The Human Future: Changing Human Nature and Changing Natural Law

THE HUMAN FUTURE: CHANGING HUMAN NATURE AND CHANGING NATURAL LAW By Brian Patrick Green Student Symposium on Science and Spirituality, Zygon Center for Religion and Science, Chicago, Illinois, March 2011 Author’s note, 2015: portions of this paper were revised and contributed in part (along with revised portions of Brian Patrick Green, “Could Transhumanism Change Natural Law?” American Academy of Religion, National Meeting, San Francisco, California, November 2011) to Brian Patrick Green, “Transhumanism and Catholic Natural Law: Changing Human Nature and Changing Moral Norms?” in Religion and Transhumanism: The Unknown Future of Human Enhancement, edited by Calvin Mercer and Tracy Trothen. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2015. Please see that chapter for an improved and more complete analysis of this subject. Abstract. Natural law rests on the idea that “action follows being” and that by knowing what something is we can say something about how it should act. In the past natural law has been considered static, but with the expanding scope of human action, especially due to technology, human nature is changing both culturally and biologically. Using the idea of first nature and second nature from Thomas Aquinas, and Hans Jonas’s idea that ethics must expand to meet the challenges of new technology, I explore how natural law can still exist with a dynamic nature, and I attempt to begin the formulation of a natural law ethic for guiding action when being is no longer static. Keywords: Catholic; cultural evolution; ethics; evolution; Hans Jonas; human nature; natural law; technology; Thomas Aquinas 1 For most of human history, human nature has seemed immutable: a permanent, fixed reference point for human interaction, including ethics. There was no theory of evolution or fossil record to demonstrate the dynamism of the human form. There was little historical record to show change over time. Technology and culture were essentially static. And so when thinkers pondered human nature they saw something solid and static, reflecting the solid, static nature of reality itself. Natural law ethics is built upon the fundamental axiom that agere sequitur esse, that “action follows being,” and therefore that by knowing fixed being we could know, fixedly, how to act, always and everywhere. We no longer live in that static world; we now live in a world of change. On the cosmic side, Copernicus’s heliocentrism ended the idea of a static Earth, Darwin’s theory of evolution ended the idea of static life-forms, and Lemaitre’s “Big Bang” cosmology made the entire universe a dynamic phenomenon. On the human side, science combined with industrial capitalism has turned technology into a rapidly accelerating force, which now has considerable power over the biological portion of human nature itself. To understand all this dynamism and to try to extract ethics from it is daunting. If human nature is dynamic, then must not we try to build ethics on something more stable than human nature? If all ethical systems of the past are inadequate, then must we create something completely new? Or are there seeds in past philosophies which we can cultivate in order to adapt ethics to these new problems? The answers to some of these questions can be found in past philosophies, and particularly in the philosophy and theology of the 13th century saint, Thomas Aquinas. By combining Aquinas’s ideas that action follows being and that human nature is a composite of first nature and second nature with ideas from the philosopher Hans Jonas 2 on the increasing scope of human action and the consequent necessity to update ethics, we can create a new form of natural law ethics capable of adapting as human nature changes. To use a metaphor, we can create a natural law ethics capable of hitting a moving target: evolving human nature. Human nature is mutable and is becoming more mutable as technology gains more power, especially power over human biology. Natural law ethics can take into account this new situation using the Catholic moral tradition and contemporary natural science. To make this case for a dynamic natural law ethics I must prove three things: first (1), that human nature has relevance to ethics; second (2), that human nature is mutable; and third (3), that it is possible to construct a dynamic ethic to fit a dynamic nature. (1) THE RELEVANCE OF HUMAN NATURE TO ETHICS Is human nature relevant to ethics? Hume famously asserted that “ought” cannot come from “is;” that there is no way to get a moral conclusion from a descriptive premise. This was later construed to mean that nature had nothing to do with ethics. But there is a way to relate nature and goodness. Aristotle, one of Aquinas’s philosophical inspirations, originally grounded his ethics in natural teleology, and Alasdair MacIntyre argues persuasively in After Virtue that there is no way to do ethics without telos. MacIntyre solves the is-ought problem by restoring teleology to ethics. He articulates the connection between ethics and teleology within a three part structure: “untutored human nature, man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos and the moral precepts which enable him to pass from one state to the other” (MacIntyre 1984, 54-55). 