Human Engineering and the Value of Autonomy

Ethics, Policy and Environment Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2012, 244–247 OPEN PEER COMMENTARY Human Engineering and the Value of Autonomy ZEV TRACHTENBERG Department of Philosophy, University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma, USA Liao, Sandberg and Roache (2012) aim to provoke a serious discussion about engineering human beings. They offer for consideration a proposal that climate change be addressed by genetically modifying human beings so that we are less likely to contribute to it. I agree that their proposal can be discussed seriously. But not, as I think they want, in the sense of being seriously entertained for implementation, and not really as being motivated by a concern over climate change. Rather we can regard the proposal itself as a technological reimagining of an age-old theme in political theory: the idea that people must be fundamentally transformed to suit them to political cooperation. For many, this theme has a rather dark tonality. This particular variation on it is rejected because it does not escape problems associated with the fundamental value of autonomy. Liao et al. (2012) concede that an intuitive response to their proposal to modify human beings is that it is ‘preposterous,’ and they indicate that they have in fact tried to provoke just that reaction. They make clear their strategy by reminding us that by confronting things we take to be absurd, we can learn important lessons. No doubt. However, they perhaps risk misunderstanding by adopting a rhetorical technique typically associated with satire. They are not, after all, the first to propose a dietary solution to a pressing social problem, and theirs is more modest than others that come to mind. Yet it is clear that their purpose is not satirical. Indeed, a review of their work outside this paper indicates that they see the mitigation of global climate change as simply one of the benefits that can flow from the overarching project of ‘human enhancement.’1 However, the goal of enhancing humanity can plausibly be seen to pervade political thought, from antiquity forward. For a pervasive problem in politics, hence for political theory, is human recalcitrance. Put most simply (if reductively), individuals act to further their own interests as they see them, leading to collective results out of keeping with leaders’ (or theorists’) clear vision of the communal good. Thus, the classical preoccupation with civic education: citizens are not born but Correspondence Address: Z. Trachtenberg, Department of Philosophy, University of Oklahoma 455 W. Lindsey St. Rm 605, Norman Oklahoma, 73069 USA. Email: [email protected] 2155-0085 Print/2155-0093 Online/12/020244–4 ß 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2012.685596 Human engineering and the value of autonomy 245 made, by institutions which function to divert them from narrow self-interest, disposing them to act with the city foremost in mind. No theorist put this idea more clearly than Rousseau, who declared that political life requires that human beings be ‘denatured,’ so that they are no longer motivated by self-interest, but by the interests of their society.2 Liao et al. (2012) in effect imply that the traditional modes of making citizens – education and a robust civic culture – are rendered obsolete by our advanced neurochemical theories and techniques. It turns out that people become more disposed toward social cooperation in response to the hormone oxytocin. I am not certain whether Liao et al. (2012) propose that people be given oxytocin directly, or that they be genetically modified to produce more of it themselves. In either case, the neuropharmecological solution would presumably be more efficient and effective than the old fashioned (and time consuming) methods of social conditioning. The view that a core goal of political life is to create conditions whereby citizens attain the excellences of which they are capable is known as perfectionism, and the project of human enhancement that Liao et al. (2012) espouse appears to be a high tech version. Yet a standard concern provoked by perfectionism is that it sits uneasily with a commitment to human freedom. The socialization perfectionists countenance can look alarmingly coercive. As readers of Rousseau have wondered for 250 years, just what sort of freedom is it that people will enjoy if they must be forced to be free?3 Their repeated assurances that only people who voluntarily agree would undergo modification indicates that Liao et al. (2012) are clearly aware of the ominous potential in their view. In my view, this concession challenges their entire position. On the one hand, they correctly point to the difficulty confronting ‘behavioural solutions’ to climate change – namely that people are typically reluctant to change their behavior. For example, meat consumption is a significant driver of CO2 emissions. However, it is hard to persuade people to voluntarily eat less meat. Hence Liao et al.’s (2012) proposal that people be modified to dislike the way meat tastes, thereby suppressing demand and decreasing the amount produced. Voluntary action will not do the trick, so people should reengineered to act properly. Now the problem here is not that the autonomy of people who submit to a very sophisticated form of meat aversion therapy will be compromised. By assumption, the people involved have submitted to the treatment voluntarily, so the proposed treatment raises no great puzzle about autonomy; it is a kind of biochemical ‘nudge.’4 Rather, the problem is that Liao et al. (2012) suppose that people who are not willing to stop eating meat would be willing to undergo a treatment to make them stop eating meat. Yet if their wills are so weak that they need a ‘meat patch,’ why should we think that their wills are strong enough for them to show up at their appetite reengineering appointments? Will they need a nudge to get their nudge? In general, Liao et al. (2012) make a concession to what I take to be the common sense view that morality demands that people give voluntary consent to the kinds of interventions in their lives human engineering encompasses. At the same time, however, they take those interventions to be required because people will not voluntarily do the right thing. Why then are they confident that people will volunteer to be re-engineered? If the will is the problem in their view, how is it also the solution? In sum, Liao et al. (2012) try to respect autonomy by insisting that human 246 Z. Trachtenberg engineering be voluntary – but that would make it no more effective than the ‘behavioural solutions’ they say it would supplement. There is, I think, a more substantive problem with Liao et al.’s (2012) treatment of autonomy, stemming from their suggestion that pro-social behavior can be induced by means of increased oxytocin exposure. Say that it could, and people could, so to speak, agree to have themselves programmed to do good. It is reasonable to ask whether such engineered humans are meaningfully responsible for their actions: whether the good they did is attributable to them, or the oxytocin. Here we are in an old debate. Let me simply present a familiar understanding of the link between morality and free will, expressed forcefully by Milton in Paradise Lost. God is speaking, explaining why He is not responsible for Mankind’s Fall: . . . I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Such I created all th’ Ethereal Powers And Spirits, both them who stood and them who fail’d; Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love, Where only what they needs must do, appear’d, Not what they would? what praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid, When Will and Reason (Reason also is choice) Useless and vain, of freedom both despoil’d, Made passive both, had serv’d necessity Not mee. (Milton (2005), Book III, lines 98 ff.) What makes human action morally valuable, Milton argues, is precisely the fact that it includes the possibility of sin; if it did not, what praise could we receive? To apply this argument to Liao et al.’s (2012) proposal, humans engineered to perform pro-social behavior might generate less CO2 – but that they could not have done otherwise suggests that they are not responsible for that result. The process by which evil is engineered out of the world at the same time excises autonomy – the tribute the authors pay to it by their references to consent notwithstanding. A world whose inhabitants lack moral responsibility and autonomy is one in which, at a minimum, many of our ordinary moral understandings no longer hold. Thus we can ask, in conclusion, whether the world Liao et al. (2012) envision, restored climate and all, is one which we are truly prepared to understand as morally valuable. Notes 1 Liao et al. (2012) are (or were) all associated with the Future of Humanity Institute at the OxfordMartin School. Retrieved from http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/human_enhancement 2 See Rousseau’s (1994) discussion of the lawgiver, the quasi-mythical figure whose function is to make human beings governable Social Contract, Book II, ch. vii. Rousseau cites both Plato and Human engineering and the value of autonomy 247 Machiavelli in this chapter; Hobbes is also deeply concerned to show how human motivation can be restructured to produce law-abiding citizens. 3 Rousseau (1994) Social Contract, Book I, ch. vii. 4 For a discussion of the more conventional kind see Thaler and Sunstein (2009). References Liao, S. M., Sandberg, A. & Roache, R. (2012) Human engineering and climate change, Ethics, Policy & Environment, 15(2), pp. 206–221. Milton. (2005) Paradise lost (New York: Oxford University Press). Rousseau. (1994) Social contract, in the Collected Writings of Rousseau, in: Masters, R.D. and Kelly, C. (Eds.) (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England). Thaler, R. H. & Sunstein, C. R. (2009) Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin).