Futurisms

Happy Birthday?

2012-05-24T15:22:00.000-04:00

One of our crew here at The New Atlantis celebrated a birthday this week, and we were discussing the question of whether transhumanists — especially of the Eliezer Yudkowsky, hyper-rationalist variety — should celebrate birthdays. On the one hand, from a philosophical perspective, they are a barbaric concession to arcane rituals of pre-rational cultures. They are based, moreover, upon a system of non-universal measurement — the arbitrary length of time it just happens to take the planet on which we just happen to be located to rotate around the stellar mass around which it just happens to rotate. What’s so special about occupying the same region of the solar system you did when you crossed through the maternal threshhold? And what about beings who don’t live on planets? What would a universal sentience say?

On the other hand, birthdays suggest the primacy of the individual, who is after all at the center of the transhumanist ethos. However, this suggestion comes by way of noting our icky, evolutionarily inefficient, and arguably tyrannical biological natality — not to mention our mortality. Yikes! It’s all quite dizzying.

Birthday photo via Shutterstock

Free Willy

2012-05-14T16:41:00.000-04:00

On a Mothers’ Day trip to the Pittsburgh Zoo yesterday, I had the pleasure of watching the antics of a baby sea otter. The docent explained that it had been found on an Alaskan beach along with its two dead parents, nursed on Pedialyte to stabilize it, and then shipped via FedEx to Pittsburgh, where to all appearances it is thriving.

It is one of those little stories that tells us what a remarkable time and place we live in. For the vast stretch of human history, I’m guessing, a foundling sea otter would have meant some useful fur and perhaps meat (does anybody eat sea otter?). Books like Rascal and Ring of Bright Water suggest that, for some decades in the twentieth century, somebody might have tried to make this otter a pet. Now, a network of commerce, civic institutions, and individual professionals is ready to swoop in and save the critter, at no small monetary cost. It is a privilege to live in a society that can afford to do such unnecessary things, and, on balance, I’m willing to say it represents something we can fairly call progress.

But what is the next step in such progress? The docent did not present a cause of death for the otter’s parents; but plainly, for many, further progress would mean at least making sure that human activities were not the cause. Hence we list the sea otter as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, and we can imagine all sorts of schemes to protect it and its habitat. Beyond that, as we have had occasion to discuss on this blog, some would say further progress would mean protecting it from the dangers and pains of nature itself — such as by eliminating animals who prey on them. And then, there are those who imagine that someday “we” — that is to say, our posthuman descendents — will be able to implement the Uplift of sea otters, granting them the gift of rational intelligence.

Now, I think it is fair to say that the consensus position of the vast quantities of science fiction I read as a much younger man in the 1960s and 70s was that in the future there would be no wild animals at all, and that a trip to a zoo might mean a look at exotic species like cats, dogs, and pigeons. The prospect of such a future is still a threatening card to play in the hand of environmentalism. But here is a great example of where extremes meet. For at a certain point, our vision of progress for the sea otter would mean its extinction just as surely as its entire habitat were paved over. The more we imagine ourselves managing the world of the sea otter, the less it is a wild animal, and the less it is a wild animal, the more it seems reasonable to place it within our technological dominion, until even its self-evident joie de vivre is not enough if it can’t tell us all about it.

Plainly, we are on this slope already — the otter I saw will likely spend the rest of its life in a zoo, and I for one will enjoy visiting it there. The question is, how slippery will this slope prove to be? It will be all the slipperier if we fail to note that, like any other good thing, there can be too much progress.

[Image: Sea otter at the Pittsburgh Zoo via flick user mikentiffy]

Don’t Waste Your Time

2012-04-30T11:54:00.000-04:00

I just recently got around to seeing Andrew Niccol’s 2011 movie In Time. In the dystopian world the film depicts, people are genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, but they will die by 26 unless they can earn enough time to keep living, with this living-time also serving as currency. Why and how this system was established are never explicitly spelled out; indeed, in the world of the movie, it seems as though things had ever been thus. No one expresses any nostalgia for a time before time was currency, and however resentful many of the characters may be of the inequality and injustice of the distribution of time, no one ever thinks to challenge the actual use of the anti-aging technology that underlies the whole system. As Emily Beitiks’s review over on the CGS website notes, the film’s central message is a critique of economic inequalities in our own time. A shadowy cartel of bankers controls the world’s time, with its members preserving their opulent lifestyle by oppressing the poor with exorbitant interest rates.

But beyond the movie’s cliché-riddled Robin-Hood steal-from-the-rich narrative, the fact that living-time was used as a currency gave the movie a few more thoughtful moments. Also, the theme of population control — one of the dark undercurrents running through such movements and ideologies as social Darwinism, eugenics, and neo-Malthusian environmentalism — was strongly implied throughout the film. As the despairing time-rich Henry Hamilton tells the movie’s protagonist, Will Salas:

For a few to be immortal, many must die.... Everyone can’t live forever; where would we put them?... The cost of living keeps rising to make sure people keep dying. How else could there be men with a million years while most live day to day? But the truth is, there’s more than enough. No one has to die before their time.

Hamilton, who is 105 years old, has grown tired with life, goes on to tell Will that “the day comes when you’ve had enough. Your mind can be spent even though your body’s not. We want to die. We need to.” Hamilton’s message has clear implications for those interested in radically extending the human lifespan: he reports that some people grow tired of living forever. The idea is not fully fleshed out in the film, and even in Hamilton’s own case we are given reasons to believe that it is guilt over the inequalities of society rather than mere exhaustion with living that drives him to despair. After all, Hamilton doesn’t kill himself in his own wealthy neighborhood; rather, he travels to the slums, spending his time-currency buying drinks for the destitute people his class had long oppressed, in a neighborhood where people with “too much time on their hands” are regularly robbed and murdered by gangsters. Just as these gangsters, called “Minutemen,” are about to “clean his clock” (sorry, but the movie is ham-handed with the punning), Will rescues the seemingly naïve rich man, taking him to an abandoned warehouse where they spend the night sitting in uncomfortable chairs, and Henry explains his intention to die to Will. The next morning, while Will is still sleeping, Henry gives our hero almost all of his time-currency. Hamilton leaves himself just enough time to walk to a nearby bridge and write as a suicide note what is perhaps the only decent play on words in the movie: “don’t waste my time.”

The characters in In Time are largely defined in terms of what their time and mortality mean to them. The strength of the film is the way it explores the meaning of mortality, poverty and oppression among the different classes. Unfortunately, this emphasis on the effect of social class leads the characters to be perhaps too sharply defined in terms of class roles — there’s the tired Robin Hood narrative again — making the film’s message about social justice feel heavy-handed and simplistic.

The poor, who wake up in the morning knowing that they will need to earn time-currency just to survive the day, are willing to take the kinds of risks necessary to really live life to the fullest — and despite their poverty and desperation, many of them show admirable generosity. In contrast, the rich, who could live forever if they “don’t do anything foolish,” are far more anxious about death. They are surrounded by bodyguards, they seem to live only indoors, and they never even take advantage of their beautiful beachfront properties by risking their lives with a swim in the water. Near the film’s climax, the disaffected daughter of a super-rich banker tells her father, “We’re not meant to live like this. We’re not meant to live forever. Although I do wonder, Father, if you’ve ever lived a day in your life.” Living in constant anxiety about death, and attempting to exert rational control over all the circumstances of life in order to unnaturally prolong it, leaves the immortal lives of the time-rich hollow and joyless.

In the movie, the rational control that the rich exert goes so far as draconian population control measures that kill millions of poor people. In the real world, without the time-as-currency conceit, the risk-averse people of today and tomorrow might well find themselves trying to secure their continued existence by controlling their circumstances in other, less evil ways that nonetheless may leave them leading empty, less fulfilling lives. As our ever-insightful New Atlantis colleague Peter Lawler imagines:

We might be looking forward to a future with people blessed by technology with indefinite longevity obsessing over their lack of immortality. Death, having become much less obviously necessary and much more seemingly accidental, might consume our lives. We’ll knock ourselves out like never before in accident-avoidance strategies — maybe spending our lives in in lead houses communicating with our virtual (and so non-threatening) friends with the most advanced forms of social media.

Niccol delivers a similar message with In Time, reflecting on how our technologically mediated mortality profoundly shapes our lives.

[Images © 20th Century Fox]

Alex Knapp Grades Ray Kurzweil’s Predictions

2012-04-06T10:23:00.000-04:00

Over at Forbes, Alex Knapp has taken a look at Ray Kurzweil’s technological predictions for 2009 from his 1999 The Age of Spiritual Machines. This is something we were planning on doing last year here on Futurisms, but never got around to — so we’re glad now that we don’t have to, thanks to Mr. Knapp! He finds most of Kurzweil’s predictions to be wrong. Here’s my favorite item:

“Accelerating returns from the advance of computer technology have resulted in continued economic expansion. Price deflation, which had been a reality in the computer field during the twentieth century, is now occurring outside the computer field. The reason for this is that virtually all economic sectors are deeply affected by the accelerating improvements in the price performance of computing.” Comment: Not only did the tech bubble burst shortly after this prediction was made, leading to a decade of economic stagnation, it’s arguable that more and better computing actually made the financial instruments that caused the financial collapse possible. Wrong in every way.

(See Paul J. Cella for more on how computational mindset in the financial sector can be dangerous.) Kurzweil makes a few good points in his rebuttal, which Knapp graciously posted on his blog — although one should take with a grain of salt Kurzweil’s citation of a detailed report showing his predictions to be highly accurate, given that he doesn’t mention that he himself was the author of the report.

“Not Necessarily Abnormal, But Certainly Stupid”

2012-04-05T09:45:00.001-04:00

I believe Dale Carrico is rather ill-advised to keep using the term “Robot Cultists” to dismissively refer to transhumanists. First of all, the desire for biological enhancement is more common and definitive of transhumanists than is the desire for robots and AI. Second, the cult comparison is not entirely wrong, but mostly. And third, and more to the point, repeatedly talking about “Robot Cultists” just makes him sound as insular as his targets.

Those objections aside, this recent rant of Carrico’s is classic and pretty much spot-on:

While transhumanists like to pretend that the real reason we don’t live in the science fiction fantasy land they pine for is because there are sinister forces abroad in the land who worship disease or are terrified of the idea of living for centuries in sexy model bodies wallowing around in piles of treasure, the truth is that almost nobody on earth doesn’t think it would be swell, caeteris paribus, to live in paradise but few people are idiotic enough to pretend that if they only clap louder this paradise will blossom into spontaneous existence, or, I must add, idiotic enough to join a Robot Cult and pretend that indulging in this kind of wish fulfillment fantasizing but then calling it Science! is somehow not idiotic anymore. Robot Cultists like to paint themselves as brave for devoting their adult lives to daydreaming about how awesome it would be if magic were real, then they like to paint themselves as progressive activists for pretending this daydreaming constitutes some kind of efficacious force for making daydreams real, then they like to rail against phantom armies of supremely powerful mortality-loving disease-loving luddites who presumably stand in the way of the spontaneous emergence of all the magic. Not to put too fine [a point] on it, all of this is quite palpably stupid.
Of course, there is plenty of greed and intolerance and superstition and fear holding back progress and there is plenty of work to be done solving our shared problems through scientific research and democratic reform, but none of that has anything to do with the magical thinking the Robot Cultists are peddling.

