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Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People
Decisive biotechnological interventions in the lottery of human life--to enhance our bodies and brains and perhaps irreversibly change our genetic makeup--have been widely rejected as unethical and undesirable, and have often met with extreme hostility. But in Enhancing Evolution , leading bioethicist John Harris dismantles objections to genetic engineering, stem-cell research, designer babies, and cloning to make a forthright, sweeping, and rigorous ethical case for using biotechnology to improve human life. Human enhancement, Harris argues, is a good thing--good morally, good for individuals, good as social policy, and good for a genetic heritage that needs serious improvement. Enhancing Evolution defends biotechnological interventions that could allow us to live longer, healthier, and even happier lives by, for example, providing us with immunity from cancer and HIV/AIDS. But the book advocates far more than therapies designed to free us from sickness and disability. Harris champions the possibility of influencing the very course of evolution to give us increased mental and physical powers--from reasoning, concentration, and memory to strength, stamina, and reaction speed. Indeed, he supports enhancing ourselves in almost any way we desire. And it's not only morally defensible to enhance ourselves, Harris says. In some cases, it's morally obligatory. Whether one looks upon biotechnology with hope, fear, or a little of both, Enhancing Evolution makes a case for it that no one can ignore.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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April 29, 2023
In Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (2010), John Harris rebuts some opponents of new reproductive technologies. Harris was mostly preaching to my figurative choir, because random unintelligent evolution has saddled humankind with a litany of problems. According to Wikipedia, there are well over 6,000 known genetic disorders, and new genetic disorders are constantly being described in medical literature. The resulting scale of human suffering is difficult to comprehend, and that's just from the recognized disorders. Additionally, the exploding field of behavioral genetics has found "evidence that nearly all researched behaviours are under a significant degree of genetic influence, and that influence tends to increase as individuals develop into adulthood." This includes, of course, nearly all the pathological behaviors. In short, for almost any problem we experience in our lives, or as a result of dealing with other people, genes (either ours or theirs) will play a substantial causal role.
Having known this before I picked up the book, I didn't expect Harris to challenge the Captain Obvious conclusion that humans should sieze the wheel of the driverless bus of evolution just as soon as we can. Sure, every new technology carries risks, but it would be hard to do worse than nature has.
Harris spends most of the book rebutting the monumental short-sightedness, sadism, or theism (I'm not sure which, not that the three differ by much) of a mostly conservative batch of panglossian luddites who seem to believe that the current morass of human pain and suffering and inequality represents the best of all possible worlds.
***
The book has some notable omissions. Harris doesn't mention GWAS or CRISPR gene editing. That's not his fault, as GWAS had only begun in the early 2000s and hadn't reached the wider awareness by the 2010 date of the book; and CRISPR was only first published in 2012. From the perspective of 2023 as I write, these two technologies may figure largely in human enhancement debate going forward. Instead Harris writes about weaker technologies that came into popular awareness earlier. That includes human cloning, which seems unlikely to amount to much. Cloning is not an "enhancement" technology per se, since at best it merely duplicates a genome originally produced by unintelligent evolution. Given that virtually everyone carries at least some genetic defects, it might be hard to find genome donors of sufficient quality to be worth the bother of cloning. People can already produce children the traditional way who are genetically similar to themselves.
Harris doesn't mention the psychologist's fallacy that opponents of enhancement may commit. Take for example one of Harris' targets, Leon Kass. Given Kass' distinguished intellectual career, he is almost certainly near the top the IQ distribution. The "psychologist's fallacy" is the tendency to judge the mental lives of others according to one's own mental life. But the mental life of Kass is different from that of the average person, and very different from that of the below-average person. As Richard J. Haier points out, "Most people with high g cannot easily imagine what daily life is like for a person with low g". By opposing human enhancement, Kass seemingly wants to deprive the genetically disadvantaged of the unearned genetic privilege he has enjoyed and prospered from.
Harris doesn't cite any work about the science of human intelligence differences, and he doesn't convey the scale of intellectual privilege. I think he left a lot on the table in the debate over human enhancement. Before we think about creating superhumans, we can transform society for the better just by giving everyone the talents enjoyed currently by only a lucky few. That is, "superhumans" of a sort already walk among us. Thus Kass is being perhaps disingenuous when he talks about how enhanced humans would no longer be "human." The most gifted existing humans are very much human, and everyone else deserves to go through life with the same genetic tailwinds they enjoy.
