Table Of ContentMythologies of
Transhumanism
Michael Hauskeller
Mythologies of Transhumanism
Michael Hauskeller
Mythologies of
Transhumanism
Michael Hauskeller
Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology
University of Exeter
Exeter , UK
ISBN 978-3-319-39740-5 ISBN 978-3-319-39741-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39741-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956560
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Acknowledgements
I have so far published two monographs on the philosophy of human
enhancement—namely, B etter Humans? Understanding the Enhancement
Project (Acumen/Routledge 2013) and S ex and the Posthuman Condition
(Palgrave Macmillan 2014). In B etter Humans? I focused on the concept
of human enhancement as an enhancement of the human a s a human
and looked at the normative assumptions that underlie the various pro-
posals for human enhancement in diff erent areas. S ex and the Posthuman
Condition focused on the role that sex plays in transhumanist and proto-
transhumanist visions of our post-human future and what that reveals
about the way we understand ourselves in relation to other people. What
I have not systematically explored in either of these two books is the
peculiar function that the idea of human nature has in the public and
academic discourse on the desirability of radical human enhancement.
Much of the academic literature on human enhancement engages pri-
marily with the ethics of human enhancement and shows little inter-
est either in the question of what it means to be human (and what it
means to ask that question) or in the narrative context of the arguments
that are exchanged between proponents and opponents of radical human
enhancement. In this book, I attempt to fi ll that gap.
Some previously published material has been reworked and incorpo-
rated. Chapter 2 draws on “Reinventing Cockaigne: Utopian Th emes in
Transhumanist Th ought”, Hastings Center Report 42/2 (2012): 39–47,
v
vi Acknowledgements
and “Utopia”, in Post- and Transhumanism. An Introduction, eds. Stefan
Sorgner & Robert Ranisch, Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2014, 101–108; and
Chap. 3 on “Making Sense of What We Are. A Mythological Approach to
Human Nature”, P hilosophy 84 (2009), 1–15. Chapter 4 is based on “Messy
Bodies, or Why We Love Machines”, in M aking Humans , ed. Alexander
Darius Ornella, Freeland: Interdisciplinary Press 2015, 93–106; Chap.
5 on “Human Nature from a Transhumanist Perspective”, E xistenz 8/2
(2013): 64–69, “Pro-Enhancement Essentialism”, A JOB Neuroscience 2/2
(2011): 45–47, and “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and the Posthuman”,
Journal of Evolution and Technology 21/1 (2010): 5–8; and Chap. 7 on
“A Cure for Humanity? Th e Transhumanisation of Culture”, T rans-
Humanities 8/3 (2015): 131–147, “Clipping the Angel’s Wings: Why
the Medicalization of Love Is Still Worrying”, C ambridge Quarterly of
Healthcare Ethics (2015): 361–365, and “Being Good Enough to Prevent
the Worst”, J ournal of Medical Ethics 41 (2015): 289–290. A version of
Chap. 8 was published as “Levelling the Playing Field. On the Alleged
Unfairness of the Genetic Lottery, in Th e Ethics of Human Enhancement.
Understanding the Debate , eds. Steven Clarke et al., Oxford: Oxford
University Press 2016, 198–210. Chapter 9 makes use of a review of
Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska’s Th e Proactionary Imperative , which
was published in Sociology (2015, online fi rst). A version of Chap. 10 will
appear as “Automatic Sweethearts for Transhumanists”, in P hilosophy and
Ethics of Sex Robots , eds. John Danaher & Neil Levy, Harvard: MIT Press.
I am grateful to many people for the exchanges we had on top-
ics related to the book and for inspiring my thinking about them, too
many to mention them all. However, I feel especially indebted to Erik
Parens, Greg Kaebnick, Brian D. Earp, John Danaher, Kyle McNease,
Lantz Fleming Miller, Eliza Kolovou, Alexander Ornella, Inmaculada de
Melo-Martin, and Mary Midgley; to my PhD students Lewis Coyne,
Alexander Badman-King, Taline Artinian-Papazian, James Watson, and
Peter Sjöstedt-H; and last but by no means least, to my wife, fellow phi-
losopher and favourite storyteller, Elena Teodora Manea Hauskeller.