3 In other words, ethics mediates nature and telos, origin and destiny. To achieve a purpose, one must move from beginning to end by taking certain actions which delimit the path between these two places. These actions are ethics. Modernity, informed by Hume, and before him Francis Bacon, removed the telos, thus leaving the system corrupted because it had no goal. But how does teleology have any kind of reality in the purely mechanistic world described by science? Anthropologist Terrence Deacon has been working on this problem using biosemiotics in the context of the problem of ontological emergence and has made a strong case that teleology can be naturalized, and I refer to his work to provide that necessary step (Deacon 2006, 111-150). With this step, nature can guide ethics. (2) HUMAN NATURE IS MUTABLE The next question is whether human nature actually is mutable, and if so, how much? If human nature is mutable, then the ethics derived from it will have to change as human nature changes. To demonstrate the mutability of human nature I will appeal to a traditional source, Aquinas. Jonas’s philosophy of technology will then inform Aquinas’s anthropology to yield a better understanding of the current state of human nature. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas divides human nature into two parts: first nature and second nature ([1274] 1947, I-II, 58.1). First nature is that part of us which we share universally with all other humans. In modern terms, it would be our biological nature. First nature is also something over which we have historically had little or no voluntary control. Second nature, on the other hand, is more open. It is not universal, it varies between groups over geography and history, and in individuals over their lifetimes 4 as well. It can best be thought of as culture, as that culture is expressed in both the group and the individual. The process of acquiring culture is enculturation and habituation. Most importantly, over second nature we possess a measure of voluntary control, which is why we are responsible for our own virtues and vices. Aquinas argues that the first principles of natural law cannot vary between human groups because they are part of our biological nature. However, the secondary principles will vary between groups because they are more context-dependent (Aquinas [1274] 1947, I-II, 94.2, 94.4). For example, in another culture, what we would call “stealing” might not be considered wrong, but more like “borrowing” or “giving.” The social expectations of the group are not the same and so the specific behavioral norms are different as well. To summarize Aquinas on this point, second nature is variable and the morals of different cultures can legitimately vary in limited ways which accord to the specifics of their social and physical environment. To translate Aquinas into more modern parlance: humans are biologically behaviorally underdetermined (Porter 2005, 19, 117, 126-7, 211). Our biological inclinations are insufficient to guide our behavior, so our cultures take up the genetic slack and guide our behavior through moral codes. Not every moral code will work; cultures are selected by natural selection just as biological organisms are. Societies which do not function well either adapt or are replaced. And adaptation relies on mutation, whether biological or cultural, which raises our central question: is human nature mutable? The answer for second nature is clearly yes: human cultural nature is mutable, cultures vary widely over space and time. The answer for first nature was formerly “no” 5 (excluding the issue of the very slow changes due to evolution), but is now partially “yes,” and it is growing in mutability with technological advance. In our current world, one of the major manifestations of culture is technology. Archaeologists will often speak of a “tool-culture” and the concept works just as well for us now. Our tools are parts of our lives, and often function to keep us alive, as in medicine. Medicine is a major field of inquiry in which technology has lead to dramatic changes in human life, and it provides a clear case-study of change in nature. Medicine is a manifestation of second nature which is specifically directed at the control of first nature. It is a cultural phenomenon that has dramatically changed human health, especially lifespan and reproductive behavior. Here are a few examples: control over human reproductive capacity via contraceptives, nearly eliminating mortality involved in childbirth, technology to treat infertility, and technology to treat numerous diseases. As medicine grows in power, more and more of first nature will come under the control of second nature. This shift goes beyond medicine into many other fields of endeavor. Travel, communications, weapons, construction, habitat reconfiguration (e.g. forest-clearing), resource extraction, electronics, and so on, are further technologies which are changing nature and human nature in more broad ways. For example, the ability to destroy most of humanity with nuclear weapons, and the ability, admittedly uncontrolled at this time, to change Earth’s climate show the expanded scope of action of human second nature. These are unprecedented powers in human history. The scope of human power has grown, through the growth of technology, which is an expression of our nature. This is my first key point: If action follows being, and human action has changed, then our 6 being has changed as well. The axiom that “action follows being” is universal, but the results, in a dynamic system where action and/or being changes, are not. Human first and second nature are now mutable not only through biological and cultural selection and evolution, but also now through technology. Technology can act not only on our second nature, in our culture, but also now our first nature, our biology. Humans have indeterminacy (freedom) built into our biological nature that allows us to uptake culture, which then “completes” us. Our freedom necessitates that we have a culture with moral norms because we are not programmed by instinct as deterministically as other animals are. As our cultural technological power grows, including power over our biological nature, our indeterminacy will grow with it. More and more of our behavior will become subject to free will rather than necessity, thus the realm of morality will grow as well. This is what has happened in the last few decades with new technologies. What were previously not ethical questions have become ethical questions precisely because our power has grown and expanded our freedom to act, thus transferring first nature to second nature. This is my second key point: human second nature is growing in scope at the expense of human first nature. What was in the past not under voluntary human control, is now under our voluntary control. Our scope of voluntary action has increased, and with it our freedom, therefore also our need for ethics. As technology increases our scope for action, what we are as beings is changing. On the scala natura we are, perhaps, no longer so much closer to the animals than the angels – we are clawing our way up a little bit. With one word nuclear war can kill hundreds of millions, and by polluting the atmosphere we can warm the earth. These are not the actions of simple apes; these are the 7 actions of creatures more akin to minor deities. While our past brethren are still quite comprehensible to us, we, due to our technology, are no longer they. This is a true novelty of history, and a very dangerous one. We have immense power with inadequate ethics; we have an ethics for apes, but not demigods. Jonas makes this same point on the new scope of human action in non-Thomistic terms in his book The Imperative of Responsibility. In his first chapter, Jonas asserts that “the nature of human action has changed” over time due to our growth in technological power; and since ethics concerns action, the nature of ethics must change as well (1984, 1). Jonas lists some ways in which ethics must change to fit the new situation. Ethics must consider the vulnerability of nature to human action. Our ethical actions are now aggregate (collective of all our actions), irreversible (as in extinction of species), and cumulative (effects build up over time). Unlike in the past where actions were discrete, consequences now compound both spatially and temporally. Even more, technological change forces us continually and unavoidably into “none but unprecedented situations, for which the lessons of experience are powerless” (Jonas 1984, 7). And as the power of our action increases, especially with regard to unpredictable future effects, our knowledge of the potential effects of our actions must try to keep up as well – however, this prediction of effects will always be incomplete, and we must take this lack of knowledge itself into account in our ethical decision-making. All these must be kept in mind now for ethical actions to be responsible (Jonas 1984, 6-8). Jonas’s theory that the scope of human action is changing fits well with my assertion that second nature is growing to encompass first nature. Human nature has never been stationary, it has always been evolving. But what was once a crawl has 8 accelerated to a run. Human nature has become a rapidly moving target. If action follows being, and our capacity for action has changed, then this implies that our being has changed as well. We need to acknowledge this. We need to know exactly what has happened to ourselves, and what we now need to do in order to have an ethics which properly mediates our new nature and our telos. Only by knowing what we are will we know how to act. To have a better ethic of human nature we need a better science of human nature. (3) A DYNAMIC ETHIC FOR A DYNAMIC NATURE So what then, is our new ethic? Is it possible to respond to this fast-paced dynamism with an ethic in principle, much less in practice? I believe that it is possible to respond. First we need to get our anthropology in order: we need to really know ourselves, like we never have before. We can do this by synthesizing a lot of data from the psychological, anthropological and evolutionary sciences, as well as history, culture, and the humanities. Once we get a good idea of human nature, we can think about our human telos. What is the human telos? Aquinas supplies a few ideas that could be widely acceptable, namely what he sees as three inclinations: to preserve being, to reproduce and educate young, and to live in society and seek truth ([1274] 1947, I-II, 94.2). Today, we can think about these as five basics: survival, reproduction, education, society, and knowledge. A functioning society which fulfills these bare minima has achieved a minimal telos, beyond that, fulfilling them virtuously is the next step, culminating for those humanistically inclined with the good community or political entity, and for those religiously inclined, with God. 9 With nature (as found by science) and telos (as found by philosophy) in hand, we can return to ethics, specifically, the virtues necessary to pass from nature to telos; from what we are to what we are meant to be. For the near future, these virtues will be similar to the ones we already know, but with expanded scope for action and therefore responsibility. For example, for prudence we must look not only to our actions here and now, but to seeking the good in our collective actions over long periods of time. Conversely, the vices will become more destructive. For example, in the past gluttony was merely stuffing oneself with food; now with fertilizers and feedlots, we first fatten our corn, then our cows, then ourselves, in a growing cascade of consumption. Likewise, notions of sin will need expansion to match the expanded scope of potential for sin. Sins of commission will likely become more or less serious depending on at least two factors. They may become more serious as our power makes us more capable of committing gravely wrong acts. Also as our knowledge of the effects of our actions grow, we become more responsible for our sins because we ought to know better. Conversely, our sins of commission may become less serious because the effects of our actions will become less predictable (especially in aggregate and cumulative form) therefore lowering our culpability, at least until we realize what we are doing. Similarly, as the effects of all of our acts become clearer to us, every act may end up becoming mildly evil, including, for example, eating and driving. Sins of omission will become more serious as well, because in our expanded power, failure to act makes us more responsible for the evils we fail to prevent. What are the potential courses for natural law ethics to take in this dynamic system? What must be done to gain the vision necessary to proceed? Here are three 10 necessities for a future natural law ethics. First, we must watch human nature itself, particularly human potential for action. Because action follows being, as our potential for action changes, our being will change as well. Second, we must keep our eyes on the minimal telei: survival, reproduction, education, society, and knowledge. Third, if ethics is a journey from nature to telos, from origin to destiny, then as the location of our nature changes we will need new maps and routes to proceed from origin to destiny. Our nature is certainly changing, and possibly our telos – our purpose, meaning, and good – will change also, though for the theist we must always ultimately end in God. This is ethics like space travel, where both origin and destination are in motion, and therefore the course must be set with great care. Natural law has become unstable. Natural law’s fundamental axiom, that action follows being, combined with our modern technology changing our scope of action, means that human nature is changing, and ethics must now change as well. This does not necessarily destabilize most natural law norms in a loosening way. In fact, the strictures of natural law may actually need to be tightened as our power grows, lest we cause unimaginable harms by foolish accidents. Ultimately, words like “looser” and “tighter” may simply be misleading; the only thing we can be assured of is that ethics will be different. We need to evaluate our situation and adopt policies in accord with our new ethical responsibilities as beings of growing technological power. We have the scientific and philosophical resources necessary to accomplish this task. 11 REFERENCES Aquinas, Thomas. [1274] 1947. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1st complete American ed., 3 vols. New York: Benziger Bros. Deacon, Terrence W. 2006. “Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub.” In The ReEmergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion, by Philip Clayton and Paul Davies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jonas, Hans. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue, 2nd ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. Porter, Jean. 2005. Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. 12