Who's Afraid of Human Enhancement?

A Reason debate on the promise, perils, and ethics of human biotechnology.

From the January 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 6)

It is the alleged dangers of biotechnology that are vague, ill-defined, and wholly speculative. While Joel Garreau wonderfully chronicles some of the far-out visions of technological transcendence in Radical Evolution, my desires are more modest. All I want to do is dramatically boost people's physical and intellectual capacities, restore the natural environment, and make death optional.

Nick Gillespie: Thank you, Ron. Although I've got to say you've given the opposite side a powerful argument with your vision of a family picnic, especially if you've ever met my cousins. Next up is Eric Cohen.

Eric Cohen: Thanks very much. As a magazine editor, I want to start by simply complimenting Ron's title. I spend a lot of time trying to think of clever titles, which sometimes are the only things people remember about the nice article you publish, and Liberation Biology is a very smart title. It's a play, if I understand it correctly, on liberation theology, which is a whole collection of interesting, silly, weird ideas having to do generally with heaven and hell. Ron's title is clever on a couple of levels.

One, it signals that he's breaking from [the concept of heaven and hell]. He's breaking from this whole [religious] mythology, which I suspect in his mind hasn't delivered very much. He's leading us toward the age of flag football with your grandmother and farm-fresh salmon, but he's also signaling that he wants to try to answer some of the same human longings that theology or religion has long answered. So it's an interesting title on that level. I think it's also interesting in [raising the question of] what is it the liberty to do? What is the liberation he's talking about?

It's liberation from all kinds of horrible things in human life--sudden illness, dying children, people who have more ambition than talent, people who have more ideas than time, people who simply don't want to die and want to be a lot more like gods than most human beings are. It's also liberty to do various things, and this brings us to the subject of tonight's panel, which is the question of enhancement.

It seems to me that if you take the word enhancement at face value, there simply can't be anything wrong with it, right? Enhancement means to make things better, so then [all the things Ron talks about are] great. But the question is whether the things that seem like enhancements really are enhancements. The disquiet that some people have with the biotech revolution is [due to our] worry that in trying to make life better in ways we recognize, we're going to make it worse in ways we can't even imagine. That's the set of problems we face.

I should say most biotech is great. I hope the stocks go up. I hope they cure various diseases or at least develop better treatments for them, but some of the more ambitious and more interesting areas of biotechnology give some of us disquiet.

There are two sides to the disquiet. One has to do with the means that we're going to use to supposedly enhance ourselves and the other has to do with the ends. The conventional worry about enhancement has to do with the quality [of improvements] that the rich are going [to be able to afford]. The wealthy are going to become gene rich and the poor are going to become gene poor, and this is going to worsen the inequalities of life. I'm enough of a free market person to believe that if something works in wealthy societies, eventually most people are going to be able to afford it.

The worries about means are a little different though. Here the stem cell debate is paradigmatic. Everybody wants to cure these horrible diseases. It's an end that all sides of the stem cell debate share.

The issue is, should we be destroying human embryos to do it? I think you can make a pretty rigorous, rational, and scientific case that embryos are early human lives and that to use them as mere things would make us a lesser society. The worry here is not about the end we're pursuing but about the means that are used to pursue it.

And let me spend some time asking about those ends. What is it that we're trying to enhance? What are the goals here? I think you can break down four different ways of trying to enhance ourselves--and here I follow the definitive discussion in a report by the President's Council on Bioethics called Beyond Therapy. The four ways are superior performance in the various activities of life, better children, long lives or even ageless lives, and happiness. Those are four basic aspirations that are not new, though biotechnology might give us some new ways to pursue them.

If you think it through, there are reasons to at least wonder whether the biotechnologies we're talking about are really going to answer these human longings in any serious way. Obviously everybody's all worked up these days about performance-enhancing drugs in sports, and as Joel tells me, the existing drugs are child's play compared to what's coming. But we have to ask ourselves, is the athlete on steroids a better athlete, a better human athlete? Or has he become more an animal bred for the race? And we might create all kinds of drugs that boost the capacity to, say, remember SAT words. But is that really going to make people smarter, or is it going to narrow their minds in a certain way and make them less able to make the kinds of connections that are essential to real human intelligence and real human wisdom?

The same with the desire for better children. I question whether we would ever be able to design a better child. Can we really make a better musician than Mozart or make a better playwright than Shakespeare? We may be able to make everybody in our wildest dreams as talented as those people, though I doubt it. But there's a deeper issue, which has to do with the nature of the family. It seems to me that parenthood is about not only� trying to make your children better but having a welcoming and embracing attitude toward the child that's given to you to raise and given to you to love. I wonder whether embracing full force a kind of designer attitude is really going to make us better parents and better families.

The same with the desire for longevity. There's the worry that we may simply extend debility. It may be that we're going to simply have Alzheimer's disease for 35 years instead of for 10 in the future. I'm not sure that's necessarily progress. In a deeper sense, if we really believed or lived as if we were going to live forever, would we really have the urgency and the aspiration and the ambition to do the things that we do in life? Most of the portraits of immortality that we've seen, or at least many of them, present a less appealing picture than grandma playing flag football. I'm not sure how appealing that is either.

Nick Gillespie: Especially if you're not a Kennedy, right?