Hear, hear. Read the rest of the post here. The main thing I disagree with is the claim at the beginning about paradise: even if the longing is universal, I think very many people would not actually choose to live in utopia were they really given the chance — because they understand that it is an illusion, and not merely for reasons of technical infeasibility. For more on this, see our colleague Caitrin Nicol’s superb essay on utopias, in which she argues that “Seeking to escape chaos and suffering by idealizing the past or the future is, in the end, a rejection of our responsibility to the short bit of time that is ours.”

Civil Rights, Eugenics, and Why It’s “Being a Good Human” to Kill Your Daughters

2012-04-03T16:30:00.005-04:00

As Adam very kindly described, I appeared on Al Jazeera’s The Stream last week to talk about transhumanism with George Dvorsky and Robin Hanson. (Thanks to both the producers and my interlocutors for an enjoyable chat.) I’d like to expand upon a subject I mentioned on the show. Back in January, Prof. Hanson expressed support on his “Overcoming Bias” blog for sex selection — that is, selective abortion of female fetuses based on their gender. His reasoning was:

if male lives are more pleasant overall, it is good that we create more of them instead of female lives. Yes, supply and demand may eventually equalize the quality of male and female lives, but until then why not have moves [more] lives that are more pleasant?

I took the opportunity to ask Prof. Hanson about this on the air (my comments start around 14:45, and his response is at 16:30). Here is how he replied:

He’s right that that’s what I said, and I meant it. But we’re talking about individual private choice. We can think about parents choosing children, choosing high-IQ versus low-IQ children, choosing athletic versus less athletic children. I think it’s good if parents have the best interest of their children at heart, and choose children that they think will have better lives. I think that goes to the center of humanity; it goes to the center of being a good human — wanting the best for your children.

Reported Sex Ratios at Birth
and Sex Ratios of the Population Age 0-4:
China, 1953-2005 (boys per 100 girls)

Year	Sex Ratio at Birth	Sex Ratio, Age 0-4
1953	--	107.0
1964	--	105.7
1982	108.5	107.1
1990	111.4	110.2
1995	115.6	118.4
1999	117.0	119.5
2005	118.9	122.7

From “The Global War Against Baby Girls.”

This sounds sensible and compassionate for about half a second, until one realizes what it means: “having the best interest of your child at heart” means not allowing her to exist or killing her because she’s a girl. Tempting though it is, however, there are more clarifying ways to understand this issue than through the abortion debate — or through the trivial extension of Hanson’s logic to justify killing girls long after birth.

Commentators on sex selection have been right to talk about the issue as in part one of women’s rights, since this is almost entirely a phenomenon directed against girls, with some 160 million worldwide barred from life due to being female. Whether you consider these to be actual lives or potential lives lost, the fact is that these societies are deeming women less worthy than men by increasingly preventing them from even entering into this world. Not in the least coincidentally, this happens overwhelmingly in countries where women are considered inferior to men, where they often lack basic rights like voting, driving, and full ownership of property, and where not only women but girls are frequently forced into labor, marriage, and prostitution. If nothing else, Hanson is right that, in these countries, women’s lives are generally a lot less pleasant than men’s.

Differing approaches to social uplift

Consider for a moment: what direction would Hanson’s arguments have pushed us in had they been made during past struggles for equality and civil rights? Women had to struggle for rights here in the United States, too — to gain the right to vote, and then later to gain equality in the workplace and in the broader culture. Women’s lives could have been considered a lot less “pleasant” than men’s at these times, too.

Had Hanson and sex-selective technology been around at the time, his prescription would have been not to change laws, attitudes, and culture to bring a class of people out of oppression — but to just get rid of those people. This is exactly what Hanson is prescribing and celebrating in countries where women are abused and oppressed today.

One can imagine how Hanson’s prescription would have applied to still other civil rights struggles from America’s past. And not just in imagination: the idea that certain classes of people had lives that were less worth living — either based on race, or, just as in Hanson’s criteria, strength and intelligence — was in fact the rationale behind eugenics programs that sought to eliminate those lives. Other practices recently proposed and praised by transhumanists include infanticide, compulsory drugging of populations to make them more “moral”, and massive programs of engineering the human race to control their greenhouse gas emissions.

The path of moral progress we moderns tell ourselves we have been forging is toward a society of ever greater justice and equality, in which the individual cannot be denied her place by the prejudices of others, in which the weak are protected from the strong. Transhumanists, utilitarians, and self-anointed rationalists insist that they are dedicated to pushing us further down the path of enlightenment — toward “Overcoming Bias.” They insist that their dreams, when realized, will be a vehicle of moral progress and individual empowerment — the repudiation rather than the continuation of the twentieth century’s programs of social coercion. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

The Taco-larity is Near

2012-04-03T15:48:00.003-04:00

Folks, prepare yourselves for the yummy, inevitable, yummy taco-pocalypse. So said the news last week, anyway, which saw an exponential growth in taco-related headlines. Three items:

1. A new startup called TacoCopter has launched in the San Francisco area. It beats robotic swords into ploughshares, turning unmanned drones into airborne taco-delivery vehicles. Tacos are choppered in to your precise coordinates, having been ordered — yes — from your smartphone.

2. Google’s self-driving car is turning from project into practical reality. Google last week released a video of its car being used by a man with near-total vision loss to get around. His destinations? The dry cleaner and Taco Bell.

3. But beware: tacos may not always be used for good. In response to the arrest of four police officers in East Haven, Connecticut on charges of harassment and intimidation of Latino businesspeople, the mayor of the town was asked by a local reporter what he was going to do for the Latino community. His response: “I might have tacos when I go home; I’m not quite sure yet.” Watch the comment, followed by four minutes of exquisitely awkward backpedaling and attempts to celebrate all colors of the rainbow. It puts Michael Scott to shame.

Okay, so the last of those isn’t really about the future. Also, it turns out the taco-copter was a hoax. Well, phoo. Scientific progress goes boink.

Arguing with Transhumanists

2012-03-29T19:50:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, our co-blogger and New Atlantis senior editor Ari Schulman discussed transhumanism on The Stream, a social-media-based show on Al Jazeera English. Hosts Imran Garda and Malika Bilal did a good job of kicking off the discussion, and plenty of viewers commented and asked questions in real-time via Twitter. Several video clips were interspersed throughout the show, including a snippet of Regan Brashear’s documentary Fixed, which we previously discussed here on Futurisms.

Ari debated two outspoken advocates of transhumanism*: Robin Hanson, a professor at George Mason University (whom we have frequently written about here), and George Dvorsky, a blogger and activist. If that sounds unfairly lopsided to you — two against one — well, it was unfairly lopsided: Ari clearly had the better of the conversation.

The conversation touched on many subjects, and there wasn’t time to deal with anything in great depth, but I’d like to highlight three items.

First, Ari pointed out on the show something that Hanson said recently — that “if male lives are more pleasant overall, it is good that we create more of them instead of female lives.” (Hanson wrote this in response to a New Atlantis article; we blogged about it here.) When confronted with his own words, Hanson didn’t retreat; he stood by those remarks. Today, one of Hanson’s blog readers took him to task: “You totally let yourself look like you’d support sexism.... You made us look bad and ... I doubt you’ll have an opportunity to repair the damage your mistake caused.” I certainly agree that Hanson’s comments make transhumanism look bad — not because he misspoke or misrepresented his views, but because his forthright comments revealed the heartless calculation that underlies much transhumanist thinking.

Second, Dvorsky and Hanson both objected to one of Ari’s comments: that transhumanism shares with the twentieth century’s eugenics movement a deep dissatisfaction with human nature. When we sometimes make this comparison, transhumanists accuse us of smearing them — after all, who would want to be compared to a movement that was responsible for forced sterilizations and that inspired some of the worst Nazi atrocities? But Ari’s remarks were measured and careful, and the comparison is apt: both eugenics and transhumanism are rooted in a profound dissatisfaction with evolved human nature. That does not mean (as Dvorsky claimed) that we think that human nature as it now exists is perfect. To the contrary, we think that human beings are flawed, and some of us might even say fallen, creatures. But for this very reason, as Ari said, we are skeptical of grand schemes that promise or pursue perfection.

Dvorsky also bridled against the comparison to eugenics for another reason. He said that eugenics was a “top-down imposition,” wherein terrible decisions were made by “either the state or certain groups in power.” By contrast, Dvorsky said,

transhumanism is absolutely opposed to any of those ideas. In fact, it’s very much a hands-off type of a philosophy. If anything, it’s bottom-up, where we give the benefit of the doubt to individuals who are informed individuals, in conjunction with their doctors, their fertility clinics, and so on, who will make the decisions that are right for themselves. So everything from their reproductive rights, their morphological rights, and their cognitive rights as well.

But as Ari rightly noted on the show, not all transhumanist proposals pleasantly envision free, autonomous individuals pursuing the good as they see it. Julian Savulescu, for example, recently proposed that we should compel people to take behavior-altering drugs to make them more “moral” (as our colleague Brendan Foht mentioned here last month). And just because Dvorsky and some of his confreres think that the transhumanist future will be “hands-off” and “bottom-up” doesn’t mean that it actually will be. Who’s to say that we won’t see dictatorships of (or backed up by) Unfriendly AI? And even if somehow the transhumanist future were accomplished without obvious coercion, that doesn’t mean (as we have pointed out many times here on Futurisms) that “individuals who are informed individuals” would be free to abjure the enhancements that society is pressuring them to accept.

All in all, a fine television performance by Ari; anyone interested in hearing more such intelligent criticism of transhumanism should poke around here on Futurisms and read some of the articles we’ve linked to the right.

* To be clear, Hanson doesn’t consider himself a transhumanist, and during the program he said that he thinks “it’s somewhat premature to either advocate for or oppose these changes, because we don’t actually know very much about the context in which they’ll appear.” But since he is a vocal proponent of cryonics and he believes that many of the things that transhumanists embrace are at least plausible and in some cases desirable, I think it’s not unfair to put him on the transhumanist side of these debates.

UPDATE: See Ari’s follow-up on his exchange with Robin Hanson about sex selection.

Examining the Moral Meaning of Memory

2012-03-26T14:41:00.000-04:00

The true moral significance of memory alteration is not a simple thing to understand, and cannot be inferred from basic observations about its reliability and potential manipulability. Jonah Lehrer, in his recent Wired magazine article on memory — which I earlier discussed here — does claim to be genuinely interested in the ethical questions raised by memory alteration:

Would the President’s Council [on Bioethics] have the same reaction to memory training? What about an more effective form of talk therapy? Or is it simply the idea of an amnesiac pill that we find so Orwellian and frightening? If so, why? We take pills to cheer us up. What’s wrong with taking a pill that might get at the root cause of the sadness? These aren’t rhetorical questions – I’m honestly interested in the answers.

