... I could say I'd seen the light.
The truth is, my pecker is not up.
But I do have a new approach that I'll run by Ben. So, here goes...
There is such a thing as human enhancement, but maybe it's not exactly quite what it says on the tin. There is a tradition of humans increasing and improving various traits and capacities - self-domestication, the out-sourcing of energy demands from the metabolism to clothes and fire, the out-sourcing of problem-solving and intelligence to the group mind through cumulative culture, the use of education, meditation, specific training and various technologies to enhance skills and capacities, the use of medicine and science to extend life and increase health. The feedback loops between new skills, changed environments and adaptation have profoundly changed both 'what it is to be human' and what is valued and disvalued in human nature.
The Homeric virtues are very different from Aristotelian virtues, which are different again from Christian virtues, Confucian virtues and the characteristics admired in post-Enlightenment democracies.
To enhance by biotechnological means can be seen as a difference in degree, not kind.
It does not seem inappropriate to label capacity enhancements - like cognitive enhancements, memory enhancements or moral enhancements - under the general umbrella term human enhancements.
But this term, even when defined as such in various papers, carries with it perhaps unwanted assumptions or intuitions. The term can seem to be making the claim that all such enhancements are improvements of the human qua human. This can suggest that those who have been enhanced might be better humans or might be more human than those who are not enhanced.
I want to demonstrate that this unwanted baggage clouds the debate. Discussions get mired down as disputants argue whether or not such enhancements do in fact 'improve' or 'damage' human nature.
First I will argue that the concept of human nature is too slippery to be of much use as a normative conception and secondly will demonstrate how arguments that recruit ideas of the human spirit, human nature or human essence inevitably hit an impasse when opponents make the claim that the essence is in fact something else or when they place a singular value on one aspect of this supposed essence. As one fear is that the value of achievement might be lost if people are enhanced, I will focus on that as an example of how changes might limit some forms of achievement do not per se prevent an equally valuable form of achievement.
I will then suggest that the result of enhancing one or more capacities is not 'human enhancement' but modification for a particular role. For this part of the argument I will develop a thought experiment: a woman Bea who wishes to be the best goatherd she can be and requires an enhancement that will give her access to the capacities of the village's best goatherd, Ahia. Who just happens to be a baboon. I will argue that for Bea what some might consider a loss of some of her 'humanity' is in fact a benefit. This will lead me to suggest that the values which might lead to what critics see as deleterious uses of enhancement technology are rooted in the cultural context. The technologies are a tool in the service of values instantiated in individual cultures. The tools themselves are not problematic: the values may be. In which case, is opponents seek to question modifications for a cultural environment which allow a subject the best chances of flourishing in that environment, their argument should be with the cultural environment not with the technology.
Finally I will argue that the case of Neil Harbisson is an excellent example of adaptation. His enhancement started as a therapeutic tool but has led to him becoming a self-proclaimed cyborg. Yet he states that he is still human, just a different human. He has not undergone enhancement but modification.
Comentarios