Guest post by Melinda Hall (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Stetson University)
In “Human Engineering and Climate Change,” bioethicists S. Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache argue that anthropogenic climate change is one of the biggest problems humans face as we move into the future (2012). They lay out several non-controversial facts: climate change will impact millions around the world, causing hunger, water shortages, diseases, and coastal flooding. This will happen relatively soon. Liao et al. critique the three most common and promising solution types: behavioral solutions, market solutions, and geo-engineering (206). These solutions, for the authors, are either insufficient on their own or too risky (geo-engineering) for parties to undertake unilaterally (207).
So the authors suggest human engineering deserves just as much attention as these other solution types, especially if geo-engineering is taken seriously (2012, 211). The authors believe that biomedical technologies aimed at human enhancement could be combined with market and behavioral solutions, to effectively mitigate climate change. Human engineering (HE) strategies would be paired with a variety of incentives for their use and so would be voluntary (211-212).
Liao et al. tightly circumscribe their claim, cautioning readers that they do not seek to show that we ought to use HE strategies but rather that HE strategies should be considered (2012, 207). They further admit their proposal is “outlandish” and even “preposterous,” but claim that good ideas often are; they cite the invention of the telephone and germ theory, for example (216-217). The authors write: “whilst we may often be good at judging which ideas are unworthy of pursuing, we are nevertheless sometimes vulnerable to dismissing useful and valuable ideas” (217).
But, I argue their suggested HE strategies should not be taken seriously. The HE proposal is, as they say, outlandish, but inexcusably so; it occludes serious ethical concerns visible through feminist and disability-rights lenses. The proposal is, on my view, part of a damaging tradition in bioethics which leans on a normalizing discourse of risk and catastrophe to make troubling proposals while simultaneously disguising or eliding the ethical import of those proposals. This discourse has impact especially for women and those with disabilities.
The authors suggest introducing pharmacological meat intolerance (2012, 208), producing smaller children (208-209), lowering birth-rates through cognitive enhancement for women (209), and the pharmacological enhancement of altruism and empathy (210-211).
Especially concerning to me is the suggestion that cognitive enhancement among women would lower birth rates. The authors note that less education is linked to higher birth-rates in women; so, if smarter women have fewer babies, maybe we can cognitively enhance to ensure this result—and, in turn, fewer of us means less strain on resources (and, even if this desired result is not achieved, the authors claim that the fact that this strategy would result in smarter people is a good on its own). This proposal ignores recent demographic research that highlights the structural factors that impact higher population rates, including poverty and GDP. The authors’ insistence on the importance of cognitive enhancement over these other issues reveals the strength of the authors’ presuppositions. They suggest both that those with higher cognitive ability have better self-control and that people with lower cognitive ability engage in behaviors that are anti-social and so are unfit for responsible civic life. This further suggests that “smarter” people (those with higher IQs) have better self-control (stronger wills) and are potentially more altruistic, and therefore more moral.
The authors’s final suggestion involves a creeping materialism; it presumes that morality is a physical feature connected to measurable and quantifiable biological facts about the body. Even if the presence of certain peptides, like oxytocin, cause people to exhibit behaviors considered more “altruistic,” I am not convinced that means that we enhance ourselves in terms of morality or altruism by way of its use.
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I find that the four suggestions outlined by the authors ignore structural resource inequalities of all kinds, make assumptions about links between high cognitive skills (measured by IQ) and altruistic behavior (in this context: limiting one’s family size), and indulges in a sort of moral materialism that suggests morality can be reduced to biological facts about the body. Further, unless the HE strategies are non-voluntary, it seems they will not help enough for investments in them to be justified (that is, as several initial commentators on the article point out, they run into the same problem behavioral strategies do: the lack of will to carry them out). Indeed, the HE strategy that seems most plausibly efficacious is non-voluntary: that is, the choice to make one’s children smaller, which is non-voluntary for the children involved.
Perhaps the authors have the hidden aim of leading their readers to consider the possibility that human enhancement must be non-voluntary to efficaciously curb the negative impacts of climate change (and that there may be no other, better strategies available). This might explain the prima facie absurdity of their suggestions, which they admittedly make no attempt to mitigate (2012, 216). Many times they note that the eventual outcome of not doing anything about climate change would be mass destruction, so we should cast about for any possible solution. In other words, the backdrop of risk and catastrophe justifies actions typically considered beyond the pale, and seemingly elides the necessity for deep analysis of alternatives. This submerged rhetorical framework makes it possible for the authors to nudge readers to arrive at the necessity of involuntary human enhancement. If this is the authors’ hope, then they are indeed engaged in a manipulation not alien to a “modest proposal” but more deeply submerged.
As a feminist, I am particularly interested in critiquing bioethics for entrenched refusals to consider women’s embodied experiences, and, as someone who seeks to operate in solidarity with persons with disabilities, I am seriously concerned by a variety of stubborn refusals by scholars working in bioethics to consider disabled lives to be lives of value. Along these lines, I am especially interested in bioethical advocacy of human enhancement projects. I find that many advocates of radical human enhancement treat reproduction as a disembodied site of improvement and reject the idea that the lives of persons with disabilities are valuable (e.g. Savulescu 2001). In the case of the article by Liao et al., I claim that a normalizing discourse of risk and catastrophe (especially existential risk) maintains and polices the line between the features of lives worth living (especially those features sought through enhancement) and disposable lives. It obscures relevant ethical issues by framing proposals in terms of catastrophe.
Bibliography
Liao, S. Matthew, Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache. 2012. “Human Engineering and Climate Change.” Ethics, Policy, and the Environment 15 (2): 206-221.
Savulescu, Julian. 2001. “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children.” Bioethics 15 (5/6): 413–26.
PJW Note: Interested readers, please see our CFP for the upcoming IJFAB special issue 10.2, “Health and Ecological Destruction: Fracking and Beyond.”