But it’s hard to take Lehrer’s expressed interest seriously when this is the next thing he says: “In the meantime, progress continues apace. (What Feynman dismissively said about philosophers of science is also true of bioethicists, for better or worse: they are to scientists what ornithologists are to birds.)” So is Lehrer honestly interested in bioethics or isn’t he?

Unfortunately, it seems he isn’t. The questions he poses as apparently obvious rejoinders to the ethical inquiry in Beyond Therapy are all in fact addressed directly and plainly in the memory section of the report. To wit, here are four excerpts from the report:

We also know that individuals ‘naturally’ edit their memory of traumatic or significant events-both giving new meaning to the past in light of new experiences and in some cases distorting the past to make it more bearable. The question before us is how or whether new biotechnical interventions alter this inborn capacity to refine, reshape, and edit the way we remember the past.
What could be wrong with, or even just disquieting about, wanting to feel better about ourselves and our lives, and availing ourselves of the necessary assistance in doing so? If we may embrace psychotherapy for the same purpose, why should we not embrace mood-brighteners, especially if they are not only safe but also cheaper and more effective than ‘talk therapy’? Only a person utterly at peace with the world and content with himself would be beyond temptation at the prospect of having his troubles effortlessly eased.
...there are many people whose deep psychic distress precludes meeting obligations and forming close relationships, and for whom the proper use of mood-brighteners is the blessed gift that can restore to them the chance for a full and flourishing life.
...many Holocaust survivors managed, without pharmacological assistance, to live fulfilling lives while never forgetting what they lived through. At the same time, many survivors would almost certainly have benefited from pharmacological treatment.

And so forth. The Council’s entire report is characterized by this kind of effort to explore and present both the potential good and bad of biotechnological advancement, without firmly concluding in one direction or the other. Certainly there is reasonable room to argue with the analysis. But it’s hard to take seriously Lehrer’s “hey, I’m just asking some questions and I’m really interested in the answers” shtick when it seems based on a near-total lack of knowledge of the answers the ostensible opponents have already given, and is followed by a claim that those answers are actually irrelevant anyway.

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Of course, while Lehrer professes interest in the bioethical questions raised by memory alteration, he has clearly already staked out a position in the debate in favor of memory alteration. The heart of his argument seems to be that, as he puts it, “we already tweak our memories — we just do it badly.”

One can get a sense of what’s wrong with this argument by seeing how quickly it devolves into this: “there is no clear line between the tweaks of ‘biotechnology’ and the changes that unfold every time we remember anything.” This is perhaps the most common argument in the transhumanist playbook. It goes basically like this: X new biotechnical intervention will totally change everything, so it’s great and we should embrace it — and there’s no reason not to because it’s actually no different from what we’re doing already.

This line of argument is linked to another favorite theme of transhumanists and other pro-enhancement writers: who we are as human beings is the result of an unplanned, chaotic, and messy sequence of events — whether those events were in our evolutionary past, shaping our genetic heritage, or just things that happened to us during our own lifetimes that we would rather not remember. Sometimes, as with Allen Buchanan’s discussion of evolution and human nature, the arguments raise deeply important questions about the moral meaning of human nature. But Lehrer’s application of neuroscience to the ethics of memory alteration is just a misunderstanding of the ethically significant questions.

Real ethical reflection on these issues would not try to dismiss them with one or two stale tropes. The personal, moral, and emotional significance of memory does not depend on it representing past experiences with perfect factual accuracy. And just because there are natural processes for “re-constructing” our past experiences, it by no means follows that techniques for purposefully ablating memories are morally uncontroversial. If we already tweak our memories, it seems just as possible that we could already sometimes do it well as do it badly. One would hope that in any case the goal would be to better understand the personal and moral significance of memories, and to learn how to integrate them into the broader meaning of our lives.

Jonah Lehrer’s Errors on Memory and Forgetting

2012-03-26T13:41:00.006-04:00

About a month ago, Wired magazine published a widely discussed article on a scientific breakthrough that will have huge implications for psychotherapy, bioethics, and human self-understanding: apparently, memory is not perfect.

The author — Jonah Lehrer, the popular writer on neuroscience — reports on some scientific findings regarding the reconsolidation theory of memory retrieval, which holds that every time a memory is recalled, the brain needs to recreate the memory, just as it did when the memory was originally formed. He quotes one of the researchers describing his work in terms of Thomas Kuhn, saying that he is overturning “a very stubborn paradigm.” And Lehrer seems to agree with this characterization:

Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.
None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.

Reconsolidation theory and the research behind it are potentially important contributions to the neuroscientific study of memory. But Lehrer grossly exaggerates the significance of these findings by repeatedly trying to characterize them as novel and revolutionary when they are not.

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The problem starts from Lehrer not making much effort to distinguish between the two big takeaways from this research, which are: (1) memory can be altered by the act of recollection; and therefore, (2) memory is fallible. The first part is reconsolidation theory itself. Lehrer presents some evidence that this idea has only recently entered the scientific mainstream, but as for its being revolutionary, well, he himself notes in a follow-up blog post that scientists have been conducting research in support of the idea for almost a hundred years. Moreover, as he also notes in the article, the idea has been basically assumed by psychotherapists for decades.

It’s the second point that’s really supposed to be revolutionary, though: Lehrer uses as a foil the supposedly naïve conventional and ancient philosophical wisdom that human memory works like a videotape, accurately recording and replaying events. But he does this mainly by misrepresenting or misunderstanding the way others have thought about memory in the past.

The first volley is fired at Plato, who, Lehrer says, “compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet.” But Plato, in the Theaetetus, discusses this model only to quickly reject it. More to the point, Plato does so precisely in an effort to explain why beliefs can be false and memories unreliable. The naïve assumption that memories are “inert packets of data” has certainly had its adherents over the years — most of them in the last century, really, when such metaphors came into vogue — but the idea that memories are fallible, and that they have a life of their own, is at least as old as philosophy and literature. Indeed, even without philosophical reflection there are certain self-evident aspects of memory that show us how it can be imperfect; memories are clearly less distinct than present experiences, and no one trusts their recollections to the same extent they trust their perception.

Lehrer suggests that these developments in neuroscience constitute a transgressive and exciting challenge to entrenched beliefs about human nature. But there’s no apparent reason in this case for why neuroscience should be fighting with ordinary human self-understanding — indeed, this seems like a perfect case of neuroscience coming around to realizing and providing some biological explanation for a phenomenon that’s already very familiar.

The fact that people have always known memory to be fallible still leaves unknown why this is so, and does not diminish the value of neuroscientific research that might help explain it. Moreover, this possible biological explanation for why memory can be inaccurate does not show that memory is arbitrary or always unreliable, or that memory cannot or does not have some strong relation to the truth.

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These problems with Lehrer’s account would not be so important if not for the highly flawed ethical arguments he uses them to support. You see, another implication of this research is the possibility of creating drug-based therapies to erase the painful aspect of particular memories, or even the memories themselves. By way of supporting this possibility, depicting as naïve the idea that memory always is truthful becomes the basis for depicting as naïve the idea that memory ought to be truthful.

In that blog post following up on his article, Lehrer gives the supposed ancient philosophical wisdom about memory a modern voice in the ethical analysis of this topic by the President’s Council on Bioethics in its 2003 report Beyond Therapy. As he describes it, the Council

declared the possibility of erasing traumatic memories deeply dangerous, and worried that it would lead to the unraveling of “moral responsibility” in society. After all, if we can choose to forget our pain, then what would prevent us from thoughtlessly inflicting pain on other people? “Without truthful memory, we could not hold others or ourselves to account for what we do and who we are,” the Council wrote. “Perhaps no one has a greater interest in blocking the painful memory of evil than the evildoer.”

This argument at first seems “perfectly reasonable” to Lehrer, since “even the worst memories serve an important purpose, allowing us to learn from the past.” But his agreement turns out to be rhetorical, for

the verdict of the Council, grounded in our ancient intuitions about memory, is also problematic. The main reason is straightforward: Although the Council repeatedly proclaims the importance of maintaining “authentic” memories, they failed to realize that such an ideal form of memory doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as immaculate recall....

But the word “authentic” does not even appear anywhere in the part of the Council’s report dealing with memory. Moreover, the Council itself acknowledges precisely the point about memory reconsolidation that Lehrer claims vitiates the Council’s analysis:

it is important to note that “stored memories” do not remain static. Every time we recall a memory, what gets stored after such acts of recollection is a different memory, altered on account of how we, in recollecting it, have “received” and reacted to it. Once encoded, memories can be altered by recall.

Lehrer is criticizing a straw man. Not only does the Council’s argument not presuppose some idealized notion of perfectly accurate memory, but there is no reason for it to. Would evildoers only have an interest in blocking painful memories, in themselves or their victims, if those memories were perfect? Does the fact that memories can change or be imperfect mean that they have absolutely no relation to the truth? Does it mean we have no ethical or emotional interest in them bearing some relation to the truth?

Questions like these are the ones that the scientific discoveries Lehrer mentions really seem to raise, but Lehrer seems more interested in making bold bioethical pronouncements on the basis of neuroscientific findings than examining these tough bioethical questions. I’ll turn to comparing the Council’s analysis of these questions about the ethics of memory alteration with Lehrer’s analysis in my next post.

Images: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind;
Photo Album (via Shutterstock);
Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

Seeing and Believing

2012-03-21T10:45:00.000-04:00

John Ruskin, in Modern Painters (1843), defined the “pathetic fallacy” this way: “false appearances ... entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us.” He was largely but not entirely critical of this fallacy for its tendency to produce bad poetry. But as reflecting certain kinds of human characters, the story was more complex:

The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is ... that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. For it is no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly, the intellect, and make it believe what they choose. But it is still a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating; even if he melts, losing none of his weight.

I was reminded of the pathetic fallacy by this music video:

NO "Stay With Me" from Ryan Reichenfeld on Vimeo.

However charming in its own way, this video is certainly an instance of “false appearances.” But it is less clear just what emotion the filmmakers are “over-dazzled” by, or whether they are to be credited with an emotion sufficiently powerful to overwhelm a strong intellect, or rather with a weak intellect easily mislead by emotion. I’m inclined to think Ruskin would find it bad poetry: What is the point of ascribing human emotional characteristics to crash-test dummies? One might as well feel bad for the car being crashed. Does it add anything to the longing of the song’s lyrics to have them reflected in an impossible scenario, or is it rather some post-modern ironic distancing from longing, an unwillingness to commit to it even while expressing it?

Perhaps a recent interview with Sherry Turkle, the erstwhile techno-optimist, helps to clarify this particular pathetic fallacy. Turkle has written a book called Alone Together, which she calls “a book of repentance in the sense that I did not see this coming, this moment of temptation that we will have machines that will care for us, listen to us, tend to us.” She explains:

People are so vulnerable and so willing to accept substitutes for human companionship in very intimate ways. I hadn’t seen that coming, and it really concerns me that we’re willing to give up something that I think defines our humanness: our ability to empathize and be with each other and talk to each other and understand each other. And I report to you with great sadness that the more I continued to interview people about this, the more I realized the extent to which people are willing to put machines in this role. People feel that they are not being heard, that no one is listening. They have a fantasy that finally, in a machine, they will have a nonjudgmental companion.

The video takes this idea one step further — a companion that will save us from the mere humans who are not hearing us. I suspect that here is the pathetic fallacy at the heart of social robotics. It is a vicious circle. The more we put our hopes in machine companions, the less we expect from each other, and the less we expect from each other, the more we will accept the substitute of machine companions. Thus does “only connect” become “just plug it in.”

The Radical Cowardice of Utilitarian Bioethics

2012-03-20T15:31:00.001-04:00

It is clear that Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva were doubting some pretty obvious ethical truths in their recent paper. As Ari suggested, this is quite contrary to Kyle Munkittrick’s credulous praise that their paper is

exactly what intellectual exercise is meant to be: a reasoned exploration of an idea we find difficult and troubling. True philosophy, honest ethics, dares to ask the un-askable questions. If we are horrified by what we find, then we need to examine the very foundations of our philosophies.

But did these authors really even exhibit the spirit of deep philosophical questioning that Munkittrick claims to defend? In fact, looking at the paper itself, and at the defenses of the paper written by the authors and the journal’s editor, it is clear that they reached this ostensibly outrageous position not by deeply questioning any basic moral assumptions, but by scrupulously following certain widely accepted principles of utilitarian “personhood” ethics to their horrible logical conclusion. As the authors say in defense of their article: “It was meant to be a pure exercise of logic: if X, then Y.”

Yet so very far was this “exercise in logic” from the deep questioning of moral principles that, when they reached the conclusion that killing babies is okay, they accepted that conclusion, rather than questioning the principles that brought them there. That certainly demonstrates the deep commitment these authors had to the principles of utilitarian bioethics, but it sure doesn’t say much about their commitment to challenging moral assumptions or principles.

Their indignant surprise at the public reaction to their paper, which they take pains to point out was intended for academic audiences only — a canard that Andy Ferguson rightly ridicules — also shows how little these authors wanted to challenge any widely held assumptions in the culture. And while there was clearly a very strong negative reaction from the public, some of the assumptions made by the authors, such as the idea that “children [with Down syndrome] might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole,” are unfortunately all too common in our society.

As Caitrin Nicol notes in “At Home with Down Syndrome,” ninety percent of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. As Peter Wehner writes in a recent review of A Good and Perfect Gift — a book written by Amy Julia Becker, the mother of a child with Down syndrome, named Penny — not just utilitarian bioethicists, but also “physicians, genetic counselors, prenatal screeners, and even biology teachers” embrace the cultural assumptions that children with disabilities should be viewed “not as gifts but as burdens, not children to love but mistakes who should be eliminated.” Amy came to understand “amidst the pain and through grace,” as Wehner puts it, “that there is purpose in Penny’s life simply as she is and who she is.”

The transhumanists, with their belief in the importance of human enhancement, unquestioningly embrace our culture’s ethos of power, productivity and, efficiency as a matter of principle. Picturing themselves as critical, skeptical, free-thinking iconoclasts, they view as backwards and conformist beliefs like Amy’s. But in an age that so prizes the abilities that make us productive, useful, and powerful, it may be that beliefs like hers — that power is perfected in weakness, that the poor in spirit are blessed, and that it is the meek who shall inherit the earth — may still represent the deepest challenge to the ideological commitments of our hardened minds.

The False Boldness of “After-Birth Abortion”

2012-03-20T15:10:00.004-04:00

How many people are in this picture?A paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics called “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?,” by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, has been stirring up quite a lot of attention. Here’s the abstract:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

And here’s just a little sample of the kind of moral acuity you can find in the paper itself:

In spite of the oxymoron in the expression, we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’, to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed)....

Also:

a second terminological specification is that we call such a practice ‘after-birth abortion’ rather than ‘euthanasia’ because the best interest of the one who dies is not necessarily the primary criterion....

No kidding. Just to make clear whose interest is the primary criterion:

people with Down’s syndrome, as well as people affected by many other severe disabilities, are often reported to be happy. Nonetheless, to bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care....

Can you think of any cases before where groups of individuals have been denied rights or killed on the basis that they are not full persons, are disabled, and/or that they are a burden to society? And it’s not just the disabled:

Actual people’s well-being could be threatened by the new (even if healthy) child requiring energy, money and care which the family might happen to be in short supply of.... In these cases, since non-persons have no moral rights to life, there are no reasons for banning after-birth abortions.

I rather hope the atrociousness of a paper like this speaks for itself (though you can see Wesley J. Smith take it on here and here). Senselessness and sophistry masquerading as rational inquiry. But in case you need more:

Failing to bring a new person into existence cannot be compared with the wrong caused by procuring the death of an existing person. The reason is that, unlike the case of death of an existing person, failing to bring a new person into existence does not prevent anyone from accomplishing any of her future aims.... If the death of a newborn is not wrongful to her on the grounds that she cannot have formed any aim that she is prevented from accomplishing, then it should also be permissible to practise an after-birth abortion on a healthy newborn too, given that she has not formed any aim yet.

Emphasis in original. The contrast between ideological commitments is striking: a newborn child is only a potential person, who does not necessarily have a right not to be killed — but it seems the newborn does have a right not to be disenfranchised by being referred to with the masculine terms he or him. Somehow beings that are merely potential persons, but do not exist, can be gendered — and must have their gender properly acknowledged, but not their life defended.

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Let’s try to be charitable. Although the conclusions are awful, and the logic used to get there riddled with countless obvious errors, if there’s one thing that can be said in favor of this kind of reasoning, it’s that the kinds of distinctions they’re making — between what the authors would call actual persons and potential persons — might be useful, because they are similar to the kind of distinctions one makes in determining whether an individual is of sufficient mental capacity to be held criminally responsible for his actions.

Indeed, these criteria and distinctions are not so far away from the kinds that are used in modern societies that still use the death penalty, to determine whether a person has the mental capacity to be held accountable for a capital offense, and to pay for it with his or her life. Such, then, is the curious bent of modern “personhood theory”: the criteria, once used to defend people who are too mentally undeveloped to justly deserve being deprived of their lives, easily become the criteria by which the same kinds of people, even well beyond birth, are too undeveloped for their lives to deserve defending at all, even for a crime so small as being an inconvenience to someone else.

Realizing this points to the biggest failing of the paper on its very own terms. Giubilini and Minerva propose to extend abortion to “the first days or few weeks after birth,” before an infant possesses personhood traits like “self-awareness,” “expectations,” and “future aims.” But they offer no reason to think such traits, most of which seemingly require capacities like speech and conscious memory recall, are present as early as a few days or weeks after birth. They are enormously vague in defining and describing these traits, saying only that an infant’s ability to “value the different situation she would have found herself in if she had not been harmed ... depends on the level of her mental development.” But the traits apparently necessary to secure personhood, and so protection from being killed, are not present until at least many months after birth, and often not until age one or two — indeed, under many reasonable interpretations, not until many years after birth.

If the authors had really committed to their personhood criteria, they would need to be defending the killing of children a few years beyond birth, at minimum. And a more rigorous commitment to personhood would reasonably extend the boundary much further out, indeed, to something like the age of criminal accountability or voting. But I guess the authors didn’t want to be too radical.

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Unsurprising though this is, it should be pointed out that this is the kind of thing that gets transhumanists really excited, and that counts to them as philosophical insight and bravery. Kyle Munkittrick, for one, is breathless:

The purpose of articles that are so obviously controversial and counter-intuitive. is not to endorse or advocate a political position and say “this is right and should be law.” Instead, they are exactly what intellectual exercise is meant to be: a reasoned exploration of an idea we find difficult and troubling. True philosophy, honest ethics, dares to ask the un-askable questions. If we are horrified by what we find, then we need to examine the very foundations of our philosophies.

If something is obvious, then that is the very thing a diligent bioethicsist should be questioning and doubting.

Nowhere, of course, in this or a follow-up post (which without explanation is titled “Witch Ethics” — I guess because criticizing pro-infanticide arguments is a witch hunt?), does Mr. Munkittrick actually do any of that “reasoned exploration.” Instead he just lauds “exploration” itself, congratulating the authors for their bravery and condemning their critics for cowardice. The authors themselves are similarly aghast in a pseudo-apology they issued:

When we decided to write this article about after-birth abortion we had no idea that our paper would raise such a heated debate.... It was meant to be a pure exercise of logic: if X, then Y.... We do not think anyone should be abused for writing an academic paper on a controversial topic.

It’s all just about logic and academic freedom and the boldness to ask challenging questions! Why are people getting so bent out of shape!

Just to put peoples’ silly reactions to this paper in context, imagine that instead of the paper making the case for infanticide, it advanced an I’m-just-saying or gee-hey-why-not daring defense of some other practice, like, say ... rape, murder, slavery, or genocide. Actually, I guess I’m tilting the question by using such condemnatory terminology. “Genocide,” for example, should just be called “heritage-selective aggregate after-after-birth abortion,” lest we acknowledge “the best interests of the ones who die.” Anyway, who would dare fail to celebrate such a harmless intellectual exercise?

UPDATE: See also Brendan Foht on the same paper.

[Mother and child image via Shutterstock]

The Revolution Will Be Advertisement

2012-03-20T13:35:00.003-04:00

More on augmented reality, from Jeff Bercovici at Forbes:

So far, Google has only scratched the surface of the advertising potential here. That makes sense: How many times in your life are you actually going to point your phone at an ad?

Google glasses could change all that. Now the user doesn’t have to point his phone at an ad to activate the AR [augmented reality] layer — he only has to look at it. Combine that with location data and all the other rich targeting information Google has at its disposal and you’re talking about potentially the most valuable advertising medium ever invented.

Imagine it: You’re walking home from work. You put on your Google Glasses to check your email and notice that the sushi place across the street, where you frequently go for takeout, is highlighted. In the window is a glowing icon that lets you know there’s a discount available. A tiny tilt of your head brings up the offer: 40% off any purchase plus free edamame. With a bit more tilting and nodding, you place your order. By the time you cross the street, it’s ready for you. Would you like to pay via Google Wallet?

You nod.

In unrelated news, Ben Goertzel thinks that corporations “are directly and clearly opposed to the Singularity.”

The Future Gets In Your Eyes

2012-02-22T16:31:00.006-05:00

The Interwebs is all atwitter over yesterday’s report in the New York Times that by the end of the year, Google will be selling “a pair of Google-made glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.” And just imagine if all those a-tweets could be beamed right into your eyeballs!

Speaking of the future, Nevada has become the first state to legalize and regulate self-driving cars. These are two fronts in the same technological push to fundamentally (or impactfully, as transhumanists say) transform the way we are present in the physical world — a push we can already see underway with the rise of GPS and location-awareness technologies.

For interested readers, I meditated on this transformation in an essay for The New Atlantis last year called “GPS and the End of the Road.” Here’s a relevant snippet:

The highest-end smartphones come enabled not only with GPS, but with video cameras, and with sensors that enable the phone to know where it is pointing. Combining these abilities, augmented-reality applications allow you to hold up your smartphone to, say, an unfamiliar city street, of which it will show you a live video feed, with hovering information boxes over points of interest showing you customer reviews, historical data, photographs, coupons, advertisements, and the like. One such augmented-reality app is called Layar because it allows you to see reality “layered” over, either with fanciful images or with helpful bubbles of information telling you what to see and why. Proposals are in the works to display such information on glasses or contact lenses, eliminating even the burden of holding up one’s arm.
The great and simple promise of these technologies is to deliver to us the goods of finding things in the world in the most efficient way possible. After Brad Templeton: their feature is to find the most interesting things in the world, and to explain why they are interesting, while eliminating the apparent bug that most of the things we encounter seem pretty boring. Moreover, location awareness and augmented reality, paired with GPS navigation, transmit us to these interesting places with the minimum possible requirement of effort and attention paid to the boring places that intervene. We can get where we’re going, and see what we want to see, without having to look....

Augmented reality image via Google via NYT

Ray Kurzweil for Leader of Antiquated Tribal Political Council (a.k.a. Kurzweil for President)

2012-02-13T14:43:00.002-05:00

Even transhumanists shudder to hear Ray Kurzweil described as their leader. But he’s running for president!

Well — not really. As my friend Aaron Saenz reports at the Singularity Hub, Kurzweil has been nominated for Americans Elect, an online organization attempting to draft a third-party candidate for the 2012 presidential election. He looks to be one of maybe a couple hundred candidates listed, and currently has 25 supporters (their top listed candidate is, shockingly, Ron Paul, with 1,746 supporters).

Saenz’s post has the details, among which is that apparently the Singularity Hub itself was involved in nominating Kurzweil, and Kurzweil may not even know about it himself yet. Looks like Internet-Kurzweil just became self-aware.

Of course, it’s a little strange for either Kurzweil or his followers to be getting involved in such an arbitrary, outmoded human institution as the American electoral process. After all, as Kurzweil wrote in The Singularity Is Near, “A charismatic leader is part of the old model. That’s something we want to get away from.” But I guess you’ve got to join the system to beat it.

Speaking of selling out going mainstream, where else did Ray Kurzweil appear recently but in the Best Buy Super Bowl ad:

Marilynne Robinson on Alasdair MacIntyre: Where’s the Decline?

2012-02-13T08:58:00.002-05:00

[Note: I am very belatedly posting two final entries about the Alasdair MacIntyre conference, which I attended and blogged this past July.]

My final post on last year’s Alasdair MacIntyre conference is about what was effectively the keynote address, delivered by Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist, and author, most recently, of Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), a bracing critique of scientism. (Her novels Housekeeping and Gilead, incidentally, are among the best I’ve ever read.)

Her conference talk was titled “Metaphysics and Value Statements,” and was part explication of the work of John Calvin, part unabashed challenge to MacIntyre’s claims. The former was fascinating, but rather far afield for this blog, and I couldn’t possibly do justice to it in any event; the latter I’ll discuss for those who are interested in a critical voice on MacIntyre’s relevance to questions of modernity.

Robinson established her talk as adversarial from the start, declaring herself as a liberal and an individualist — each of which, in a certain sense of those terms, are what MacIntyrean theory is set out to demolish. Her attacks against his work were roaming, but here are some of the major points as I understood them, with some attempt on my part to roughly organize them:

Methodological Flaws and Illiberalism

• MacIntyre’s work is excessively polemical. His language distorts his arguments out of any proportion or moderation.

• MacIntyre’s work is rife with nostalgia for social settings like classical Athens in which there supposedly existed unified moral traditions, but it does not account for the fact that in all of these settings, that ideal life was available only to a privileged few people, usually all men. Conversely, he offers no account of the myriad positive sociological changes that have led to what he sees as a philosophically fractured society.

• The notion of “virtue” that is so central to MacIntyre’s work is a cipher, and seems to just mean acting in a way consistent with fulfilling social roles. But there are countless examples of people acting in a way that would so qualify as “virtuous” but that are obviously morally wrong — particularly since so many social roles have been defined by their subjugation of less privileged people.

Distortive Notions of Ourselves and Others

• MacIntyre’s work posits that we are living in the midst of a great disaster. But where is the great disaster? Most people (Robinson herself included) seem to be able to live without much sustained incoherence or anomie.

• Consequent to the notion of disaster, and fueled by MacIntyre’s polemicism, there is a streak of victimhood running through MacIntyre’s work, and especially through the attitudes of his adherents — “we poor moderns” and such. (Robinson especially criticized many of the Marxists whose talks she attended, whose abstract language and sense of victimhood, she said, seem entirely out of touch with the real suffering of hundreds of millions of laborers worldwide today.)

• The polemicism of MacIntyre’s work, combined with its argument about the will to power behind modern moral inquiry, leads us to picture all modern arguments as inherently manipulative. It thus leads us to assume that the arguments of others are insidious, and to avoid engaging in the hard work of trying to understand their arguments or to appreciate them either as rational agents or as human beings. In short, it makes worse the problem of irresolvable moral arguments between people.

Missing the Full Nature of Reason and Truth

• MacIntyre’s picture of the fractured nature of moral argument also leads us to believe we have no faculties for understanding except our current ideas and our reason. But this is doubly wrong:

• First, placing so much faith in reason offers us no account of the fallibility of the mind or the mystery of the soul. By contrast, John Calvin says we should strive for virtue but never assume that we have attained it. “This,” she says, “makes life very interesting.”

• We do not have only our current ideas. Take the Biblical parables, which hold up values that, she says, might be called aesthetic, that seem to fly in the face of reason. These represent enduring truths about human nature, and so the radical philosophical break MacIntyre speaks of can only be a relative break, because these aspects of existence do not change.

Clarifying MacIntyre’s Relationship to Liberalism

Robinson has offered here a strident critique of MacIntyre’s work, and the first thing to note is that there are many places where she gets it wrong. Some of these are essentially factual: For example, consider her claim that MacIntyre dons rose-colored glasses when looking at such classical settings as ancient Athens. But the subjugation of slaves in Athens is explored in After Virtue, and MacIntyre notes that we are today “rightly” “affront[ed]” by slavery.

Similarly, contra Robinson, MacIntyre does in fact deal with the question of exercising virtue in the service of evil ends. He argues that his account of the virtues is not simply a matter of fulfilling social roles, but must always bear a relation to human nature as such; this allows us to understand certain social structures as oppressive in that they deny striving for the good life to some people. Likewise, though I may have misunderstood her, Robinson’s argument that MacIntyre says we have only our current ideas seems to be backwards: he’s saying we shouldn’t trust our current ideas as sufficient in themselves, and must work much harder than we do now to understand their philosophical and historical origins.

However, while a few of Robinson’s other criticisms are also problematic, in general, they are right on the money — real foundational problems for which MacIntyre and his followers ought to offer better answers than they have so far.

First, although Robinson mischaracterizes some of the details of MacIntyre’s argument, on the substance she is right to argue that he simply gives short shrift to liberalism and the accomplishments of modernity. Perhaps we suffer under a malaise in which human flourishing seems inaccessible or impossible — as so many writers since the existentialists (and a few before) have argued — but what of the fact that, thanks in no small part to liberalism and the Enlightenment, we’re living many times longer, have ended slavery and have granted at least the legal ability to pursue human flourishing to women and minority groups, and no longer have a state that, say, hangs, draws, and quarters people? Robinson’s point resonated with me: even if you basically agree with the argument of After Virtue, it still seems that on balance we’re remarkably lucky to be alive today, and that most people today are still able to live good lives — and these are points that must be at least acknowledged, and then accounted for, before MacIntyre’s work can be considered.

Robinson has also hit on another key point, which she expanded on in the Q&A session: For all MacIntyre’s hostility to liberalism, what better exemplar is there of a community of people free to inquire about the good, to explore the rival claims of disparate traditions, than the modern liberal state? One qualification to this argument is that the crucial social components of traditions, without which the rational components lose their coherence, are vulnerable in the mixing-pot of liberal society.

But Robinson is still right to note that MacIntyre’s work can easily support two totally opposite attitudes toward the modern liberal state: that it represents the fracture and decline of all coherent philosophical-social contexts (clearly his position), and that it represents a near-ideal setting for the meeting of traditions, and consequently the advancement of rational inquiry and the pursuit of the good life. As Robinson has pointed out, MacIntyre’s work points to a similar dichotomy in how we should treat other people — at least, as long as we’re living in our fractured modern condition. MacIntyre’s work does pose a real danger of leading us to view other people, and other ideas, as insidious, Nietzschean exercises of the will (which is part of what was happening in the talk I attended called “Against Medical Ethics,” which could be seen as counseling a sort of ideological entrenchment).

Reason and Beyond Reason

This brings us to another point of Robinson’s: the relative constancy of the human condition. This provides stability against, on the one hand, what she sees as MacIntyre’s tyranny of reason, and, on the other, MacIntyre’s apparent implicit claim that we have nothing but our current ideas.

On the first point, it’s not entirely clear to me to what extent MacIntyre takes human goods and human nature to be a subject beyond reason. Certainly there seems to be no explicit space made in After Virtue for encounters with the transcendent, the mysterious, or other goods that derive their value for us in no small part because they seem to be beyond or contrary to reason.

And it certainly seems that MacIntyre doesn’t account for Yuval Levin’s argument in the pages of The New Atlantis — that the process of drawing out the goods of a tradition and offering reasons for them is prone to drain the significance that those goods hold for us, and so to weaken the force of those reasons. (Indeed, MacIntyre avowedly holds that defending aspects of a tradition by appeal to mystery or other things beyond reason is characteristic of a tradition in decay. In fact, he says, it is what characterizes the modern conservative use of the word “tradition” as contrasted with reason — whereas MacIntyre’s notion of a tradition is closer to the modern notion of a discipline.) In other words, MacIntyre seems to believe that all human goods can be laid bare to reason, without remainder or loss.

However, I suspect that that is not quite correct; after all, MacIntyre is a practicing Catholic, and so presumably is not squeamish about the ineffable. And indeed, Robinson’s critique on the limits of reason is arguably compatible with MacIntyre’s thesis, as her idea that we should strive for virtue but never assume we have attained it is itself easily articulated as the virtue of humility. And while MacIntyre doesn’t actually use the word “humility,” he takes pains to emphasize that we can never have complete certainty about our traditions, and that flourishing traditions must be in a continual process of formulation, articulation, revision, and self-criticism.

Relatedly, in offering her account of enduring human truths that seem to be beyond or contrary to reason, Robinson’s criticism seems to rely on impoverished modern notions of “reason” rather than the richer one that MacIntyre uses. When she speaks of the “reason” that MacIntyre thinks can offer a full account of human good, she seems to mean the kind of reason favored by rigidly analytical Enlightenment philosophers: something contrasted to emotion, which is capable of being stated in terms of a few premises and conclusions, and which is equally subject to agreement or disagreement by any rational agent, regardless of his or her history, personality, perspective, and so forth. So when Robinson speaks of Biblical parables that teach us truths about human nature, she notes that many of them seem to “fly in the face of reason.” Yet the fact that we can examine, understand, and discuss these parables shows that their wisdom is not beyond reason — just beyond reason of a certain sort. By discussing such stories, we are already engaging in rational inquiry. Such discussions need not yield axioms or proofs, and ought not to be uncomfortable with initial appearances of contradiction, to be considered rational.

Nonetheless, there remains an essential truth in Robinson’s criticism. Even if we can yield to a more human form of reason in discussing human nature, there does seem something rather dry in MacIntyre’s rhetoric of virtue. It seems to fail to account for that basic aspect of human psychology that in part motivates Yuval Levin’s argument: the fabric of our experience may become parched when exposed to too harsh a glare. Some philosophical account of human life may be true, and clarifying, yet leave a large gap between itself and what our experience feels like. (Bridging that gap is a task, as Robinson hints and shows in her own work, that is much better left to art.) But this leaves us with uncomfortable questions that MacIntyre’s work raises but does not address: Can any rational account adequately articulate human nature and the human good? Is the life well lived to some extent antithetical to the attempt to understand it?

The Takeaway from Marilynne Robinson

Robinson’s talk was trenchant, important, and intimidatingly learned. She managed to hit on many of the major weaknesses in MacIntyre’s work, and she impressively conveyed them, along with her own alternative picture, to an audience that needed to hear these challenges. That audience was basically appreciative, though there was a long Q&A session with several hostile questions, which she handled with aplomb. Above all else, it was invigorating to hear her speak, and a treat to get to watch her parry with the audience. I’ll conclude with a few out-of-context but striking quotes from her off-the-cuff responses to audience questions:

• “We know nothing about time or causality, as looking at any issue of Scientific American will confirm.” (Read Robinson’s book Absence of Mind if you want to know what she’s talking about. And you do.)

• “If academia is not attended to, it is in large part because it is not attending to the world.”

• “It is the fault of religion that it has become such a bitter pill for people to swallow. Religion is an instinct and it has taken a lot of effort to squelch it.”

• When asked why the ending of her first novel, Housekeeping, is so sad: “In cultures of the American West, the word ‘lonesome’ has a strong positive valence.”

• On why she doesn’t take account of the biographical backgrounds of students in her creative writing courses when evaluating their work: “We don’t know what people are until we see what they do. And then we don’t know what they are.”

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Related 1: If you’re interested in reading After Virtue (which, even with all of these criticisms taken into account, I still consider tremendously important), I put together a chapter summary of the book some years ago, intended as a reference to aid in reading the book.

Related 2: Also for interested readers, be sure to check out this review of the new collection Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism, which offers some incisive commentary on why MacIntyre and Marx are up to fundamentally different things, despite some apparent similarities. (Hat tip: Peter Lawler.)

Does Evolution Create Harmonious Balance or Messy Patchwork?

2012-02-10T11:11:00.000-05:00

Along the same lines as my previous post, Allen Buchanan, professor of philosophy at Duke University, recently did an interview with the Atlantic about the ethics and significance of cognitive enhancement technologies.

Buchanan, though pro-enhancement, is a lot more wary of the potential ethical and social problems than a lot of the people discussed on this blog, so I won’t quarrel right now with his arguments about the ethics of employing enhancement techniques. I wish to draw attention instead to Buchanan’s recurring argument, in this interview and elsewhere, that evolution serves as something of a justification for tinkering with nature.

Opponents of enhancement technologies or genetic engineering, Buchanan says, have a

rosy pre-Darwinian view about human nature and about nature generally. They tend to think that an individual organism, a human being, is like the work of a master engineer — a delicately balanced, harmonious whole that’s the product of eons of exacting evolution.

Moreover, he says, such opponents assume that “somehow we’re at the summit of perfection and that we’re stable” (his emphasis). Based on this misguided view of nature, which he has elsewhere called “the master engineer analogy,” we are “almost bound to conclude that anything we try to do to improve ourselves is bound to be a disaster.”

Contrasting to this pre-scientific heathenism is the gospel of Darwin, whose opinion on nature Buchanan often quotes, as when Darwin writes, “What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.” Indeed, we ourselves are just such clumsy works of nature, Buchanan tells us, as “cobbled together beings, products of mutation and selection and the crude development of ways to cope with short term problems in the environment.”

To his credit, he does not go so far as to call his opponents creationists or Intelligent Designers, and in a recent paper on the topic he made some excellent points rebutting the neo-Darwinian assumptions of transhumanist philosophers Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg.

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But Buchanan overstates the case for evolution’s cobbling things together haphazardly. And it is far from obvious that the idea that we are made from “crude developments of ways to cope with short term problems with the environment” is a superior interpretation of our scientific understanding of evolution to the idea that we are “a delicately balanced, harmonious whole that’s the product of eons of exacting evolution.” Modern biology actually shows that there is some truth to both views.

While natural selection often operates in the short term to select for particular traits, one of the surprising findings of molecular genetics over the last few decades has been just how much has remained stable over the “eons of exacting evolution.” Novel traits, such as the traits that define human nature, tend to arise not from a short term cobbling together of genes (nor from the design of a “master engineer”) but from surprisingly small mutations that elegantly change the way relatively otherwise stable genes interact with one another.

As Stephen L. Talbott has argued in The New Atlantis, these elegant biological processes do indeed constitute the “delicately balanced, harmonious whole” that Buchanan dismisses. And of course, this is to say nothing of the complex way our biological nature develops through interactions with the environment, or how that biological nature contributes to and interacts with the psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of our nature.

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It is strange that Buchanan thinks that opponents of genetic engineering who find something worth preserving in our nature must believe that evolution is analogous to some sort of “master engineer.” Considering that evolution is a slow process by which biological order spontaneously emerges from highly complex networks of highly conserved genes, there would seem to be an obvious analogy for it in the conservative view of society.

Conservatives tend to be opposed to social engineering — clearly not because they think that society was perfectly designed by some “master engineer,” but rather because they see society as embodying the wisdom of the ages: the slowly accumulated knowledge, customs and practices that constitute the social fabric. Moreover, the historical record of social engineering ranges from abysmal to atrocious. It seems dubious that we could do much better with the incomparably more complex system of biology.

Neither biology or society is ever perfect, but each is profoundly complex in ways that we do not understand. More importantly, human life is deeply embedded in these embodiments of the wisdom passed down through the ages. Living well with the imperfections in our nature is not about “breaking evolution’s chains” through crude exercises of biotechnological power, but is rather the task of ethical reflection and action.

“Liberal Education Deserves a Whole Lifetime”

2012-02-10T10:23:00.003-05:00

Speaking of liberalism and the Socratic method — and the Singularity, for that matter — here’s New Atlantis contributing editor Peter Lawler:

The “Socratic method,” so to speak, was conversational, and its results hugely time-consuming and inconclusive. The conversation in the Republic takes 14 hours, and when it’s over it’s unclear anyone knows what justice is. One thing the guys do end up agreeing on is that conversations of that importance deserve a whole lifetime. Who has that kind of time these days? (Well, things may change if the singularity really comes.) But the truth remains that liberal education does deserve a whole lifetime, and anyone who doesn’t have it is missing out.

Also, speaking of drugging people out of their psychological ills:

A good clue at what you miss is described by the philosopher-novelist Walker Percy. He contrasts the old method of conversational psychiatry (often Freudian), which involved a huge number of expensive, talky sessions and got unreliable results, with the new drug-based psychiatry which often gets fast and reliable results. The alleviation of symptoms, however, isn’t the same as really knowing what’s wrong with you. That’s why Percy said you have a right to your anxiety as an indispensable clue to who you are. Anxiety, of course, can be prelude to wonder and the joy of shared discovery. You have the right not to be diverted in one way or another from knowing the truth about who you are. The old-fashioned doctor of the soul was far less about cure than about understanding.

Against Medical Ethics?

2012-02-10T08:45:00.001-05:00

[Note: I am very belatedly posting two final entries about the Alasdair MacIntyre conference, which I attended and blogged this past July.]

The talk I was perhaps most looking forward to at the Alasdair MacIntyre conference was the provocatively titled “Against Medical Ethics” by Daniel Sportiello of Notre Dame University.

Sportiello spends the better part of his talk essentially giving a summary of MacIntyre’s argument in After Virtue.* What happens in philosophy courses, Sportiello contends, is that instructors “objectively” present students with all alternate sides of an argument, believing and acting as if, because all sides have been presented, the students will use reason to pick the best one. Because this procedure, as MacIntyre shows, is so clearly based on a moral fiction, Sportiello contends (and this is where the talk starts to get interesting, to put it mildly) that by teaching students medical ethics we are teaching them not how to ascertain which arguments are the most right and good, but only how to manipulate each other. (It’s not clear to me why he is singling out medical ethics here, except that it is among the most consequential of philosophical studies.)

* The argument, in short, is that modern philosophical debates use fragmented principles that have been divorced from their original, fully articulated forms, and from the embodied social contexts in which they could find their meaning. Modern philosophical discourse, then, is disordered; it cannot provide sufficient reason to adhere to any one side of an argument, yet it purports to provide such impersonal, objective reasons. Consequently, whatever force of argument does exist, rather than a function of reason, is a function of the Nietzschean individual’s will to power in bringing another to adhere to his own interests. (Although MacIntyre differs sharply from Nietzsche in arguing that this state of inquiry is a contingent feature of modern philosophy, not the nature of philosophy as such.)
(Speaking of divorcing arguments from their full context, this is really an inadequately truncated version of MacIntyre’s. Wikipedia’s synopsis is decent and pretty short, while any serious student of philosophy or moral inquiry should read the full book itself.)

Sportiello offers an example of a student who is raised to believe that murder is wrong. The student then goes to a bioethics course in college, where he is challenged to present rational arguments for murder’s wrongness. He is presented also with potential alternatives to this view, and is given each side of the argument from a neutral standpoint so that he may “objectively” decide between them. But here a seed of doubt is introduced, and in a later moment in his life, with his certitude wavered, he might find himself with a justification for committing the act of murder.

This may be an extreme or fantastical example, but Sportiello applies the same example to the abortion question. He asks us to suppose, first, that the pro-life side is right, and to imagine a student raised to believe it is right, who is then poisoned with “neutral arguments” for both sides. Then he asks us to suppose likewise that the pro-choice side is right, and to imagine a student raised to believe it is right, who is similarly wavered from his belief. In either case — whichever side is right — should we not greet with moral horror the student who is drawn away from what is true and right (whatever we take that to be), just as we would the student taught to doubt the wrongness of murder?

Therefore, Sportiello concludes, we should not teach students bioethics. Rather, we should teach them After Virtue, and when it comes to specific issues, instead of neutrally presenting all sides of an argument, we should reject the frameworks in which these arguments are commonly presented, and instead present the view that is true, and explain why it is true, and offer resources for combating the false arguments.

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This talk reveals what is perhaps the most dangerous impulse lurking beneath the MacIntyrean argument if it is not correctly understood: the one that is opposed to the Socratic method, and to the broader defenses of freedom and inquiry provided by liberal democratic states. I think the dangers are so obvious as to not be worth elucidating at length here — except to note that the genie is already out of the bottle: the ethical debates Sportiello is really interested in (such as abortion) are already underway in our society. And they remain unsettled just because, unlike on the question of murder, there are actual rival sides, and neither has yet offered arguments sufficient to convince every rational person.

