|
A peer-reviewed
electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 18(1)
– May 2008 |
The right not to be normal as
the essence of freedom
Anita Silvers
Professor of Philosophy
San Francisco State University
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 18 Issue 1 – May 2008 – pgs 79-85
http://jetpress.org/v18/silvers.htm
Abstract
Proponents of using medical technology for enhancement sometimes misunderstand how the biology of enhancement works. Appreciation of biological diversity supports a program of enhancement. Acknowledging a liberty right to be biologically different addresses worries abut enhancement’s being undemocratic. Doing so also suggests changes in emphasis to strengthen the case for enhancement.
Introduction
Enhancement is as American as apple pie,
despite philosophical and political claims to the contrary that cast
enhancement as alien or alienating. Attacks launched against enhancement aim at
the idea of creating supermen, but the attitudes that animate these assaults
cannot help but take out peripheral targets too. All biological outliers are
within their scope because the arguments against using medical technology to
alter people beyond the commonplace are structured to reject whoever appears
not to be normal. Such reasoning valorizes populations of biologically “normal”
individuals, making their homogeneity an important social goal. In contrast,
the traditional American personal liberty value promotes diversity and so frees
people to not be normal.
In an era that promises enormous expansion of
control over our biological processes, liberal democratic theory should prize
the right of citizens to be biologically different from one another, and to
diverge from species typicality – from supposed biological norms – without
restrictive social penalties being imposed. But what of the fear that
permitting this sort of biological freedom to diverge from species-typicality
through enhancement comes at the cost of social freedom? Prudence is advisable,
because enhancement technologies being more readily available to some people
than to others could impose burdens. Nevertheless, enhancement’s basic nature
is to nourish freedom, not to starve it.
It is as much within our power to reduce the
political and social risks of using new biological technology for enhancement
as to safeguard against the biological hazards to which therapeutic
applications of the same technology may be susceptible. Worries about possible
anti-democratic outcomes of applying biological technologies for enhancing,
rather than just for curing, are not chimerical fears. But using applications
of the technology to enhance is not inherently dangerous. We have, of course, a
horrid tradition of unfairly punishing people’s biological differences while
privileging other people for being species-typical or “normal” (Silvers 1998).
Such differential treatment is traceable, however, to widely promulgated
misconceptions about the naturalness and normality of biological homogeneity.
So if the price of guarding against social or political harm occasioned by new
biological technologies lies in improving how fairly we treat each other in
spite of our biological differences, that price seems more than fair.
Biological Contingency
The liberty to be biologically different is
grounded in an understanding of the truth of biological contingency. Disregard
of biological contingency is a fault that distinguishes both virulent
supporters and virulent opponents of applying our new biological technologies
to enhance people. That opponents should ignore what the relevant biological
technologies actually do is not so surprising, given their fear of the cultural
changes they believe would ensue from biological alteration. But supporters
doing so as well only fuels their antagonists’ fears.
Biological contingency is true because biological properties – whether
these be sex-related hormone secretion, skin pigmentation, or number of feet
- generally are not intrinsic strengths
nor weaknesses, nor are biological properties essentially functional nor
dysfunctional. Whether a biological property enhances or reduces a person’s
capabilities is contingent on both the physical and social contexts in which
the individual is situated. For
example, generous testosterone secretion is a functional strength in
environments rife with physical combat, where muscle bulk, speedy recovery from
injuries, and hair trigger aggression are useful, but it is a functional
weakness in a nonbelligerent environment where inducing trust and facilitating
cooperation are crucial to productive functioning. Oxytocin secretion may be
more functional in the latter context (Kosfield et. al. 2005). Secreting testosterone in precisely the
species-typical amounts may be prudent for Tour de France competitors, but is
not so important generally.
Vaccination exemplifies the relevance of context in
assessing whether a biological enhancement helps or harms. Enhancing people’s immune systems may seem
equivalent to strengthening the persons, for increased ability to fight off
infection initially appears to be an unequivocal benefit. Vaccination
technology therefore is one of the therapeutic processes suited to effect
benign enhancement. But even in this case, we must balance benefit against risk
in relation to context, for we are applying a (prophylactic) therapy that can
also enhance.