***
While Harris mentions the philosophy of Kant in passing, he does not mention Kant's categorical imperative. In particular, the First formulation:
Now granted, Kant's first formulation needs some work, as it seems to say we shouldn't be plumbers (since civilization would also collapse if we only had plumbers - we also need farmers, bakers, candlestick makers, and so on). We don't need or want everybody to contribute in exactly the same way, but we need everyone (or enough people) to contribute in some way.
Harris seems to make (or go along with) a kind of ceteris paribus assumption, namely that we can consider the morality of an individual choice in isolation from what anybody else does. We can simply assume that a civilization like the one we currently have will be there to provide resources as necessary to care for individuals with special needs. But clearly, as Kant showed, this can't be enough to determine the morality of an action. Harris even acknowledges as much in the last chapter. There he points out that people who consume the benefits of scientific research without doing anything to support scientific research are free riding on the generosity of others. But Harris doesn't mention that exactly the same principle applies to the genetic quality of offspring we produce. Every genetic defect creates costs, either on self, or on others, or on both. We only have modern medical care because enough people were born with sufficient genetic quality to have become doctors and taxpayers all the rest who make modern medicine possible, to keep themselves out of prison, and so on.
***
Harris exposes the silliness of the "therapy-enhancement" distinction, but I think his argument could have been stronger. "Therapy" is commonly defined as restoring a person to "normal" function. Harris could have pointed out the mathematical definition of normal, i.e. as a mathematical average. If you treat all the people who are below average with respect to some trait or function, then you just raised the average. For example, consider the largely morally neutral trait of height, since it's easy to understand. If someone were to discover a safe and effective treatment for short stature, which could bring all people who are currently shorter than average up to the current average height, then the new average height would be a little taller, since there would no longer be short people pulling down the average. Thus everyone who had been or is now at the old average height finds themself below the new normal height. Another round of treatment for all these newly-short people would again increase the average height. Further turns of this therapeutic treadmill would result in everybody being as tall as the tallest people. Harris does make the point that each therapeutic improvement raises the definition of "normal" (in the past it was normal for many people to die of smallpox) but he could have pointed out that it applies equally to any kind of genetic deficiency, such as below-normal intelligence.
***
This quote implies that Harris wrote before vaccine denial was a thing. But Andrew Wakefield's fraud started the lethal movement in 1998. Surely by the time the 2010 edition of Harris' book had come out, there were enough anti-vaxxers causing enough unnecessary deaths to create awareness of their derangement.
***
While Harris includes an extensive bibliography, it needs an update for 2023. We are currently living in a genomics revolution, which continues to transform the scientific understanding of human nature. To fill some important gaps in this book, I recommend reading (at the very least):
* Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are
* Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
* Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
* In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence
* Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (newer 2020 edition)
* Intelligence: All That Matters
* Science Wars: Politics, Gender, and Race
* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
* The Neuroscience of Intelligence
* The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature
* The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not
* The Unnatural Selection of Our Species: At the Frontier of Gene Editing
Disclaimer: by citing a book I do not imply that all these books agree with all my opinions or with each other. Instead I mean they provide needed perspective as you develop your own opinions.
Having known this before I picked up the book, I didn't expect Harris to challenge the Captain Obvious conclusion that humans should sieze the wheel of the driverless bus of evolution just as soon as we can. Sure, every new technology carries risks, but it would be hard to do worse than nature has.
Harris spends most of the book rebutting the monumental short-sightedness, sadism, or theism (I'm not sure which, not that the three differ by much) of a mostly conservative batch of panglossian luddites who seem to believe that the current morass of human pain and suffering and inequality represents the best of all possible worlds.
***
The book has some notable omissions. Harris doesn't mention GWAS or CRISPR gene editing. That's not his fault, as GWAS had only begun in the early 2000s and hadn't reached the wider awareness by the 2010 date of the book; and CRISPR was only first published in 2012. From the perspective of 2023 as I write, these two technologies may figure largely in human enhancement debate going forward. Instead Harris writes about weaker technologies that came into popular awareness earlier. That includes human cloning, which seems unlikely to amount to much. Cloning is not an "enhancement" technology per se, since at best it merely duplicates a genome originally produced by unintelligent evolution. Given that virtually everyone carries at least some genetic defects, it might be hard to find genome donors of sufficient quality to be worth the bother of cloning. People can already produce children the traditional way who are genetically similar to themselves.
Harris doesn't mention the psychologist's fallacy that opponents of enhancement may commit. Take for example one of Harris' targets, Leon Kass. Given Kass' distinguished intellectual career, he is almost certainly near the top the IQ distribution. The "psychologist's fallacy" is the tendency to judge the mental lives of others according to one's own mental life. But the mental life of Kass is different from that of the average person, and very different from that of the below-average person. As Richard J. Haier points out, "Most people with high g cannot easily imagine what daily life is like for a person with low g". By opposing human enhancement, Kass seemingly wants to deprive the genetically disadvantaged of the unearned genetic privilege he has enjoyed and prospered from.
Harris doesn't cite any work about the science of human intelligence differences, and he doesn't convey the scale of intellectual privilege. I think he left a lot on the table in the debate over human enhancement. Before we think about creating superhumans, we can transform society for the better just by giving everyone the talents enjoyed currently by only a lucky few. That is, "superhumans" of a sort already walk among us. Thus Kass is being perhaps disingenuous when he talks about how enhanced humans would no longer be "human." The most gifted existing humans are very much human, and everyone else deserves to go through life with the same genetic tailwinds they enjoy.
***
While Harris mentions the philosophy of Kant in passing, he does not mention Kant's categorical imperative. In particular, the First formulation:
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."Harris seemingly alludes to it when arguing in favor of support for scientific research in the last chapter, but he doesn't mention it when discussing the morality of producing defective offspring. He seems to frame that debate as if only the welfare of the affected individual matters. Kant's notion of universality matters too. Consider, what would happen if all children were born blind, deaf, and with Down syndrome? Who would provide the costly and technologically sophisticated care for them, as the existing population of "normals" ages and dies out? Could civilization even survive?
Now granted, Kant's first formulation needs some work, as it seems to say we shouldn't be plumbers (since civilization would also collapse if we only had plumbers - we also need farmers, bakers, candlestick makers, and so on). We don't need or want everybody to contribute in exactly the same way, but we need everyone (or enough people) to contribute in some way.
Harris seems to make (or go along with) a kind of ceteris paribus assumption, namely that we can consider the morality of an individual choice in isolation from what anybody else does. We can simply assume that a civilization like the one we currently have will be there to provide resources as necessary to care for individuals with special needs. But clearly, as Kant showed, this can't be enough to determine the morality of an action. Harris even acknowledges as much in the last chapter. There he points out that people who consume the benefits of scientific research without doing anything to support scientific research are free riding on the generosity of others. But Harris doesn't mention that exactly the same principle applies to the genetic quality of offspring we produce. Every genetic defect creates costs, either on self, or on others, or on both. We only have modern medical care because enough people were born with sufficient genetic quality to have become doctors and taxpayers all the rest who make modern medicine possible, to keep themselves out of prison, and so on.
***
Harris exposes the silliness of the "therapy-enhancement" distinction, but I think his argument could have been stronger. "Therapy" is commonly defined as restoring a person to "normal" function. Harris could have pointed out the mathematical definition of normal, i.e. as a mathematical average. If you treat all the people who are below average with respect to some trait or function, then you just raised the average. For example, consider the largely morally neutral trait of height, since it's easy to understand. If someone were to discover a safe and effective treatment for short stature, which could bring all people who are currently shorter than average up to the current average height, then the new average height would be a little taller, since there would no longer be short people pulling down the average. Thus everyone who had been or is now at the old average height finds themself below the new normal height. Another round of treatment for all these newly-short people would again increase the average height. Further turns of this therapeutic treadmill would result in everybody being as tall as the tallest people. Harris does make the point that each therapeutic improvement raises the definition of "normal" (in the past it was normal for many people to die of smallpox) but he could have pointed out that it applies equally to any kind of genetic deficiency, such as below-normal intelligence.
***
This quote implies that Harris wrote before vaccine denial was a thing. But Andrew Wakefield's fraud started the lethal movement in 1998. Surely by the time the 2010 edition of Harris' book had come out, there were enough anti-vaxxers causing enough unnecessary deaths to create awareness of their derangement.
