Opinion: Enhance or lose-Telangana Today

Normalising looks, functionality has been an integral part of human society and is unlikely to change

By Pramod K Nayar

Suppose, in the face of the climate crisis, we could cut electricity bills because humans can now see in the dark. Suppose, in the age of droughts, human metabolism needs far less water to live. Suppose, in the age of social tensions and war, humans have greater empathy and less aggression.

Thinking beyond restorative treatments — to bring the body to ‘normal’ functionality —, the debate over human enhancement has taken a moral turn. Would collective enhancement help humanity to deal better with, or even ameliorate, the crises we face now as a planet? The answers to this question necessarily range from parenting to the social, from the individual to the communitarian.

Genomic Parenting

There is no way to build a society where all kinds of bodies receive equal, or at least non-discriminating, attention and eventual acceptance. Normalising looks, shape, functionality has been an integral part of human society and this is unlikely to change even with trenchant wokeism. This also means certain kinds of bodies will experience suffering no matter how hard society tries to be sensitive to them.

Genetic choice-making and genome editing are modes chosen by parents to ensure their next generation has a better chance at social acceptance, and reduced chances of suffering. In other words, enhancing the chances of a better life is treated by philosophers of posthumanism such as Julian Savulescu and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, as a responsibility that parents take on.

These posthumanists argue that healthcare, education and different cultural practices or nurture are geared towards reducing the dependence on the forces of nature in shaping the child.  That is, humans have always been reluctant to let just plain Nature shape the child: culture has intervened to ensure the best chances for the child. Posthumanism’s genome editing takes this same route. If parents were to abandon the child to Nature’s ways, it would be deemed an act of irresponsibility (as is often the accusation levelled against those who do not endorse vaccinations for children). In a world given over to genome editing, would refusing similar editing not be irresponsible parenting?

Replanning Human Nature

Twenty years ago the political scientist Francis Fukuyama asked: ‘what is that human essence that we might be in danger of losing?’ What would happen, he wondered, to ‘the species-typical characteristics shared by all human beings qua human beings’.

Enhancement will exacerbate existing inequalities — just as those with access to coaching centres get through the exams

Fukuyama assumes that we collectively agree on what ‘human essence’ is. But it also believes that there is a natural process by which this essence has come about and made us what we are. As Allen Buchanan, a philosopher and bioethicist, has pointed out in his Beyond Humanity (2011) that ‘literacy and numeracy are profound and far-reaching cognitive enhancement. Computers, building on the platform of literacy and numeracy, extend human cognitive capacities even farther’. Therefore, he concludes, ‘it is quite misleading to say that it is only now, in the age of molecular biology, that human beings are able to change themselves irreversibly’. In other words, long before biotech, cognitive and moral enhancement have been practised through numeracy, literacy and other forms of education.

We have also replanned human nature for several decades now.  The philosopher Maurizio Balistreri writes of one such revolutionary change induced into human nature:

our ideas about what is essential may just refer to prejudice or habit. For example, before assisted reproduction, sex may have seemed an essential feature of reproduction, but today — after over forty years’ assisted reproduction — our perception is completely different

Thus, we have replanned human nature to accept, indeed in some cases, encourage, assisted reproduction as an alternative.

Following from the above, it stands to reason that if human nature can be replanned to develop a different approach to the nonhuman and the planet, would it not be a responsible modification to undertake for the collective? To return again to Buchanan:

The justification [for genome editing] offered would be indistinguishable from that which is used to justify education, immunization, and basic health care  [so that] every citizen has the capacity to be an effective participant in social cooperation.

This argument now turns towards the responsibility of those modified.

Hyperagency and the Social

Suppose through cognitive enhancement techniques, you can double your intelligence, reasoning abilities, and concentration. These enable the individual to perform better across different domains and, therefore, achieve their goals better.

But is that all? Applied ethicist Emma C Gordon in a recent essay in The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy has argued that cognitive enhancement places a wholly different burden on the Enhanced (we assume this is a subspecies of humanity in the future):

Along with acquiring all of this new power—including the power to continue upgrading your powers, altering what options are available — you at the same time acquire a lot more responsibility than you had before. Whereas before, you were less responsible for how things go for yourself, your loved ones, and your wider community — given the limitations on what you were able to anticipate and do about these things in light of the capacities you were originally gifted limitations … have now been lifted.

She terms this enhanced ability, hyperagency. Enhanced abilities can lead to the expectation, she says, of a ‘corresponding increase of responsibilities for the results of one’s choices proportionate to the degree of the enhancement’ but also ‘generates additional desires to fulfil these additional responsibilities’.

Gordon links enhancement not to mere privilege or performance but to greater responsibilities. But this naturally — an odd word to use in an essay on enhancement! — leads to the conundrum where the Enhanced desire to take on greater responsibilities for themselves and the world, but the contexts are not conducive for the execution of those responsibilities.  In such a situation, would the thwarting of their greater responsibilities ruin their chances of well-being? That is, if enhancement is meant to improve, first, the Enhanced’s well-being and second, their acts of responsibility in the world, then unmet responsibilities can be the cause of considerable anxiety. To put it differently, if enhanced abilities and capacities do not have the opportunity to reach their fullest potential — as the Rawlsian model of justice suggests —then, enhancement in and of itself is a dead end.

There is one final concern in connection with enhancement and the responsibilities of the Enhanced, and that has to do, expectedly, with matters of justice. Kirsten Brukamp of the Institute for History, Theory, and Ethics of Medicine, Aachen University, Germany, writes:

If neuroenhancers indeed conferred advantages, wealthy groups in society would gain more such advantages. In contrast, the proponents of pharmaco- logical neuroenhancement assert that it would help to create equal opportunities because it corrects injustice sown by distinctive biological traits.

Enhancement is here seen as a mode of facilitating greater equality, but the fear is that it will exacerbate existing inequalities — just as nationwide exams, as we have seen, enable those with access to coaching centres to get through the exams. Like coaching for competitive exams, which are seen as acceptable modes of enhancement, there will come into play socially coercive pressures for biomedical cognitive enhancement too.

With greatly enhanced power comes greater responsibility.

(The author is Senior Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)