In his book, Our Posthuman Future (2002), Francis Fukuyama attempts to defend humanity as a category of exclusive moral and political significance by invoking a brand of Aristotelian essentialism, as follows:
Aristotle argued, in effect, that human notions of right and wrong—what we today call human rights—were ultimately based on human nature. That is, without understanding how natural desires, purposes, traits, and behaviors fit together into a human whole, we cannot understand human ends or make judgments about right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. Like many more recent utilitarian philosophers, Aristotle believed that the good was defined by what people desired; but while utilitarians seek to reduce human ends to a simple common denominator like the relief of suffering or the maximization of pleasure, Aristotle retained a complex and nuanced view of the diversity and greatness of natural human ends.
While conceding that the conceptual and species boundaries of humanity are not as clear as they once seemed, he argues that humanity, as we have evolved, still exhibits clear genetic tendencies towards expressing characteristic features and faculties that set us apart from other organisms. Furthermore, this is sufficient to establish a secular ethical framework, which would include some kind of duty or obligation to resist certain kinds of enhancement, as follows:
What is it that we want to protect from any future advances in biotechnology? The answer is, we want to protect the full range of our complex, evolved natures against attempts at self-modification. We do not want to disrupt either the unity or the continuity of human nature, and thereby the human rights that are based on it.
There are a couple things to be said against any such duty or obligation derived from reason and observation alone. Firstly, Fukuyama’s view of the uniquely exclusive value of humanity as a species is grounded in a transcendental argument that the contemporary discourse of human and political rights cannot be sustained without it. However, from a secular point of view, such a transcendental must be consistent with our best science. Our best science has demonstrated the explanatory power of regarding humanity as a kind continuous with other nearby natural kinds. So, it disregards a positive finding of our best science to suggest that there is, nonetheless, some categorical distinction between humanity and non-human species. It is not enough to show that there are persistent differences between humans and non-human animals. This is because it remains a difference of degree, which Fukuyama is then invoking to demonstrate a categorical moral difference sufficient to justify resistance to incremental species change through certain kings of genetic enhancement. This seems to involve an unwarranted conceptual leap.
To counter this, Fukuyama argues along the lines of the following:
[I]n the evolutionary process that leads from prehuman ancestor to human beings, there was a qualitative leap that transformed the prehuman precursors of language, reason, and emotion into a human whole that cannot be explained as a simple sum of its parts, and that remains an essentially mysterious process.
Fukuyama’s argument therefore depends upon the empirically defeasible claim that there was some point of discontinuity in human evolutionary development when recognisably distinct human faculties emerged in a leap forward from simpler capacities shared with non-human animals. This seem to be a tenuous theoretical basis upon which to establish human exceptionalism. Such reliance on functional distinctiveness to establish an exclusive humanism would also seem to entail that developments in artificial intelligence and robotics that could reproduce the functional capacities and complexity of humanity would necessarily produce beings with the same rights and moral standing as humans. Indeed, what would justify preventing a cybernetically or genetically modified animal, with a different but equally complex and nuanced set of capacities and traits, from claiming equal rights and standing?
Fukuyama makes some reference to phenomenal consciousness as an emergent aspect of human mental life, which artificial intelligences and modified lifeforms might not share. However, unless he wants to go to the extreme measure of denying non-human animals an inner mental life, it remains the case that he relies on functional distinctions to ground human exceptionalism.
Secondly, the Aristotelian idea of essences incorporates telos or the way that a substance was meant to development in order to become more really or authentically what it is essentially. The Good is defined in terms of whatever promotes or inhibits this development. This metaethics – that is, this way of grounding ethical or moral truths in some way that the world is – fails to deliver on the metaethical criterion of unavoidability that I discussed in this previous post. Succinctly, what is to stop people – lots of people – from agreeing that certain genetic enhancements will come at the cost of human dignity, but also shrugging and adding that it will create a new standard of dignity to be enjoyed by whatever comes next? If it were truly morality at stake, grounded in the essences of species, then it seems as though it should not be an option to disregard this morality. Morality has more force than that, in some sense, and yet the replacement of humanity, as currently understood, by artificially modified lifeforms seems increasingly possible as a future trajectory. This would mean that we have the power to end moral reality, as it is currently understood, if we so choose. Yet, this appears to give us too much power over moral reality, and a way to avoid morality that seems inconsistent with the absolute category of normativity to which we sometimes appeal when whole societies behave reprehensibly. So, an objective human essence does not appear to be the right phenomenon to be supported by a transcendental argument from moral and political rights.
As I have been arguing in this blog, the only basis for human exclusivism in a posthumanist age, when objective essentialism has ceased to lack credibility, is that of a divine interest in human affairs, which privileges a concept of humanity through demands, commands and promises made with respect to human conduct. However, due to such a valorisation of humanity derived from divine revelation, I concur with Fukuyama’s final argument that stringent regulation of biotechnology is needed, which can be effected by extant, democratic political systems, but only with the creation of new regulatory institutions. Such new intuitions must be willing and able to inscribe and enforce lines in the sand representing our best guesses about the boundaries of the human and the ethical/moral.
Theocentric Posthumanism 