***
While Harris includes an extensive bibliography, it needs an update for 2023. We are currently living in a genomics revolution, which continues to transform the scientific understanding of human nature. To fill some important gaps in this book, I recommend reading (at the very least):
* Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are
* Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
* Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
* In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence
* Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (newer 2020 edition)
* Intelligence: All That Matters
* Science Wars: Politics, Gender, and Race
* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
* The Neuroscience of Intelligence
* The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature
* The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not
* The Unnatural Selection of Our Species: At the Frontier of Gene Editing
Disclaimer: by citing a book I do not imply that all these books agree with all my opinions or with each other. Instead I mean they provide needed perspective as you develop your own opinions.
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May 3, 2024finis!
Harris napisał książkę, która na pierwszy rzut oka wydaje się być całkiem porządna. Jednak po drodze pojawia się parę problemów. Część jego argumentów opiera się na przesłankach, które, chociaż on zapewne nie zgodziłby się z tym stwierdzeniem, nie są oczywiste do przyjęcia, jeśli wyjdziemy poza jego, dość wąskotorowe, myślenie. Polemika z problemami społecznymi jest typowym, liberalnym bełkotem, sprowadzającym się do chłopskiego rozumu. Odpierając stanowiska mu przeciwne podchodzi do nich z lekceważeniem, przez co w paru miejscach nie rozumie sedna argumentu i walczy z chocholem (istnieje też oczywiście opcja, że specjalnie zmienia sens argumentu, aby był łatwiejszy do odparcia, ale nie mam żadnych przesłanek, żeby go o to oskarżać). Poza tym, często kręci się w kółko i rozwleka rozdziały, co jest jednak całkiem powszechnym problemem filozofów.
Harris napisał książkę, która na pierwszy rzut oka wydaje się być całkiem porządna. Jednak po drodze pojawia się parę problemów. Część jego argumentów opiera się na przesłankach, które, chociaż on zapewne nie zgodziłby się z tym stwierdzeniem, nie są oczywiste do przyjęcia, jeśli wyjdziemy poza jego, dość wąskotorowe, myślenie. Polemika z problemami społecznymi jest typowym, liberalnym bełkotem, sprowadzającym się do chłopskiego rozumu. Odpierając stanowiska mu przeciwne podchodzi do nich z lekceważeniem, przez co w paru miejscach nie rozumie sedna argumentu i walczy z chocholem (istnieje też oczywiście opcja, że specjalnie zmienia sens argumentu, aby był łatwiejszy do odparcia, ale nie mam żadnych przesłanek, żeby go o to oskarżać). Poza tym, często kręci się w kółko i rozwleka rozdziały, co jest jednak całkiem powszechnym problemem filozofów.
July 19, 2021
2.5/5
Oczekiwałam etycznych rozważań na tle naukowym, dostałam osobiste poglądy autora na dane tematy, podpierał je argumentami, ale dla mnie były grubymi nićmi szyte i większości nie mogę uznać za przekonujące, wręcz przeciwnie.
Jednak czasem ksiązka dostarczyła mi kilku smaczków i rozważań, więc nie uznaję czasu za zmarnowany, częściowo lektura była ciekawa, chociaż liczyłam na to, że będzie bardziej rozbudowana, a kwestie etyczne głębiej poruszone.
Oczekiwałam etycznych rozważań na tle naukowym, dostałam osobiste poglądy autora na dane tematy, podpierał je argumentami, ale dla mnie były grubymi nićmi szyte i większości nie mogę uznać za przekonujące, wręcz przeciwnie.
Jednak czasem ksiązka dostarczyła mi kilku smaczków i rozważań, więc nie uznaję czasu za zmarnowany, częściowo lektura była ciekawa, chociaż liczyłam na to, że będzie bardziej rozbudowana, a kwestie etyczne głębiej poruszone.
April 21, 2023
Interesting arguments...unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world.
August 26, 2020
Unapologetically bioliberal, Harris book is mainly a critique of the biggest opponents of biomedical enhancement. The arguments presented are simple and original, although not always solid. He nevertheless succeeds in showing the flaws in bioconservative thought. My only problem with his book is the way he (I believe wrongly) presents Buchanan's view on justice and how he then pushes an extreme and overly simplistic utilitarian approach to the ethics of enhancement.
July 11, 2020
Interesting collection of essays defending enhancement, embryo selection, and other uses of biotech.
August 30, 2013
I had to read this book for a course on transhumanism. While I do not oppose transhumanism in itself and the book was fairly well written, and accessible to all (doing away with a lot of the more complicated philosophical language usually associated with this topic), I just couldn't help but cringe many times.