This means that implementing the solution Sportiello prescribes would not be an act of philosophical restoration, but rather would be an entrenchment of the exercise of the will that Nietzsche and MacIntyre agree characterizes so much modern philosophical debate. More practically, attempting to eliminate pluralism and to force in its place the certitude Sportiello seeks would require either abandoning society for enclaves and sects, or moving away from our liberal attitudes about differing ways of life, and away from our tolerant attitudes toward free inquiry.

This doesn’t mean Sportiello isn’t on to something in his practical application of MacIntyre’s theory. There is something wrong, even dangerous, with that style of moral inquiry, so commonly found in ethics courses, that simply presents rival arguments on particular issues from a disinterested, ahistorical standpoint and asks students to decide.

But on the questions over which there is real dispute, telling (or “teaching”) students that one side is obviously right is not the only alternative. The better alternative is to offer students the resources to understand to the greatest degree possible each rival argument. But this crucially must involve not taking a disinterested, neutral standpoint, but rather following the Socratic method, and learning how each ethical viewpoint understands and attempts to answer the criticisms of the other. And, as MacIntyre so well shows, teaching rival ethical perspectives involves learning not only differing philosophies, but the distinct historical and social contexts from which these perspectives derive, and within which they are fully embodied. Any adequately articulated ethical perspective, after all, consists not just of a set of principles or propositions, but a way of being and living. Teaching this fuller form of philosophy and ethics is not a small task, but it is possible.

The preceding is my interpretation of what MacIntyre’s theories imply about the proper approach to conducting moral inquiry. But it is clear from this talk that MacIntyre has not adequately taken pains to emphasize how his approach actually requires a liberal society and a liberal methodology, even if it rejects liberalism as an account of morality itself. And it’s remarkable what a fine line there is in the takeaway from his argument between these two radically different conclusions about how we should regard liberalism.

(I should note that the conference audience last July also pounced on Sportiello and made many of these points. And he said he had not meant his talk the way we were taking it and was worried it might come across this way — though I still wasn’t clear after this on what he might have meant instead. So one should not necessarily take this post as a completely fair representation of and response to Sportiello’s argument — although he did publish a version of it as a column in the Notre Dame Observer a month later, and it appears consistent with my description here. [NOTE: See the end of this post for an exchange between myself and Mr. Sportiello about his talk.] Regardless, one could easily take MacIntyre’s work to the conclusions described here, and so it is crucial to respond to them.)

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As a postscript to MacIntyre’s account of moral inquiry, I would also contend that coming to the best conclusion in a moral debate requires not only understanding but sympathizing with each side of an argument. This is crucial to inhabiting rival views, to understanding why someone might not only rationally believe them but reasonably live according to them. The act of sympathy can become a rational basis for rejecting a viewpoint — and it ought to be considered a much better basis than one of lacking understanding, of bafflement.

It strikes me that this account tends already to support a skeptical view of the reflexively progressive impulse toward bioethics and biotechnology — the impulse that culminates in transhumanism. For (at the risk of overgeneralizing) it seems that transhumanists tend to meet their critics with bafflement. Transhumanists regard their rivals’ viewpoints as fundamentally irrational and superstitious, and their approach is more often to dismiss those arguments as such than to provide criticism based on a deep understanding of their rivals. By contrast, I think critics pretty well understand and sympathize with, and have offered coherent and charitable accounts of, the impulses and reasons motivating transhumanism.

Actually, it is closer to the truth to say that transhumanists and their critics fundamentally value different, and basically opposed, sets of goods. But transhumanists seem to reject their rival goods out of incomprehension — whereas the critics of transhumanism reject transhumanism because they understand all too well what it wants.

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ADDENDUM: Before publishing this post, I sent it to Mr. Sportiello to give him an opportunity to correct or clarify my account of his talk. The below is excerpted from our e-mail exchange.

Daniel Sportiello: I have now given my paper several times — and been misinterpreted several times: my audience at Providence, of which you were a member, took me to be a reactionary, for example, while my audience at Notre Dame took me to be a nihilist. No doubt these misinterpretations are my fault: I find, in the words of the poet, that it is impossible to say just what I mean. Nonetheless, let me try to articulate my thesis as clearly as brevity allows.

First, to repeat, I advocate teaching courses on After Virtue instead of courses on applied ethics — though any course on After Virtue must begin with a course on applied ethics in miniature. But we should teach them these common arguments only in order to immediately reveal their shallowness — the extent, that is, to which they depend upon premises that are without justification — and the culture of manipulation that results from that shallowness.

We should next teach them what men like Kant and Hume actually wrote — the grounding of autonomy in the normativity of theoretical and practical reason and the complementary role of sympathy and self-love in any explanation of the rise of civil society, respectively — before teaching them what really matters in all of this: an understanding of embodied rationality, deeply informed both by the practices of everyday life and by history, that would serve as the core of a tradition of rational inquiry that could be shown to be rationally superior to its rivals — who should be included, not excluded, from this conversation.

Ari N. Schulman: It’s important to point out the philosophical errors of common ethical debates. But the issues people discuss in medical ethics courses are there because they are of such pressing significance. So it seems you have to advance some positive argument about bioethical issues, even absent a revolution in philosophy or culture. People are going to have to contend with these issues — if not in an ethics course, then elsewhere.

So once you’ve taught students After Virtue, just how are you going to present them with those purportedly shallow arguments in favor of, say, abortion or euthanasia? Because the big problem with your talk as presented is that it sounds like you’re saying that you wouldn’t present them with those arguments at all — yet the arguments need a full and clear airing, whether to defend or refute them. The other problem is that if you’re truly following After Virtue, then you have to believe that you shouldn’t be teaching the common arguments against those practices, either — or rather, as you say in your talk, you have to present all of the common arguments about these practices as equally unjustified and manipulative. So you seem both to be saying that you shouldn’t teach any of the common arguments on these issues, and yet also that you should present only the right one. These two positions are of course hugely problematic on their own, but are also quite opposed to each other. So how then do you go about presenting and responding to these contemporary arguments about bioethical issues?

Daniel Sportiello: The version of my paper that you heard ended in a way that was intended to be punchy but succeeded only in being obscure. This obscurity is, it seems to me, reflected in your interpretation of my position, expressed in the paradoxical conclusion that “you shouldn’t teach any of the common arguments on these issues, and yet also that you should present only the right [arguments].” I admit this is contradictory — or would be, if “arguments” were taken in the same sense in both conjuncts. However, I do not mean for it to be so taken.

When “arguments” is taken in one sense, I affirm the first conjunct: one should not teach any of the common arguments, for or against, in applied ethics. This is because I, with MacIntyre, take these arguments to rest on incommensurable premises, each of which is shared only by a minority of those in our society; therefore, to teach any of the common arguments, for or against, would be to induct students into a practice of manipulation and to introduce unanswerable doubt into their hearts regarding matters of life and death. You are quite right, in other words, to think that my paper forbids teaching, for example, either the common argument for socialized medicine (citing utility) or the common argument against it (citing autonomy). And this applies to all of the arguments in applied ethics that are taken seriously within our emotivist culture: they should be presented only in order to show that they, and the whole practice of argumentation in which they find their home, are unsound.

When “arguments” is taken in the other sense, I affirm the second conjunct: one should teach the right arguments in applied ethics. But by “one should teach the right arguments,” I mean that one should build a whole new culture — one based not in manipulation and shallow arguments but rather upon the very deepest understanding of human practices, human nature, and human history. When you say, then, that I “have to advance some positive argument about bioethical issues, even absent a revolution in philosophy or culture,” I agree entirely: a revolution in philosophy and culture is exactly what I seek.

I know those who would put the point in this vocabulary: one should work to overthrow the Culture of Death and institute in its place the Culture of Life. Whatever one calls such a culture — one defined by its rejection of manipulation — one thing is quite clear: no one will be in doubt about the morality of issues like abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. Sound arguments against them would be fairly trivial deductions from a comprehensive view of our relation to the world and to ourselves — a comprehensive view, that is, of the point of human life. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that questions regarding abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment — if questioning implies honest perplexity about something — would not even arise. This could even be a litmus test for such a culture: it would not only answer such questions but, indeed, stop asking them altogether.

I hope that my tone comes across as one of goodwill rather than hostility: for what it is worth, I have come almost to regret ever giving this paper — one born less of any desire to make a bold claim than of my frustrations with teaching intelligent, eager students the sophistries of medical ethics. I never meant for it to sow the confusion that it did. For I take it that my position is not otherwise than that of a fairly orthodox MacIntyrean: the danger was not, in the words of the poet, that I would be refuted, but that I would not be understood.

Forcing People to Be Good

2012-02-09T16:15:00.005-05:00

[Editor’s Note: We are pleased to introduce Brendan Foht, the new assistant editor of The New Atlantis. He holds degrees in political science from the University of Calgary and in biology from the University of Alberta. This is his first post for Futurisms, to which he will be a regular contributor.]

Peter Singer, along with researcher Agata Sagan, recently made an appearance on the philosophy blog of the New York Times. Suggesting the need for a “morality pill” that could boost human ethical behavior, Singer reminds us why he is the king of crass consequentialism:

Might governments begin screening people to discover those most likely to commit crimes? Those who are at much greater risk of committing a crime might be offered the morality pill; if they refused, they might be required to wear a tracking device that would show where they had been at any given time, so that they would know that if they did commit a crime, they would be detected.

As long as we’re asking people to take morality pills, we might as well preemptively implant those we deem pre-criminals with tracking devices, right?

Singer’s ideas about moral enhancement, however, pale in comparison to those of Julian Savulescu, who drops even the rhetorical semblance of doubt as to whether moral enhancements ought to be compulsory. Indeed, he seems to believe that without the development of genetic or other biomedical methods for moral enhancement, the human race is doomed to extinction.

Savulescu, a professor at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and one of the most prominent academic advocates of human biological enhancement, has argued that the human race is “unfit for the future,” and is heading into a “Bermuda Triangle of Extinction.” The three points of this triangle (representing the three factors pulling us toward extinction) consist of our rapidly advancing technological and scientific power, the evolutionary origins of our moral nature, and our commitment to liberal democracy.

The moral nature we received from our ancestors is far from perfect, rooted as it is in a world of supposedly violent and xenophobic cavemen. With the development and dispersal of powerful new technologies, it is becoming increasingly likely that powerful weapons, like genetically engineered super-plagues, might end up in the hands of people whose moral nature disposes them to violent, possibly catastrophic acts. Liberal democracy is represented in the triangle because it prevents us from taking the measures necessary to ensure the survival of the human race — measures like compulsory moral enhancement.

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The idea of using genetic engineering as a measure to secure global security or peace is, hopefully needless to say, totally removed from medical, scientific, and political realities — not to mention from basic ethical and practical concerns. The idea of actually implementing such a scheme, effectively and successfully, is laughable.

Since facts don’t play much of a role in these proposals, consider just one small bit of relevant data. In Afghanistan — a country that would be high on the list as a potential source of troublesome weapons or people — the infant mortality rate in 2009 was over 13%, and one in five children died before the age of five. Even from a purely practical standpoint, are we to take seriously the idea of going into country that lags a century behind today’s medical standards, and undertaking a massive program of chemical or genetic manipulation, using techniques that are as of now barely hypothetical, targeting genes that we have barely begun to identify, on “patients” who are unlikely to understand the procedures, and in any case will almost certainly be coerced into them?

While it is true that our moral dispositions are to some extent rooted in our biology, our moral and political actions are rooted at least as much in our beliefs about justice and injustice as in our innate dispositions. And one would think that just about any society would not take kindly to an attempt to violate its members’ bodily autonomy. Even if the technical and medical problems were somehow miraculously solved, the fact that some state or international agency would have to force people to take these “moral enhancements” — as Savulescu notes, those who most “need” them would be the least likely to take them voluntarily — would create a backlash that would almost surely inspire more violence than the intervention could possibly prevent.

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The apparent failure of transhumanists to recognize the basic political problems with such a scheme makes plain some of the lapses in their understanding of human nature. Savulescu’s argument that human beings are “unfit for the future” reflects an anxiety common among many people — not just transhumanists — who think about how messy and imperfect our biological nature can be. Evolutionary biology seems to show us that our bodies were designed to compete in a vicious, pre-historical struggle, burdening us with desires and vices that conflict with our higher longings and our moral values.

But this insight is of course not new; Plato and the authors of Genesis seemed to have some notion that human nature is prone to bad as much as good, and common sense shows that we are not always as good as we would like to be.

The difference between transhumanists and more serious ethical traditions is that transhumanists think that because nature is not perfectly designed, it is completely up for grabs — while others acknowledge that ethics is about learning the best way to live with our natural imperfections. In this sense, trying to eliminate the aspects of our nature we don’t like would not be a moral “enhancement,” but would rather be a profound change in the meaning of a moral human life.

How to Solve the Future

2012-02-09T13:51:00.000-05:00

Google has set up a new program called Solve for X. In the clear and concise words of the site, Solve for X

is a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems. Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people. Radical in the sense that the audaciousness of the proposals makes them sound like science fiction. And radical in the sense that there is some real technology breakthrough on the horizon to give us all hope that these ideas could really be brought to life.

The site already has posted a number of videos that are forays into the “moonshot” thinking the program hopes to encourage, including one typically intelligent and provocative talk by author Neal Stephenson.

Those of us who follow the world of transhumanism may be a bit surprised to find that anyone thinks there is a lack of audacious and radical thinking about the human future in the world today. Stephenson is a bit more cautious in his talk, arguing instead that at the moment there seems to be a lack of effort to do big things, contrasting unfavorably the period from around 1968 to the present with the extraordinary transformations of human thinking and abilities that took place between 1900 (the dawn of aviation) and the Moon landing.

(It’s not quite clear why Stephenson picks 1968 as the dividing year, instead of the year of the first moon landing (1969), or the last (1972). Perhaps it makes sense if you consider that the point at which it was clear we were going to beat the Russians to the Moon was the point at which enthusiasm for efforts beyond that largely evaporated among the people who held the purse strings — meaning American lawmakers as well as the public.)

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At any rate, Stephenson attributes at least some of that lack of effort to a paucity of imagination. He thus calls for deliberate efforts by science fiction writers to cooperate with technically minded people in writing what could be inspiring visions of the future for the rising generation.

There is a good deal that might be said about his argument, and perhaps I will write more about in later posts. For the moment, I would just like to note that, even accepting his premise about the paucity of big thinking and big effort today, Stephenson’s prescription for remedying it is odd, considering his own accomplishments. It’s not as if the nanotechnology world of his brilliant novel The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is an uninspiring dead letter.

The same of course goes for many of the futuristic promises of classic science fiction, but in Diamond Age, Stephenson presented his science fiction world with an unusual moral realism that one might have thought would make it all the more inspiring to all but the most simplistically inclined. Perhaps it is modesty that prevented him from putting forward his own existing work as a model.

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Yet by ignoring what he achieved in Diamond Age, Stephenson also overlooks another way of looking at the problem he sets up in the achievement gap between 1900–1968 and 1968–now. For the book is premised in part on the belief that history exhibits pendulum swings. Should we really be surprised if a time of revolution is followed by a period of reaction and/or consolidation?

Believers in the Singularity would, of course, be surprised if this were the case. But they are attempting to suggest the existence of a technological determinism that Stephenson wisely avoided in Diamond Age. But he was swimming against the tide; it is striking just how much of the science fiction of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century was driven by a sense that the future would be molded by some kind of necessity, often catastrophic.

For example, overpopulation would force huge urban conglomerations on us, or would be the driver for space colonization. Or the increasing violence of modern warfare would be the occasion for rebuilding the world physically or politically or both.

Perhaps we are living in a time of (relative) pause because the realization is dawning that we are not in the grip of historical forces beyond our control. It would take some time to absorb that sobering possibility. It is not too early to attend to the lesson drawn so well in Diamond Age: that at some point the question of what should be done becomes more important than the question of what can be done.

Robin Hanson, Proudly Fighting the Good War Against Baby Girls

2012-01-23T18:51:00.010-05:00

A recent issue of The New Atlantis features the article “The Global War Against Baby Girls,” by Nicholas Eberstadt, on the epidemic of sex selection. In countries that value the lives of women less than men, gender discrimination now means not just that women are likely to be treated poorly, but that they might not be allowed to live at all. Baby girls in these countries are habitually being killed because of their sex (typically in the womb but also in many cases after birth).

Eberstadt’s article goes into some detail about the demographics of this phenomenon: it’s happening in scores of developing countries across the world, and, perhaps counterintuitively, is much more prevalent among affluent families. Minimum estimates place the number of baby girls eliminated based on their gender in the range of 30 million; more comprehensive estimates place the total upwards of 160 million.

Reported Sex Ratios at Birth
and Sex Ratios of the Population Age 0-4:
China, 1953-2005 (boys per 100 girls)

Year	Sex Ratio at Birth	Sex Ratio, Age 0-4
1953	--	107.0
1964	--	105.7
1982	108.5	107.1
1990	111.4	110.2
1995	115.6	118.4
1999	117.0	119.5
2005	118.9	122.7

From “The Global War Against Baby Girls.”

So what do our friends, the bastions of potential biotech progress, have to say about this very actual biotech present? The transhumanist and libertarian economist Robin Hanson has weighed in on Eberstadt’s article on his blog. Hanson has previously turned his moral acumen to subjects like how we should forget the 9/11 attacks because they killed an insufficient number of people to matter. When Hanson responds to Eberstadt’s article, however, the number of lives lost doesn’t seem to matter, even though in this case it can be expressed as large percentages of affected countries’ populations.

Instead, Hanson asks the really important question, which is what a high school student in the second week of his introductory macroeconomics course would say about all this:

A simple supply and demand analysis says that selective abortion both expresses a preference for boys and causes a reduction in that preference as wives become scarce. In South Korea this process is mostly complete, with excess boys down from 15% in the 1990s to 7% today (with ~5% as the biologically natural excess).

That’s a nice story, except that South Korea is the only country where there has been a clear reversal. Hanson doesn’t mention the dozens of other countries where the ratio of male to female births has increased steadily, without significant reversal, since the early 1980s. Perhaps this issue isn’t clarified by forcing it inside “a simple supply and demand analysis.” But let’s not let facts stand in the way of our favorite theories.

Reported child (0-4) sex ratio in China by county, 2000

Or perhaps the reversal just hasn’t kicked in yet for those countries. So history should bear out Hanson’s idea. Can you think of any societies that have selectively exterminated a certain class of their members? Now, how did those exterminations come to an end: was it because those societies suddenly began to value what they had made scarce?

Hanson elaborates:

This topic offers a good example of a conflict between sending desired signals and getting desired outcomes. Since parents who selectively abort girls show favoritism toward boys, it can feel quite natural to signal your opinion that women have equal value by condemning such parents, and favoring policies to discourage their actions. Not doing so can make you seem anti-female. Yet since via supply and demand the abortions chosen by these parents directly increase the value of women, then all else equal discouraging their abortions reduces the value of women. So if you want women to have higher value, your signal is counter-productive.

You might think that the people who devalue girls so much that they kill them are the ones who, well, devalue them. But you’d be wrong. The best thing you can do to help the cause of girls is to get rid of more of them. Got it?

Maybe I’ve been hasty in my take on Hanson’s analysis. Let’s see how he wraps this up:

Of course it is far from clear that the relative value of males and females should be the main consideration here. One might instead argue that if male lives are more pleasant overall, it is good that we create more of them instead of female lives. Yes, supply and demand may eventually equalize the quality of male and female lives, but until then why not have moves [more] lives that are more pleasant?

One goes through life aware that some people, even respected intellectuals, think these things — but you figure they at least know better than to say them in public. Did I mention that the name of Hanson’s blog is “Overcoming Bias”? And he doesn’t seem to be kidding, either. If some other people think your life is not worth living, then that makes it actually not worth living, and the rational, beneficial thing to do from a public and economic standpoint is to end it.

Transhumanists claim they’re bringing us away from moral slavery and toward rational enlightenment. Libertarian economists claim to offer tools to make peoples’ lives better and more free. To borrow a line from Alan Jacobs: How are they doing so far?

Irfan Khawaja on Appearance as a Guide to Moral Character

2012-01-23T09:34:00.003-05:00

Back in August, I wrote a post entitled “Appearance as a Guide to Moral Character: Does Real Beauty Come from the Inside?,” responding to a talk by Prof. Irfan Khawaja of Felician College. Now Prof. Khawaja has written a thoughtful response to my post, which is available here.

I probably won’t have time to response again to Prof. Khawaja at length, but suffice it to say that, while he makes some valid criticisms of my post in the first section of his piece, I agree with him that the core of our dispute traces back to the question of the nature of perception. Specifically, I maintain that perceptions and theories intermingle, and he strongly disagrees. I probably (even for such a long post) wrote too hastily on this point, skipping past some crucial steps to go right into talking about perception “depending” on “theories.” It’s much better to approach this subject by asking whether our perceptions are affected by our interpretations of them, or, put another way, by what we think they are.

I find the evidence for a positive answer to this question to be overwhelming, though I realize that this affronts the sensibilities and intuitions of the Western mindset since the Enlightenment. In lieu of defending this idea myself, for the time being I will refer interested readers to what I consider the definitive case for this idea: Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (especially the first third — though I should say there are key parts of that and the rest of the book with which I disagree). It’s a short and bracing read.

Also, coming back to Alasdair MacIntyre — the philosopher whose work sparked the original discussion between myself and Prof. Khawaja — a similarly provocative account on the theory-perception question can be found in the chapter “‘Fact’, Explanation and Expertise” from After Virtue. MacIntyre also alludes to Kant’s crucial work on this question in The Critique of Pure Reason (see Wikipedia for a decent, very short overview). Finally, if you’re interested in a take on this subject from a less philosophical and more intuitive or experiential standpoint — which is, after all, closer to the subject under dispute here — I highly recommend Alain De Botton’s delightful book The Architecture of Happiness, which is about how our senses of what we find beautiful and ugly arise from associations and ideas that usually reside below our conscious awareness.