Vaccination was developed in the eighteenth century, despite religious
and scientific opposition, to extend life expectancy and improve people’s
quality of life. Initially it was opposed as unnaturally against God’s plan
because it is a technique that permanently strengthens the human body beyond
its naturally susceptible state.
Concerns about the propriety of altering the bodies that God gave us,
and fears about interrupting the familiar cycle of purges of the population by
epidemic illnesses God visited on us, were reasons given for condemning
vaccination technology (White 1895, 2006). Although
vaccination is so commonplace today we do not identify it with being enhanced,
this technology clearly improves immune systems so that people overcome inborn
natural susceptibilities. Vaccination techniques have been refined, and vaccination
targets multiplied, to give individuals better immunity than they could achieve
absent medical intervention. Vaccination programs have brought about
unprecedented levels of population healthiness as well.
Yet strengthening immune systems is not an unconditional benefit. The
technology to do so holds some hazards, for agents that stimulate immunity may
have unintended effects. Nor is heightened immunity dangerous only when
artificially induced, for natural immune reactions can turn a person’s body
against itself. For example, the highest mortality in the 1918 influenza
epidemic was suffered by young adults (15 to 34 year olds) because their bodies
could not survive the vehemence of their immune systems’ response to the virus
( Billings 1997).
The self-same immune process that helped them overcome other infections that
were fatal to weaker individuals completely shut down their respiratory
systems, while weaker individuals recovered.
Should we permit the use of therapies that also have the
power to enhance, as Ritalin and Prozac do? Should we permit therapeutic uses
but police these stringently to prevent the substances being used otherwise, as
we do with opiates? For one thing, being enhanced is not always freely chosen.
Enhancing a biological capability sometimes is integral to mitigating a
biological incapacity as, for instance, people who cannot walk sometimes
develop enhanced arm and shoulder strength from swinging through on crutches or
pushing on wheels attached to a chair.
The question also is difficult because often there is no
clear division between enhancement and cure. Context also affects whether a
medical intervention merely mitigates or enhances. Having two feet, or even
one, foot, rather than having none, can be helpful in some situations, for
example if a person oversleeps and must leap out of bed and into the shower.
Having no feet rather than two, but protheses instead, may be more useful if
moving very fast over a track is more important than leaping onto a floor, or
if the floor leapt upon is sprinkled with glass. But there’s no substitute for
fleshly feet if a person craves a soothing foot massage. Prostheses that
replace amputated extremities can enhance certain kinds of activities while
making others more difficult. We thus should be enormously cautious in
extrapolating the burdens or benefits of biological properties from
individualized contexts to general principles.
The special prosthetic foot used by the
bicycle racer Dory Selinger is preferable to a fleshly foot because it connects
directly to the bicycle pedal and does not flex at the ankle, permitting more
efficient transfer of energy from man to machine( Squatrighlia 2001). Yet if needing to escape a burning bedroom in
the middle of the night, Selinger might be better off with his original
flexibly but firmly attached at the ankle foot than with a prosthetic he has to
pause to put on. On balance, of course, both before and after his amputation,
bicycle racing was more important in Selinger’s life than escaping from fires at
night.
The South African track star Oscar Pistorius,
whose congenitally anomalous feet were amputated in childhood (Philip 2005),
uses modern alloy artificial feet that return almost as much energy as the
runner’s weight loads (Hood 2005). But this is only half as much thrust as the
strongest, best trained human calf muscles can provide. So being a double amputee may seem
disadvantageous for speedy running, until one realizes that Pistorius’s
prosthetic ankles can be lengthened well beyond the commonplace, consequently
lengthening his stride. In his first race with the newest design racing feet,
his time was just 1.22 seconds outside the current Olympic qualifying time, and
he’s widely expected to shave much more off his time after prosthetic
adjustment to make his stride length optimal, and more practice.
Many contingencies individualize whether a
prosthetic improves or reduces functionality. Optimal prosthetic design is
contingent on progress in metallurgy to produce better alloys. Psychological
(for instance, that the person desires to be a competitive athlete) and
physical (for instance, that the person is otherwise physically suited to
achieve speed) as well as social (for instance, that there are organized
bicycle and track competitions that permit people with amputations to
participate) factors are important.
These examples show why biological properties
commonly thought of as essentially enhancing or essentially depriving, or
essentially functional or dysfunctional, actually deserve neutral assessment
until context is supplied. The means to enlarging a certain performance or experience may strike people
who value such performance or experience as beneficial, but strike people who
prefer other, incompatible performances or experiences as damaging. So whether
strengthening a biological property is an improvement or loss is contingent on
both the physical and the social contexts in which the individual is
situated.
Superficial enhancement scenarios such as that medical technology will
extend the human life span to many hundreds of years are unrealistic. Doing so
would require correlating changes in many biological properties at the same
time, as well as fortuitous coordination with the ever-evolving physical and
environmental context. More likely, therapeutic
interventions directed at alleles known to contribute to early mortality will
raise life expectancy (not lengthen life-span) by addressing some of the causes
of people’s dying before advanced old age, just as improving sanitation and
nutrition once did to increase life expectancy.
Optimizing alleles through technologies that manage genes may enable
some people to deliver particular kinds of performances that excel. There are
various combinations that might enable a body to run faster, or eyes to read
faster, than anyone previously. But whether such enhanced performances
ultimately count as benefits or harms depends on context, so we should not
preemptively either court or condemn them, anymore than we should view
vaccination technology either as a guarantee of well-being or a categorical
threat.
Progressives are likely to be more hopeful about the outcomes of
biological change, while conservatives may be less optimistic about escaping
its risks. But their debates about the propriety of enhancement technology, or
more precisely about therapies with the power not only to heal but to enhance,
do not address the intrinsic morality of either the aims or the means of
enhancing. Their quarrel is about the most propitious formula for weighing
likely benefits of potentially enhancing technologies realistically against
risks.
Democratic Equality and the
Antidote to Species Norming
Stripped of context, biological difference is biologically neutral, but
should it be politically neutral as well?
Equality of opportunity, as expressed in the familiar instruction to be
“All you can be,” calls for political and social structures that enable all of
us to develop and exercise our strengths and talents, whatever these are, as
long as doing so does not harm others. Applied to biological difference,
equality of opportunity calls for participation in political and social
practices to be equally open and inviting to individuals who differ from each
other biologically.
Some critics worry that using bio-technology
to bestow biological enhancements cannot help but exacerbate social inequality.
Worrying that inequitable distribution of biological technology will make the
rich richer is widespread. An interview about the value of the world’s first
manfactured equine, cloned from a cell of a champion racing mule, produced the
following illustrative assessment: “If they were doing it on a large scale,
we’d be against it,” said Haw (a thoroughbred horse owner). “Then the best
animals would be owned by the richest people. It wouldn’t be right for only the
billionaires to be able to afford it” (Johnson 2006). But it is mistaken to
think that economic advantage achieved through biological technology this way
damages equal opportunity.
We should not conflate equality of opportunity
and equality of outcome. Consider why athletes with amputations were, and still
may be in future, barred from Olympic track trials. They used to be barred –
denied opportunity to compete – because old-fashioned prosthetics handicapped
them. Clunky artificial feet were feared to take too much edge off their
competing, even if their natural talent was great. Today enhancement technology
creates superior prosthetic running feet, making it conceivable for amputees to
run Olympic trial qualifying times, and even run much faster. But where once
they were denied opportunity to compete for being too slow because of their
artificial feet, they now may be denied for being too fast because of their
artificial feet.
If so, equal opportunity will be closed to their
talent and training by bias about the substance of people’s feet. Far from victimizing equal opportunity,
enhancement is similarly victimized. But if their participation depends on
equality of outcome, and their matching – neither undershooting or overshooting
– species typical outcomes, the biologically different always will suffer
exclusion. This is evident from the nature of biological gifts.
Like disabilities, biological enhancements
tend to diversify performance outcomes rather than homogenizing them. One
reason is that to become biologically more efficiently or effectively
functional in one way is not to become biologically more successful overall.
Thus individuals who have biological talents do not necessarily enjoy
competitive advantages over species-typical individuals. If their strengths and
talents are not appropriate to the context, or are not appreciated and
cultivated, they may be no more competitive, or even disadvantaged, instead.
The kinds of biological talents people have,
and the contextual differences that make these beneficial or not, are so
diverse as to render outcomes achieved through biological talent
incommensurable and thereby to defy judging whether they are equal. We cannot
clearly compare outcomes in contexts to which those with unusual talents are
suited with outcomes in commonplace contexts. So equality of outcome appears to
be a value appropriate for biologically homogeneous populations but not for
biologically diverse ones.
Equality of opportunity is the democratic
value crucial to a biologically diverse population. Biologically enhancing one
or another talent won’t lead to suppression of equality of opportunity, for
people enhanced in different ways have an interest in maintaining multiple
avenues of opportunity to ensure finding some suited to their special
configurations of powers. Rather than increasing social inequality, the
proliferation of enhancement technologies should discourage people from
measuring their life’s outcomes against each other and homogenizing conceptions
of well-being, and thus should invite more kinds of opportunity.
Nevertheless, uneasiness about enhancement is
understandable. Too many enhancement proponents adopt the discourse of
biological strengths and weaknesses. Their opponents share this error. Both
affiliate with a conceptualization pressed by eugenics theories, namely, that
biological differences should be judged as weaknesses or strengths, and
disposed of or promoted accordingly for the sake of biological homogeneity.
Indeed, the best protection against eugenics is not to abandon enhancement but
to reject thinking that does not appreciate biological diversity. Promoting
biological diversity is the most powerful, pervasive, and persistent way to
undermine the conceptual foundation of eugenics programs.
The fear that enhancement necessitates
eugenics also confuses population enhancement, which may be harmful but is not
diversifying, with individual enhancement, which is diversifying but harmless.
Eugenics homogenizes populations with the aim of reducing the frequency of
dysfunctions or weaknesses. In addition to population enhancement’s wrongful
targeting of minorities, such programs are alarming from anyone’s
viewpoint.
First, because different biological
properties often are correlated, seeming weaknesses can be paired with sure
strengths, complicating whether to sacrifice both or save both. Second, a
functional property may become dysfunctional if the environment changes, or
alternatively, as is famously illustrated by sickle cell trait, which conveys
protection against malaria helpful in lowland climates but also causes
debilitating symptoms at elevated altitudes. Thus programs to eliminate
so-called “bad” properties to improve the population could in the long run have
the opposite effect. Third, species that maintain diversity of talents within
their populations are in principle more adaptable and perhaps more competitive.
Proposals to improve the population by homogenizing people biologically also
undemocratically impose ideas of what is biologically good that have no firm
biological foundation. Political systems therefore should assign neither
advantage nor disadvantage on the basis of biology, either explicitly, or as an
unintended consequence of policy or practice.
The Right To Be Biologically
Different
For biological difference to remain
politically neutral, the political system should neither advance nor hinder
people either because they are biologically typical rather than extraordinary,
or biologically extraordinary rather than typical. It may seem odd to
articulate this caveat, grounded in the fact of biological contingency, as a
right, specifically the right to be biologically different. For often, although
not always, people who are biologically different have not chosen to be.
So how can there be liberty claims to
biological difference? What could it mean for people to have a right to be what
they cannot help but be? Why are we obligated to respect biological difference
rather than just to tolerate it?
Understanding the right to
be biologically different, whether artificially or naturally so, and whether
difference is adopted voluntarily or results accidentally or from inheritance,
begins with recognizing that no bright line separates natural and artificially adopted
biological differences. From tattooing (altering one’s pigment to be more
attractive and thereby more competitive) to training (altering one’s muscle
strength and ability to oxygenate to have more stamina and be more
competitive), people voluntarily alter their biological properties to enhance
themselves without anyone thinking the improvement is unnatural. Whether
members of a biological minority chose to be so or not, social restriction
should not delimit what their biology can enable them to do.
In principle, people might reasonably be
denied liberty rights to two main types of biological properties: properties
that directly cause their possessors to harm others and those that indirectly
result in harm to others. Beyond
science fiction scenarios about biologically manufactured soldiers with
enhanced aggressiveness launched directly at their designers’ enemies,
enhancement most often is thought to endanger indirectly by conferring unfair
advantage on undeserving
competitors.
Of course, technologically induced
enhancement could be yet another means those who have much can deploy to
maintain their advantage over those who have little. Would whoever objects on
this ground to cloned racing mules also find Pistorius’s racing on his
manufactured feet to be unfair? So unfair as to deny him the liberty of
competing? Surely a runner whose fleshly ankles afforded identically lengthy
stride would not be similarly excluded. As both the lanky ankled runner and
Pistorius achieve their speed through training and talent, and through lower
extremities of the very same length, it’s hard to find unfairness here. For
enhancement technology, applied
individually rather than delivered in a society-wide eugenics program, alters
people incrementally rather than giving them capabilities of a different order.
So even the costliest enhancements is unlikely to be effective without
individual effort to make it work.
Further, such concern about making
enhancement technology available for individual use assumes that human well-being
is basically competitive rather than cooperative, and therefore that additional
capabilities for some people cannot help but mean losses for others. But even
if Pistorius’s stride were considerably longer than any fleshly leg could ever
deliver, it would be pernicious to hold the right to be biologically different
hostage to a perverted model of human interaction. Competitive games provide
entertaining thrills, but for at least two reasons they are poor models for
productive societies.
Games are, first, unproductively arbitrary. A
marathoner’s having the resources or good fortune to increase his capability of
oxygenating by training in Kenya as opposed to a sea-level site seems neither
less nor more harmful to competitors than his increasing oxygenation by
undergoing gene transfer. It is the terms set by the organization of the game
that makes it seems so. Neither training site is available to all participants
equally and this is arbitrarily accepted by the rules of the game, whereas gene
transfer used by some competitors but not others arbitrarily is not.
Second, games are unproductively
exclusionary. Games call upon narrow kinds of talent to the exclusion of other
equally productive ones. It would be more useful to ask how individual
enhancements could affect a society that values cooperation over
competition.
How biological technology might expand the
ways in which individuals contribute to each other’s well-being is not well
explored in transhumanist literature. Transhumanist writers commonly focus on
how enhancement can elevate success in living longer, becoming smarter and even
being happier, but how enhancing individuals might facilitate people working
together often seems an afterthought for them. Yet everyone benefits from
talented colleagues who can contribute something special to the work, and whose
talents also leave room for other people’s contributions.
Transhumanists’ inattention to the prospect
of enhancing human collaboration may be, in part, because empirical studies
only now are illuminating the complex biological mechanisms that facilitate
human cooperation. Of course, enlarging cooperative behavior is more
complicated than altering individual genes.
Doing so also is more sophisticated than administering transmitters such
as oxytocin, for how conducive such a substance will be in effecting
collaborative behavior is affected by whether each recipient’s past experience
of placing of trust in others has been reliable (Carey 2005). The prevailing
social organization thus will influence the effectiveness of biological
intervention to expand human capacity to be cooperative. In regard to enhancing
productive cooperation, we should understand that promoting the right to be
biologically different supports the development of multi-talented cooperative
teams.
To counter understandable fears about
dangerous privileging and dangerous homogenizing resulting from applications of
enhancement technology, transhumanists should enhance their appreciation of
biological diversity. As well, they should consider the implications of
enhancing biological properties associated with the collaborative capabilities
that make humans more productive than other animals. In focusing more on the
social goods that biological diversity brings, they will find it easier to make
enhancement’s strong connection to democratic values clear.
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