The author will often play man instead of playing ball and sometimes gives refutations for arguments which to me simply aren't, or are too weak to frankly discredit the arguments of his opponents. When your response is "this is humty-dumpty!" and you feel obliged to post something from Alice in Wonderland to make your point, for me, you still haven't clearly made out why exactly, in your opinion, something is "humpty dumpty".
Secondly, the author tiptoes around bigger questions, one being that of WHY parents would choose one genetical trait over the other. Sure, being a man or a woman or being black or white does not give the resulting person a different moral status (he often insists on those choices being morally neutral). Still, moral neutrality (having the same worth as a human being) does not mean it is totally neutral. There is SO MUCH behind the choice to have a boy rather than a girl or black rather than white skin that simply doing away with that reality by saying it's "morally neutral" just doesn't cover it for me.
The same "blindness" to actual societal problems comes up when discussing immortality. Saying that it won't drain the resources of the earth because at first only a small group of people would be immortal is a bit easy. In a discussion that's almost entirely hypothetical, "locking up" and argument with such a decisive claim seems phoney to me. And he misses a really huge point for me in the discussion: if one knew that there were people on the planet that achieved immortality, when faced with the certainty of one's own death, people would do anything to obtain or gain access to the technology in question, and not simply go down quietly because they can't afford it.
Lastly, something that I usually find lacking in any book about transhumanism of enhancement is: define that "better" that you're aiming for, and define exactly what is enhancement. Saying "the word doesn't need explanation and people understand it naturally" is an easy cop-out. Defining a term is the first step to understanding exactly what you mean and what are the values you thus uphold, what you hope to see happen in society. Also, "better" in the sense of a what? A higher degree of complexity, higher degree of achievements? Or are we instead truly talking about any kind of technological "add-on" to a human being, meant to make him more (or less) of something he wants (or doesn't) for himself? Then what's the difference with someone with BDD who wants his leg removed? What's "better". No answer, and the question isn't even asked.
The author will often play man instead of playing ball and sometimes gives refutations for arguments which to me simply aren't, or are too weak to frankly discredit the arguments of his opponents. When your response is "this is humty-dumpty!" and you feel obliged to post something from Alice in Wonderland to make your point, for me, you still haven't clearly made out why exactly, in your opinion, something is "humpty dumpty".
Secondly, the author tiptoes around bigger questions, one being that of WHY parents would choose one genetical trait over the other. Sure, being a man or a woman or being black or white does not give the resulting person a different moral status (he often insists on those choices being morally neutral). Still, moral neutrality (having the same worth as a human being) does not mean it is totally neutral. There is SO MUCH behind the choice to have a boy rather than a girl or black rather than white skin that simply doing away with that reality by saying it's "morally neutral" just doesn't cover it for me.
The same "blindness" to actual societal problems comes up when discussing immortality. Saying that it won't drain the resources of the earth because at first only a small group of people would be immortal is a bit easy. In a discussion that's almost entirely hypothetical, "locking up" and argument with such a decisive claim seems phoney to me. And he misses a really huge point for me in the discussion: if one knew that there were people on the planet that achieved immortality, when faced with the certainty of one's own death, people would do anything to obtain or gain access to the technology in question, and not simply go down quietly because they can't afford it.
Lastly, something that I usually find lacking in any book about transhumanism of enhancement is: define that "better" that you're aiming for, and define exactly what is enhancement. Saying "the word doesn't need explanation and people understand it naturally" is an easy cop-out. Defining a term is the first step to understanding exactly what you mean and what are the values you thus uphold, what you hope to see happen in society. Also, "better" in the sense of a what? A higher degree of complexity, higher degree of achievements? Or are we instead truly talking about any kind of technological "add-on" to a human being, meant to make him more (or less) of something he wants (or doesn't) for himself? Then what's the difference with someone with BDD who wants his leg removed? What's "better". No answer, and the question isn't even asked.
July 27, 2008
While the book is not an easy read, Harris makes a compelling philosophical argument that enhancing human health through genetic engineering is just as morally required as medical care, based on the concept that preventing harm is morally equivalent to healing. However, certain concerns about enhancement were left unaddressed, and I finished the book in disappointment.
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April 24, 2008nonfiction,philosophy,transhumanism,enhancement
March 4, 2009
I didn't disagree with the concept of enhancement, but I did disagree with Harris in general.
April 20, 2015
For Sociology 126: Health of the Public
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews