Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People - Softcover

Harris, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691148163 ISBN 13: 9780691148168

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2010

Synopsis

In Enhancing Evolution, leading bioethicist John Harris dismantles objections to genetic engineering, stem-cell research, designer babies, and cloning and makes an ethical case for biotechnology that is both forthright and rigorous. Human enhancement, Harris argues, is a good thing--good morally, good for individuals, good as social policy, and good for a genetic heritage that needs serious improvement. Enhancing Evolution defends biotechnological interventions that could allow us to live longer, healthier, and even happier lives by, for example, providing us with immunity from cancer and HIV/AIDS. Further, Harris champions the possibility of influencing the very course of evolution to give us increased mental and physical powers--from reasoning, concentration, and memory to strength, stamina, and reaction speed. Indeed, he says, it's not only morally defensible to enhance ourselves; in some cases, it's morally obligatory.


In a new preface, Harris offers a glimpse at the new science and technology to come, equipping readers with the knowledge to assess the ethics and policy dimensions of future forms of human enhancement.

About this title

About the Author

John Harris is the Lord David Alliance Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester School of Law, joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, and a member of Britain's Human Genetics Commission. His many books include On Cloning and Clones, Genes, and Immortality.

From the Back Cover

"John Harris has an enormous reputation in bioethics for his adroit, acerbic, dead-on argumentation, his ingenuity at undermining familiar but flaccid argument, his immense imaginative capacities, and his skewering wit. These are rare qualities in an often goody-goody field like bioethics, and his intellectual skills earn him real respect. His philosophical work is an exploration, as he puts it, of our shared responsibility to make the world a better place. Enhancing Evolution is an ample demonstration of this work at its best."--Margaret P. Battin, University of Utah

"John Harris can be depended on to sharply challenge conventional thinking in bioethics, especially when that thinking takes a conservative cast. He does not disappoint here. Harris shows how deep-seated a part of human history enhancement is and how weak most objections to it are; indeed, he makes a persuasive case that it is not only generally morally permissible, but often morally required."--Dan W. Brock, director of the Division of Medical Ethics, Harvard Medical School

"John Harris's writings are always provocative as well as superbly reasoned. In this latest book, he succeeds in demolishing the arguments of those who claim that enhancements are a threat to humankind."--Ruth Macklin, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

"Enhancing Evolution is a pleasure to read and an important contribution to bioethics. Against writers such as Leon Kass, Michael Sandel, and Jürgen Habermas, John Harris argues for using genetic and other technologies to improve and extend human life, and even to design and clone humans. Whether or not one shares his optimism that humans are wise, prudent, or moral enough to use technology to benefit humankind, his cogent and elegantly expressed arguments must be taken seriously."--Bonnie Steinbock, University of Albany

"Over his illustrious career, John Harris has explored the most challenging bioethical questions with insight, engaging wit, and eloquence. In Enhancing Evolution, Harris does it again. He argues that it is not just an option but an obligation for people to use available biomedical technologies to enhance their own--and their children's--physical and mental abilities. Harris rightly deserves his reputation for fearlessly following his ethical arguments wherever they lead."--Ezekiel J. Emanuel, M.D., Ph.D.

"Full of witty arguments, Enhancing Evolution is a powerful response to concerns about human enhancement and genetic selection. It is also a deep, enlightening, and delightful (often hilarious) philosophical read. Scholars studying these topics, as well as the status of embryos and research on human subjects, would be wise to give Harris's arguments serious consideration."--Nir Eyal, Harvard Medical School

"Enhancing Evolution is the most comprehensive, robust defense of human enhancement in the literature to date. Harris blends more than fifteen years of work on human enhancement into a single volume and mixes in new arguments that definitively make the pro case for enhancement. The bioconservatives are in retreat. Harris has now set the agenda for the future of humankind. This will be the locus classicus for the enhancement debate."--Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Enhancing Evolution

The Ethical Case for Making Better PeopleBy John Harris

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14816-8

Contents

Preface to the Paperback edition............................................ixForeword bySteveRayner......................................................xixAcknowledgments.............................................................xxvIntroduction................................................................11 Has Humankind a Future?...................................................82 Enhancement Is a Moral Duty...............................................193 What Enhancements Are and Why They Matter.................................364 Immortality...............................................................595 Reproductive Choice and the Democratic Presumption........................726 Disability and Super-Ability..............................................867 Perfection and the Blue Guitar............................................1098 Good and Bad Uses of Technology...........................................1239 Designer Children.........................................................14310 The Irredeemable Paradox of the Embryo...................................16011 The Obligation to Pursue and Participate in Research.....................184Notes.......................................................................207Bibliography................................................................227Index.......................................................................239

Chapter One

Has Humankind a Future?

"Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi." "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." —Tomasi de Lampedusa, The Leopard

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we humans could live longer healthier lives with immunity to many of the diseases like cancer and HIV/AIDS that currently beset us? Even more wonderful might be the possibility of increased mental powers, powers of memory, reasoning, and concentration, or the possibility of increased physical powers, strength, stamina, endurance, speed of reaction, and the like. Wouldn't it be wonderful?

Many people think not. The idea of improving on human nature has been widely rejected. Decisive interventions in the natural lottery of life, to enhance human performance, improve life, and perhaps thereby irrevocably to change our genetic constitution, have met with extreme hostility. This hostility is, as we shall see, misplaced. In this book I hope to convince you that human enhancement is a good thing and that our genetic heritage is much in need of improvement.

Whatever people say, no one, I believe, actually thinks that there is anything in principle wrong with the enhancement of human beings. This seeming contradiction, paradoxical as it may appear, is resolved when we reflect on the familiarity and acceptability of existing enhancement technologies and on their history. Many of us are already enhanced (do you wear glasses, for example?) and all of us without exception have benefited from enhancing technologies. (For example, have you ever been immunized? And even if you haven't, you will have benefited from the so-called "herd immunity" created by the fact that others have.)

Not only do we all approve of enhancement, we approve for good reasons—we approve because we are decent moral people who want to protect each other from harm and who want to benefit ourselves, and others.

In terms of human functioning, an enhancement is by definition an improvement on what went before. If it wasn't good for you, it wouldn't be enhancement. There is a continuum between harms and benefits and the reasons we have to avoid harming others or creating others who will be born in a harmed state are continuous with the reasons we have for conferring benefits on others if we can.

We have reasons for declining to create or confer even trivial harms and we have reasons to confer and not withhold even small benefits. The opportunity to create healthier, longer-lived, and altogether "better" individuals is one that there are moral reasons to take.

As with all opportunities, we have also to consider the risks that they may entail and there is of course a relation between the magnitude and probability of the benefit and the degree and size of risk we are prepared to run to get it.

I will argue that enhancement is also an opportunity that it is in the interests of society and government to take. On this view, parents would act ethically if they were to attempt to achieve such an objective for their children, and those of us who are autonomous enough to consider such questions have good reasons to confer such benefits on ourselves. I will further show that governments have prudential as well as moral reasons to support parental and individual choice in such matters. Indeed, although this chapter is partially intended to introduce the themes of this book, it also initiates the argument and attempts to place the argument in a tradition of thinking about attempts to shape human nature and to rethink the destiny of humankind.

The freedom of citizens to do what's right ethically and what's personally prudent is not only self-evidently sensible, it is, as we shall see, enshrined in our moral and political theory. Now, and in the chapters that follow, I will show why and how human enhancement is in the interests of all of us personally and in the interests of society. The principal objections to human enhancement will be examined in detail and I will argue strongly not only for the freedom, but also for the obligation to pursue human enhancement.

Threats to human life and dramatic policies and practices to meet them are all too frequent in human history. My own interests in this process began in the early sixties of the last century.

In 1961 the philosopher Bertrand Russell published a book (a pamphlet really) asking a pertinent and agonizing question. That question had arisen because of threats posed by scientific advance and humankind's apparent inability to deal sensibly with the consequences. In 1961 the perceived threat was to all human life and it came from the policies of "mutually assured destruction" which were at the heart of strategies on both sides in the cold war concerning the use of nuclear weapons. Thinking about a rational response to what he perceived as the real possibility of the extinction of all human life, Russell's book asked the question and took the title: Has Man a Future? This book asks effectively the same question, and seeks to examine whether the answer might not lie in humankind's ability to realize its potentialities. We should be clear that, while the question "has humankind a future?" seems to be empirical, this is not the case. The question invites reflection on the nature of humankind and on the desirability of humankind's continued existence or further evolution.

Russell imagines a conversation with God:

If I were the pleader to Osiris for the continuation of the human race, I should say: "O just and inexorable judge, the indictment of my species is all too well deserved, and never more so than in the present day. But we are not all guilty and few of us are without better potentialities than those that our circumstances have developed.... It is not only what to avoid that great men have shown us. They have shown us also that it is within human power to create a world of shining beauty and transcendent glory.... Lord Osiris we beseech thee to grant us a respite, a chance to emerge from ancient folly into a world of light and love and loveliness." Perhaps our prayer will be heard. In any case, it is because of such possibilities, which, so far as we know, exist only for Man, that our species is worth preserving.

Russell was concerned with a nuclear catastrophe that might destroy all life and end in a permanent nuclear winter. He was pleading for the survival of the human species: not a survival that would preserve it with all its faults and follies, but rather a survival that would enable the realization of our "better potentialities." At the conclusion of Has Man a Future?, Russell restates his hopes for a future free from the fear of the threat that loomed largest in 1961:

Man has not only the corresponding capacities for cruelty and suffering, but also potentialities of greatness and splendour, realised, as yet very partially, but showing what life might be in a freer and happier world. If man will allow himself to grow to his full stature, what he may achieve is beyond our present capacity to imagine. Poverty, illness and loneliness could become rare misfortunes ... And with the progress of evolution, what is now the shining genius of an eminent few might become a common possession of the many. All this is possible, indeed probable, in the thousands of centuries that lie before us. Russell might initially be taken to be saying that the survival of humans as we know them has value. But if we scratch the surface we see that for him what matters is the preservation and expansion of what is good about humans. We too should prioritize improving on humans over preserving the species in its present form.

This "progress of evolution" is unlikely now to be achieved accidentally or by letting nature take its course. If illness and poverty are indeed to become rare misfortunes, this is unlikely to occur by chance, even with the thousands of centuries that Russell envisages and evolution requires. It may be that a nudge or two is needed: nudges that will start the process, trailed in the introduction to this book, of replacing natural selection with deliberate selection, Darwinian evolution with "enhancement evolution." This book is concerned with the ethics and indeed with the policy dimensions of providing the required nudges.

If we wish humankind to achieve its potential (which has so far almost universally been assumed to be an inevitable part of evolutionary progress), this might require some deliberate changes. It is possible that, however conservative we are and however much we wish for things to go on as they are, things will have to change. If this is right, then conservatives for whom the sanctity of the existing human genome or the preservation of the species is an article of faith may need to accept change to preserve if not the totality, at least the essence, of what they value.

The epigraph for this chapter, which perhaps also serves as a salutary reminder of the connection between the impulse to conservatism and the temptations of revolutionary change, is Lampedusa's wonderfully memorable idea that "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." It is worth recalling the context in which this paradox is introduced.

Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, the "Leopard" of the title of Lampedusa's famous novel, is a deeply conservative hereditary prince in a still feudal Sicily. When we meet him in May 1860, Garibaldi's "revolution" is about to topple the Bourbon monarchy and the "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies." Ten years later, a united Italy, a phenomenon not seen since the fall of the Roman Empire, will be proclaimed, with Rome as its capital, and the Risorgimento will have completed its final phase. The Prince of Salina wants things to go on as they always have and yet he eventually accepts that his nephew Tancredi is right to think that even revolutionary change may sometimes be the only way to protect things as they are and that "if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." The very different possibilities that are the subject of this book raise the same questions that faced Tancredi and Don Fabrizio: whether or not change is required and what will have to be sacrificed to achieve it, whether the changes constitute a revolution or the continuation of the status quo by other means. The crucial question, however, concerns whether or not the proposed changes enable the survival of what matters and permit the flourishing and further improvement of life for everyone (which is what all decent conservatives, liberals, and revolutionaries desire).

Russell's question is thus also the Prince of Salina's dilemma. It is a question and a dilemma that has been sharpened in our own times by the revolutionary possibilities for human enhancement developed and developing in science and technology.

This book looks seriously at the possibility of revolutionary change in human powers and capacities as well as in human nature. Whether this revolutionary change will prove conservative or radical is of course a further and complex question. Potentially, supporting human enhancement is as conservative as the Prince of Salina and as revolutionary as Tancredi; it shares with both of them their love of life and of love, their respect for science, for tradition, and acceptance of the necessity, sometimes, for decisive action.

It is doubtful that there was ever a time in which we ape-descended persons were not striving for enhancement, trying to do things better and to better ourselves.

Shelter, learning and teaching, tool using, body decoration, clothing, gathering and hunting, cooking, storing, cooperation, cultivation, animal taming and domestication, farming, social living, language, and education are all enhancement techniques or technologies. With the help of some of these tools we have built institutions and relationships, families, villages and cities, societies and civilizations, schools, universities, markets, commercial organizations, and other mechanisms of cooperation and competition. We have created literature, art, and music; we have created agriculture and industry, science and medicine, and technology and engineering.

Not all of these are equally beneficial of course, and any human construct can be misused or ill-used; but all mechanisms which make possible (though not of course inevitable) better life and better lives are means of enhancement in some sense. Substances that are effective analgesics in small doses are often poisons in larger doses; heroin is a derivative of morphine and both are derived from opium. The fact of widespread and disastrous heroin addiction does not discredit morphine as an important source of pain control and hence as a "beneficial" compound.

It is important to be clear that when we call something an "enhancement" or an "enhancing" technology or therapy we are not saying that is always its effect, any more than when we call something an "analgesic" we imply that it will in every case and every dose reduce pain or that "stimulants" will always stimulate or that "carers" always care or "healers" always heal. There is no sensible way in which we must take the possibility of misuse into account before determining that something is an enhancement. When we call something a form or method of human enhancement, we are pointing to a likely improvement that it can (will typically) effect if used in ways best calculated to achieve that effect. Aspirin is a painkiller which can also have many other beneficial "enhancing" effects, including reducing the risk of stroke. It is also a well-known killer and is often used to attempt suicide.

Writing is one of the most significant enhancement technologies. In addition to providing ways of recording speech and setting down ideas, it supplements memory and has indeed made, among many other things, recorded history possible for the first time. Writing, and everything that goes with it—reading, books, printing, libraries, education, universities, computers, etc.—would never have taken off if its incredibly expensive and elitist beginnings had been like the serpent in the egg "killed in the shell." Think how expensive, rare, and elitist were manuscript books, school and university education, and printed books. Remember too that, until comparatively recently, the ability to read, and in turn to teach literacy and numeracy and everything which depends on these, was very thinly spread, not only throughout the world but within most nation (and city) states. Imagine if someone had said (and been heeded) that we should not invest in books and in literacy and education because it was expensive and elitist and could not be provided for all, or that we should not do so until it could be provided for all.

When the college at which I studied as a graduate student was founded in Oxford somewhere around 1263, university education was available to very few (and they were not the elite). The books the scholars read were in manuscript form and university education for all who might benefit was not even an idea, let alone an ideal. The same went for the founding of schools. Now in much of the world all children have some schooling, and university education is in many countries available for a majority of those who can (and who wish to) benefit. Schools and universities are incredibly expensive institutions but, despite this, it is not an exaggeration to say that the world aspires to universal provision. While this has not yet been achieved, few say that we should not further invest in education in Western Europe or North America, for example, until the same levels can be reached in the rest of the world. Equally we do not (and I believe should not) think that in investing in education we are trying to steal an advantage over people in countries who spend less.

If there is a lesson here, it is that we should be slow to assume that a good is too expensive, rare, or elitist to be pursued in the hope that eventually it can be made generally available, and that it therefore does not merit investment. Still less are there reasons to prevent the investment of others in the development of enhancing technologies and procedures.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691148163
• ISBN 13: 9780691148168
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 242