller points out, though, that it is unclear that humans educate their children to increase kids' intelligence. Rather they educate their children so the children may function as adults. Similarly, for example, most birds and mammals teach their offspring the skills to function as adults like flying and hunting. Perhaps some technique, if pursued, increases a child's capacity to learn, but education is not coherently construed as primarily an intelligence-increasing technological enhancement.
EM's intelligence plan has more pressing problems: It is not evident that even if intelligence is integral in acquiring “certain (material and immaterial) goods that we (rightly or wrongly) tend to value, that more intelligence … is always good” (19). Several considerations demand investigation before attempting to fashion a techno-master-race. He writes:
You don't have to be super-intelligent to have a good life in our world … . Often outstanding cognitive abilities go along with social and emotional disorders … . Abstract reasoning requires the suppression of concrete reality … . Human relations, and everything that needs to be invested into them, are, for the purpose of abstract reasoning, a dispensable distraction. (19)
Memory is another area of cerebral function that EM backers seek to improve, through the ability, for example, to control memory or increase storage capacity. Clarification is again in order. Memory researchers have found that forgetting is essential to memory, so a program of increasing storage by eliminating forgetting could undermine itself. People with hyperthermistic syndrome – retaining almost all that happens to them – appear to suffer problems of distinguishing important from trivial events. Yet, controlling it could just as well tend to undermine human memory, which appears to require some involuntariness in its daily flow. Selecting out and forgetting painful memories could well drain a person's capacity to cope. Memory's apparent “sins”, as memory scientist Daniel Schacter points out, are integral for memory's functioning correctly. Furthermore, alleged “cognitive-enhancing” drugs such as those common among college students show no documented, long-term cognitive improvements.
What is most important, Hauskeller points out, in evaluating the deployment of reputed cognitive enhancements is examining the underlying values that prompt grasping for such enhancements and whether, if the common good would appear to be advanced, the individual good is as well: “[F]orcing people, in the name of the common good, to undergo a treatment that is not entirely without risks shows clearly how dangerous it can be to adopt the standards of the presumed ‘common good’” (33). What exactly is good for the individual is hard enough to determine. To build upon a shaky and far-from-universal notion of good and surmise that everyone will benefit if this good is increased is to lock up the species in a very morally unsound construction.
Bettering morality itself has been a target for the EM. Morality appears to be good for us by preventing the species from killing itself off, the logic goes; so more morality, or more morally abiding citizens, should be better. Again, miracle drugs offer a means. Hauskeller questions whether “radically enhanced humans, or posthumans, [would] be morally good” (37). One problem is that “there does not seem to be any intrinsic connection between cognitive enhancement and moral enhancement” (37). Perhaps if all moral facts were indeed shared and absolutely universal, the cognitively enhanced might have a stronger grasp of these. However, we have little evidence that there are such universal moral facts and, if there were, whether “these would necessarily motivate us in any particular way” (39). Yet another problem is whether radical enhancement's potential to boost to social and “sheer manipulative power” could reasonably ensure that the individual is indeed morally better than others. After all, such power is a main thrust for EM – without, though, posthumans' necessarily feeling “any kind of solidarity with one another” (39–40). Conversely, “[t]he very lack of moral scruples and remorse can itself … be seen as a human enhancement” (41). Thus, many in the EM, such as Max More, espouse a Nietzschean flouting of morals, best achieved via radical enhancement. This fact reflects back on the first reason to question moral enhancement: If the EM itself cannot agree even on whether morals are good, then the movement is far from settling upon the absolute universal moral facts needed to ensure everyone is being enhanced in a morally correct fashion. Perhaps morality is somehow good for the species, or necessary for this social animal to be social; but it remains unclear whether somehow making people “more moral” or heightening moral behavior will make humans better.
Well-being, by the very word “well”, implies it is good. (If there were a “bad well-being”, perhaps the way that the well-being was attained was bad, but not the well-being itself.) Denying that well-being is good would be as hard as denying good is good. But enhancing well-being may also be as inscrutable as trying to make good even more good. The problem of enhancing well-being is determining how it is constituted across all human beings. To the extent that well-being is distinct, for example, from sheer physical pleasure, providing persons pleasure-center-exciting electrodes or drugs would not heighten their well-being. According to Hauskeller, people do not so much seek such pleasure or well-being but rather they seek “to do certain things with their lives” (60), and perhaps in so doing they become happy. This view harks to Kant's observation about the nigh impossibility of founding practical reasoning upon what should make one happy, because it is nigh impossible to gauge just what would make a person happy. Using mood-enhancers to ensure the sense of well-being is problematic, Hauskeller points out, because if we are to take these drugs when we are supposedly not feeling appropriately for a given occasion, the question then becomes what should we appropriately or naturally feel? He argues that the appropriateness or naturalness “is in fact a social norm, one that demands conformity of feelings”, and yet “social expectations are often flexible with regard to our emotions, so it is not always clear what is appropriate” (63, emphasis in original). Take the example of loving one's children. One is supposed to love them. Yet what is appropriate here is not to “feel lovingly” but to undertake certain actions with respect to the children. It is far from clear that “increasing the level of oxytocin” (65) in parents' brains can do the trick. “[I]t seems there is no general answer to the question how we should feel … The paradox of complete control is that it makes us goalless” (70–71, emphasis in original).
This sort of paradox and its close kindred run throughout Hauskeller's argument. For us to make decisions at all, there must be some given in us that we do not control. (Compare the paradox of a completely self-designed entity: Pace some theists, that entity must first have an existence in order to begin designing itself.) If, as Hauskeller defines the term, “A transhumanist … believes … that we should do everything we can to leave the human condition behind and evolve into something better than human” (75), this belief involves an inconsistency: It would mean for the entity to rid the very thing that led it to rid that thing. Like a Klein bottle, there is no longer anything contained. If the species is so bad that we should evolve into something better than it, it is unclear that the criteria of good we have evolved to possess are themselves sufficient to guide it to the better thing. The “better” thing remains locked in the faulty creature's criteria of good. The faulty creature and its faulty evolution are thus still guiding the next allegedly “self-evolved” creature, which is wholly beholden to the faulty creatures' (very likely faulty) criteria. Supposed complete control of the thing will entail that the agent is in fact completely controlled by it, Giovanni Pico's attempt at defining humans as the “animal whose nature it is not to have a nature” (82) only relocates the paradox. One must retain some aspects of oneself that cannot control in order to have any control over oneself at all.
Hauskeller finds a similar paradox in uploading a mind (which perpetuates Cartesian mind/body dualism). The mind, in this scenario, is understood as so much information extractable from the brain. Yet, “[h]aving a mind generally means to some extent being aware of the world and oneself, and awareness is itself not information” (117, emphasis in original). Living for infinite time, a common EM proposal, may rest upon an infinite-lasting physical matrix; yet it could not ameliorate the problem of how the agent could not, without inconsistency, “continue looking upon the world with fresh eyes” (105), which freshness arises from mortality's program of one's being born as a baby, and thus undermines the point of its infinite-life program.
The EM's championing of freely using enhancement techniques in sport, Hauskeller notes, may offer the best reflection of the EM's paradoxical intentions. The point of most competitive sport can be boiled down to winning a competition only for the sake of winning the competition, rather than for what can be gained for the competitor beyond that narrow domain. It is this sort of elusive point “that makes competitive sport such an interesting test case for the enhancement debate. It does not seem to fulfill any purpose apart from that of showing that one can do the deed” (157). As one EM proponent suggests, “To choose to be better is to be human” (153). Yet this claim does not evidently translate into “To choose to focus all one's powers and existence merely into getting better and better (at given tasks?) to the sacrifice of all else is to be human.” It is instead to be clearly a proponent of the EM, which in fact strives to be no longer human anyway.
While Hauskeller offers a humorous, even-handed, and well-read examination of the enhancement project, he pointedly questions the coherence, consistency, and worthiness of a movement dedicated to obsessive betterment. He refers to Voltaire's note that “the better is the enemy of the good” (175) – not, as commonly interpreted, that one should constantly strive for betterment, but that such obsessive striving in fact counters the good. Recall such obsessive social-betterment programs as those conducted by Stalin or Pol Pot. Rather, “the worth of what has been given to us is here acknowledged as an absolute value, in the Kantian sense … it is good in itself, absolutely”, and as Voltaire's “anti-Leibnizian hero [exhorted], we must take care of our garden” (175, emphasis in original). In short, there remain severe theoretical and philosophical problems to resolve if the EM is to be realized as its salespersons promote. These promoters may protest that earlier visionaries such as Henry Ford and John Rockefeller did not have to wait for philosophers to solve conceptual problems before realizing their fantasies for humanity, supplying many a car and steel bar. However, these visions did not rely upon such tough philosophical problems.
Despite this work's insightful arguments and Falstaffian celebration of life, some shortcomings may preclude its merited wide acceptance. One is that detractors may snipe at its positive citations of C.S. Lewis. While there is even less religiosity in this book than in many an EM work, Lewis's association with mainstream Christianity, and that religion's association with fundamentalism, could trigger sneers. More importantly, Hauskeller spends much space untangling Michael Sandel's knotted argument for the “giftedness” of life. While Hauskeller's interpretation is plausible, it seems that catering to the EM's breaking down philosophers into sides (with Sandel, Kass, and Fukuyama cast as the bioconservatives) will not go far in breaking up the locked ice of the debate. Nonetheless, if this book is conceded, its greatest strength – as a compendium of sharp arguments about the problematic bases of the EM – it should receive substantial response.