Contents
1 Introduction: From Logos to Mythos 1
2 Anxious Dreams of a Better World 11
3 Birds Don’t Fly 35
4 Shitting Ducks 55
5 Stealing Fire from the Gods
(and the Weak) 75
6 Fixing the Animal 97
7 Th e Disease of Being Human 121
8 Th e Unfairness of Nature 145
vii
viii Contents
9 Gods Rather than Cyborgs 163
10 Automatic Sweethearts 181
Epilogue: Flowers from the Future 201
Bibliography 205
Index 219
Prologue: Bein g in the Way
When people who don’t know me ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a
philosopher. When they ask me what I specialise in, I tell them that I am
mostly, even though I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that label,
an ethicist. Th is used to be a good thing, or at least not a bad one, but
things are changing. People like me are now increasingly being described
as, at best, a nuisance, and at worst, a threat to human well-being and
possibly even survival.
In this vein, Steven Pinker, the well-known psychologist and bestsell-
ing author, has recently (1 August 2015) published an opinion piece in
the Boston Globe, entitled “Th e Moral Imperative for Bioethics”, in which
he chides ethicists for hindering the progress of our species. According to
Pinker, biotechnology could do amazing things for us if we only stopped
hampering research by raising fl imsy ethical concerns about it, which is
not helpful at all. Scientifi c and technological progress is already slow
enough as it is, and given the “vast increases in life, health, and fl ourish-
ing” that biomedical research promises, every day we lose worrying about
the ethics of the matter is one day too many. While biotechnological
research is urgently needed to rid us of all sorts of terrible diseases, what
we most certainly do not need are professional worriers who call them-
selves ethicists, second-guessing every promising new development and
thus stalling scientifi c and technological progress by throwing “nebulous
but sweeping principles such as ‘dignity’, ‘sacredness’, or ‘social justice’”
ix
x Prologue: Being in the Way
in its way. A true ethicist, Pinker decrees, would realize that there is in fact
only one valid moral imperative they should promote and follow, namely
to “get out of the way”.
F or Pinker and others like him, ethics is a luxury that we cannot aff ord.
People are dying, people are suff ering. Th e biotech industry is attempt-
ing to do something about it, working very hard to succeed, while the
“so-called ethicists” are attempting to prevent this from happening.
Humanity is painfully pushing a rock up a hill, while all that ethicists
are doing is help push it back down again. For Pinker, it is as simple as
that. Except, of course, it is not. Surprising as it may be, it is in fact not
the primary goal of us ethicists to make life diffi cult for those who want
nothing but to make the world a better place. Ethics is not about issuing
“red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution” (although ethical refl ec-
tion may occasionally give rise to all that). Instead, ethics is about making
sure that we know w hat we are doing and w hy we are doing it, that the
path we are following is really the path we w ant to be following, and that
the place where this path is likely to lead us is really the place where we
want to end up being.
We all, naturally, want things to be better than they are, if that is pos-
sible. We all want progress. But just as nothing is ever better a s such , but
only ever in certain respects, there is no such thing as progress as such,
or in the abstract. We are not sitting in an evolutionary elevator that
has only two directions: up and down. Instead, there are many diff erent
ways of going up and going forward, many diff erent ways of going down
and backwards, and many diff erent ways of going sideways, or around
in circles, or of moving without any clear direction at all. Moreover, the
ways that lead upwards in some way may also lead downwards in some
other way. Th ings are usually more complex than we would like, and for
this very reason, also more complex than we may care to acknowledge. In
order to progress, to step forward, you need to have a goal, or at least have
made up your mind about a direction. Spending a thought or two on the
reasons for choosing that particular goal or direction before you start run-
ning doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. And that is all we are doing when
we are engaging in ethical refl ection. Th e one question that ethicists keep
asking is whether the things we do or propose to do are actually good for
us, all things considered. Would we really prefer that this question be no
longer asked?
