Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People

By John Harris

In Enhancing Evolution, leading bioethicist John Harris dismantles objections to genetic engineering, stem-cell research, designer babies, and cloning and makes an ethical case for biotechnology that is both forthright and rigorous. 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. Further, 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 says, it's not only morally defensible to enhance ourselves; in some cases, it's morally obligatory.

In a new preface, Harris offers a glimpse at the new science and technology to come, equipping readers with the knowledge to assess the ethics and policy dimensions of future forms of human enhancement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781400836383

John Harris

John Harris, author of Britpop!: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock, has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo, Q, The Independent, NME, Select, and New Statesmen. He lives in Hay on Wye, England.

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| Enhancing Evolution

| Enhancing Evolution

The Ethical Case for Making Better People

With a new preface by the author

John Harris

Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire ox20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Fifth printing, and first paperback printing, with a new preface, 2010

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-14816-8

Cloth ISBN: 978-0-691-12844-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007928679

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Palatino

Typeset by T&T Productions Ltd, London

Printed on acid-free paper ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5

|   For Jacob

| Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Foreword by Steve Rayner

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Has Humankind a Future?

2 Enhancement Is a Moral Duty

3 What Enhancements Are and Why They Matter

4 Immortality

5 Reproductive Choice and the Democratic Presumption

6 Disability and Super-Ability

7 Perfection and the Blue Guitar

8 Good and Bad Uses of Technology

9 Designer Children

10 The Irredeemable Paradox of the Embryo

11 The Obligation to Pursue and Participate in Research

Notes

Bibliography

Index

| Preface to the Paperback Edition

The most significant developments in the ethics of enhancement since the first edition of this book was published in 2007 reflect the way in which our increasing ability to alter, adapt, and increase human functioning requires us to reconceptualize our ideas of what it is to be human, and indeed the very concepts of ‘human’ and ‘humanity.’¹ Beyond this we need to expand our moral horizons to consider the possibilities of transhuman and nonhuman persons (some of whom may already exist at the present time). It is clear to me that excessive preoccupation with ourselves as we are, instead of constructive thinking about ourselves as we might (and perhaps ought to) be or become, is one of the chief obstacles not simply to progress, but perhaps even to survival. I attempt in the pages that follow not only to make clear why this is so but also to indicate some of the most promising pathways to innovation, not simply in terms of scientific and technological discovery, but also in terms of human nature and possibilities.

This reconceptualization of the parameters of the human and the possible transcendence of those parameters started some years ago, when initial interest centered on the field of sports,² and on the legitimacy of various ways of enhancing achievement in sports. A different set of preoccupations leads people to speculate about the possibility and effects of substantial increases in human life expectancy. And as life span extends radically, possibly to the point at which we humans might become, for all practical purposes, immortal, we clearly see that such possibilities, if they can be actualized, would transcend one of the defining characters of our species, namely, that we are essentially a species of mortals.³ These interests continue center stage⁴ with urgent consideration of the ethics of various combinations of human and animal parts and the creation of cybrids or hybrids and fears about the creation of centaurs and mermaids.⁵ Related to possibilities of animal/human combination is interest in human-machine interfaces. These to a certain extent already function (in the form of computers, cell phones, and the like) to assist memory and speed up many intellectual processes; but it is the integration of cyber elements into our human physiology that creates most interest and anxiety.⁶

In this preface to the paperback edition of Enhancing Evolution I want to consider briefly three possibilities that did not receive attention in the 2007 edition. One is a family of technologies, grouped under the not particularly illuminating heading of synthetic biology, that continue to arouse interest. Another enhancement possibility that is gaining ground and that has not received the attention it deserves is moral enhancement, and finally, the possibility of memory-enhancing and memory-inhibiting drugs has raised some interesting new issues.

Synthetic Biology and Synthetic Sunshine

One of the most dramatic and important of the new technologies that will produce new creatures is synthetic biology. When people talk about synthetic biology and synthetic life, they may have in mind Frankenstein scientists in the lab making creatures out of old socks and coat hangers, or perhaps some bubbling vat of biochemical primeval soup, out of which will arise either a monster or a perfect specimen of humanity. This, however, is far from likely or at least far in the future!

What Is Synthetic Biology?

Synthetic biology⁷ is the name now used for a cluster of new technologies in which biomolecular components (natural or synthetic) are newly combined or reorganized in order to create novel genetic and biochemical circuitry, pathways, and ultimately organisms. It may be thought of as a hybrid discipline between science and engineering.

Synthetic biology has caught the imagination not least because it marks the beginnings of what looks like the possibility of manufacturing life forms from scratch and eventually of creating tailor-made creatures in our own image or in principle in the image and with the attributes of anything we like, or at least of anything we can engineer. This is heady stuff, and if it works it may give us unprecedented powers, which like all powers may be used for good or evil or simply wasted by lack of use.

Many people believe we humans have been made in the image of God, by a God who, presumably, likes the way she looks. Is it the hubris of such a prospect, however remote, that makes the possibility of humans doing the same so daunting and so dramatic? However, it is not hubris to believe we can do good and try to do it. In this sense synthetic biology raises issues that are in essence the theme of this entire book, but it is important to think about whether there are any special problems associated with the creation of synthetic or artificial surrogates for natural processes or phenomena. The natural/unnatural distinction, insofar as it can be coherently drawn, is often appealed to, but I believe it has never been endowed with any moral significance whatsoever. People often affect a preference for the natural, but when reminded that people naturally fall ill and die prematurely and that the viruses and bacteria that often attack us and inflict indiscriminate pain, suffering, and death are all perfectly natural, whereas the vaccines and treatments with which we combat them often are not, the moral power of the distinction evaporates. Indeed the entire practice of medicine and medical science seems to be best characterized as the comprehensive attempt to frustrate the course of nature.⁸ A further reminder, if one is needed, is the suggestive case of synthetic sunshine, an imitation of the natural of immense practical importance and one of the earliest enhancement technologies.

Synthetic Sunshine

Before synthetic sunshine people slept when it was dark and worked in the light of day. With the advent of synthetic sunshine, firelight, candlelight, lamplight, and electric light, work, including study and other attempts to improve the mind, and indeed social life could continue into and through the night, creating competitive pressures and incentives for those able or willing to use them to their advantage. The solution, however, was not to outlaw synthetic sunshine but, perhaps belatedly, to regulate working hours and improve access to the new technology and think hard about how to manage and control the pressures it created.

Synthetic sunshine created two of the features that are most deplored today in the prospect of, for example, smart drugs (discussed in chapter 2); synthetic sunshine created positional advantage, enabling some people to gain an edge over their fellows, and competitive pressures either to maintain that edge or in others to equal and even surpass it. Should we (or, rather, our early ancestors) have turned our backs on synthetic sunshine and gone back to sleep … and said thanks but no thanks? Surely, the right response to things that confer significant benefits to humans individually and collectively is not to say no thanks but rather yes please. Of course, we must also work hard, tirelessly and ceaselessly, to make sure that the benefits or their effects are as widely and as fairly available as possible.

Moral Enhancement

I have not discussed the possibility of so-called moral enhancement hitherto, first because I believe that education, both formal and informal, and cognitive enhancement are the most promising means of moral enhancement that are so far foreseeable. The other main reason that moral enhancement is not so far on the horizon is that moral dispositions, motives, and awareness are, I believe, so complex as to be unlikely to be susceptible to enhancement in the foreseeable future, if ever. It is, however, worth saying something about why I believe this to be so. Ethical expertise is not being better at being good; rather, it is being better at knowing the good and understanding what is likely to conduce to the good. Those with the insight, sympathy, empathy, and knowledge to have formed clear ideas of what might conduce to the good are not necessarily better at making the world a better place, for a number of familiar reasons.

Some of these are to do with a problem understood at least since classical Greece, the problem of akrasia, or weakness of will, one form of which was brilliantly summarized by Oscar Wilde when he defined virtue as insufficient temptation.

A bigger problem is that the sorts of traits or dispositions that seem to lead to bad conduct are also the very same characteristics required not only for virtue but for any sort of moral life at all. To explain what I mean here it is worth considering the work of one of the most insightful and interesting proponents of the possibility of moral enhancement, Tom Douglas. Douglas has defined the most promising form of moral enhancement as an enhancement that will expectably leave the enhanced person with morally better motives than she had previously.⁹ Noting the difficulty of identifying good motives, Douglas adopts the interesting expedient of trying to identify what he calls counter-moral emotions. He identifies at least two: a strong aversion to certain racial groups and the impulse towards violent aggression. Douglas commits himself to the belief that there are some emotions such that a reduction in the degree to which an agent experiences those emotions would, under some circumstances, constitute a moral enhancement.¹⁰

There are two major problems with this approach. The first is that it seems unlikely that, for example, an aversion to certain racial groups is simply a brute reaction, a sort of visceral response, as perhaps is an aversion to spiders. Rather, it is likely to be based on false beliefs about those racial groups and/or an inability to see why it might be a problem to generalize recklessly from particular cases. The second reason is that we would need to be pretty sure that the reduction in the degree to which the emotion was experienced could be precisely targeted only on strong aversions to things it is bad to have strong aversions to and not things to which strong aversions are constitutive of sound morality. This problem was effectively articulated by Peter Strawson in a famous essay entitled Freedom and Resentment.¹¹ Strawson was concerned not at all with moral enhancement but with the problem of free will, and in the course of combating some absurd forms of determinism he points out that certain strong emotions, including aversions, are an essential and even desirable part of certain valuable motives or attitudes to others. Could we, in short, have the sorts of feelings that are appropriate and indeed, it might be argued, necessary to morality if we did not feel a strong aversion to, for example, someone who deliberately and unjustifiably injured those we love? In other words, while of course Douglas is right when he claims that there are some emotions such that a reduction in the degree to which an agent experiences those emotions would, under some circumstances, constitute a moral enhancement,¹² this is a modest claim indeed, and I for one am skeptical that we would ever have available an intervention capable of targeting aversions to the wicked rather than the good. Of course, if ever we do have the prospect of such precise and unequivocally good-producing interventions, I will welcome them, but I remain doubtful and maintain my aversion to the prospect of weakening possibly essential and essentially moral responses.

Memory-Enhancing and Memory-Inhibiting Drugs

Improvements in cognitive functioning, sometimes rather misleadingly classified as neuroenhancement, have been added to a growing ethical and policy literature on enhancement more generally.¹³ Added to this understandable preoccupation with the brain has been recent, more specific interest in the use of drugs to enhance on the one hand or inhibit on the other memory and the recall of specific events.¹⁴ The enhancement possibilities for memory inhibition have been touted as protecting people from the unpleasant or indeed terrifying recall of events such as horrific accident, or assault. There can be no objection in principle to protecting people in this way, but I believe insufficient attention has been paid to the possible downside of such interventions. For example, interference with recall may possibly hamper the identification of the perpetrators of crime, leaving victims exposed to further assaults and being deprived of the satisfaction and the justice of having their assailants brought to book. Equally, it could result in the denial of the possibility of victims learning important lessons from their (albeit unwelcome or even horrendous) experiences. As for memory enhancement, this seems less problematic, save only for the dangers of total or at least excessive recall. We use amnesia to unclutter our minds, and this may well be advantageous—excessive recall, if not precisely targeted, could lead to disastrous information overload. In both cases there may also be distortions in the normal development of identity (we are, after all, to some extent constituted by what we have done and by what has happened to us). I am not suggesting that considerations of these sorts are decisive arguments against memory enhancement or inhibition, nor yet that they constitute justifications for banning such attempts; rather, they should give us pause. Whether the public interest in solving crimes and protecting the community is sufficient to outweigh the protection of the victims of crime from the painful memories of the abuse they have suffered may be a difficult question to resolve in particular cases.

What Is Science For?

The question of the purposes and point of science overlaps with questions about the legitimacy of human enhancement. I have increasingly been interested in the connections between these two superficially rather different sorts of questions.¹⁵ An answer to the question, what is science for? which seems increasingly apposite, is that whatever might motivate scientists and whatever else science might achieve, it is inseparably connected with the common good to the extent that doing good must be part of any adequate answer to such a question. Scientific discovery and the innovation it delivers to the clinic and the marketplace may have many purposes and many uses, but the overriding justification, both for scientific endeavor and for the vast amounts of public money that are devoted to science education and science research worldwide, is the good that science does. A large part of that good is the development of processes, products, and technology that not only ameliorate or cure dysfunction but enhance function, sometimes simultaneously! This is why over a large time span I have been fascinated not only by the question of what science is for, what science can do for us, but rather what we can do for science, what obligations are owed by citizens to science as part of the reciprocal, quasi contractual, accord between science and society.¹⁶

These ideas concerning a sort of social contract between science and society, centered on making the world a better place and people better people, have developed consistently over many years, and they appear in embryonic form in my book The Value of Life, written between 1980 and 1984 and published in 1985. There, writing of the function of medical science, I speak of a fundamental duty that we all have as people and as citizens that death should be postponed and life chances made as good as they can be for so long as the individual’s life remains valuable to that individual.¹⁷ These ideas have led me to various conclusions on the ethics of human enhancement that include a defense of radical life extension¹⁸ and the sorts of more particular forms of human enhancement discussed in the pages that follow.

Since the writing of this book and the first edition’s publication in 2007 my attention has been drawn to a wonderful paper published in 1984 by Art Caplan, who, unbeknownst to me until recently, has clearly been thinking along related lines. I certainly would not have published either chapter 11 of this book or the articles on which it was based in their current forms without acknowledgment to Art had I been aware of his paper. Art’s paper is entitled Is There a Duty to Serve as a Subject in Biomedical Research?¹⁹ In it he argues that there is a limited form of such a duty, and he summarizes his position thus:

There is a strong case for arguing that biomedical research constitutes a form of voluntary social co-operation. The hospitals and institutions in which research usually occurs are quite analogous to other forms of social co-operation where the obligations generated by fair play demand equal participation in sharing the benefits and burdens of voluntary social activity. Any competent person who voluntarily seeks out and takes the benefits of care resulting from biomedical research can legitimately be said to be a consenting participant in the enterprise and, thus, the bearer of a duty to share in the costs of producing the desired goods.

Art bases his argument entirely on considerations of fairness and derives the basic structure of his argument in this regard, as do I, from Herbert Hart via John Rawls and Robert Nozick. To this argument from fairness I add and rely on what I believe is a stronger argument, based on a universal duty to avoid, or minimize, causing harm to others. This argument is based on considerations I first advanced in my book Violence and Responsibility.²⁰ Art believes that the duty to serve as a research subject, insofar as it exists, applies principally to those who knowingly and consciously seek out the benefits of care in research institutions and that if the scope of the general obligation to participate in research is to extend to all persons who receive any sort of health care, then patients will have to be much more informed about the various costs and burdens of having health care available. Readers of chapter 11 of this book will see that my arguments apply, and are intended to apply, to all people, regardless of whether they are patients or have consciously and knowingly sought out benefits provided by the research participation of others, and regardless of information of which they are aware. That said, Art’s paper is an important contribution to the debate, and I wish I had come across it sooner, not least because it would have saved me from reinventing parts of an important wheel.

Notes

1. John Harris, Taking the ‘Human’ out of Human Rights, The Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics (in press), doi:10.1017/S0963180109990570. Published online by Cambridge University Press, February 19, 2010. See also Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom, eds., Human Enhancement, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009.

2. T. H. Murray, Sports Enhancement, in From Birth to Death and Bench to Clinic, The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for Journalists, Policymakers, and Campaigns 2008–2009, The Hastings Center, 2008. Andy Miah, Genetically Modified Athletes: Biomedical Ethics, Gene Doping, & Sport, Routledge, London and New York, 2004.

3. John Harris, Intimations of Immortality, Science 288, no. 5463 (April 2000): 59. John Harris, Intimations of Immortality—The ethics and justice of life extending therapies, in Michael Freeman, ed., Current Legal Problems, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, pp. 65–97.

4. See recent work by Allen Buchanan: Enhancement and the Ethics of Development, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 18, no.1 (March 2008); and Human Nature and Enhancement, Bioethics 23, no. 3 (March 2009).

5. Inter-species embryos, A report by The Academy of Medical Sciences, June 2007 (ISBN 1-903401-15-1). Sarah Chan, Should we enhance animals, The Journal of Medical Ethics 35, no. 11 (November 2009): 678–683. For discussion of some of the ethical issues related to human-animal chimeric organisms, see M. Greene et al., Moral Issues of Human-Non-Human Primate Neural Grafting, Science 309 (2005): 385–386; and H. Greely et al., Thinking about the Human Neuron Mouse, American Journal of Bioethics 7 (2007): 27–40. See also John Harris, Transhumanity: A Moral Vision of the Twenty-First Century, in N. Ann Davis, Richard Keshen, and Jeff McMahan, eds., Ethics and Humanity: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Glover, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, pp. 155–175.

6. James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 2004.

7. In describing synthetic biology we draw heavily on the ideas and research of our colleague John McCarthy, Director of the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre, University of Manchester.

8. See John Harris, The Value of Life, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1985.

9. Thomas Douglas, Moral Enhancement, The Journal of Applied Philosophy 25, no. 3 (2oo8). See also http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19132548.

10. Douglas, Moral Enhancement, p. 231.

11. Peter Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1960).

12. Douglas, Moral Enhancement.

13. S. W. Chan and J. Harris, Cognitive regeneration or enhancement: the ethical issues, Regenerative Medicine 1, no. 3 (May 2006): 361–366.

14. Daniella Schiller et al., Preventing the return of fear in humans using reconsolidation update mechanisms, Nature (December 9, 2009). Merel Kindt et al., Beyond extinction: erasing human fear responses and preventing the return of fear, Nature Neuroscience 12, no. 3 (March 2009).

15. An interest rekindled by conversations with John Sulston and Sarah Chan.

16. My recent thinking on these issues has been influenced by many conversations with my colleagues and friends Sarah Chan and John Sulston.

17. Harris, The Value of Life, p. 53.

18. See note 3 above.

19. Arthur L. Caplan, Is There a Duty to Serve as a Subject in Biomedical Research? IRB: Ethics and Human Research 6, no. 5 (September/October 1984).

20. John Harris, Violence & Responsibility, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1980.

| Foreword

By Steve Rayner¹

This book evolved from a series of invited public lectures delivered at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization. The institute was founded at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School in 2004, supported by a generous benefaction from the James Martin Trust.² Our mission at the institute is to focus on the major science and technology issues that are likely to shape the next decade to century. Where possible, we seek to highlight opportunities where relatively modest investments or interventions in the present have the potential to propagate, over time, to prevent harms and encourage the generation of greater goods for humanity.

To this end, the institute is developing two core capabilities. The first is in long-range thinking about alternative possible states of the world, although not necessarily all of it at the same time. We seek to think intelligently and nondeterministically about the future of a wide range of institutions, including families, communities, businesses, local and national governments, and international agencies. The second capability lies in understanding human behavior as complex adaptive systems, subject to enormous challenges of path dependency (technological and social lock-in effects), such as those characterizing the world’s current commitment to fossil fuels and consequent harmful greenhouse-gas emissions. Our goal in such cases is to understand how heavily overdetermined systems can be unlocked, to facilitate institutional and technological change, especially in the face of entrenched interests and commitments to competing values.

We seek to bring these twin capacities, which we refer to as futures and practices to bear in six areas of application:

• tomorrow’s technologies—understanding the social issues around new and emerging technologies, such as nanotechnology and biotechnology, as well as the implications of their convergence;

• governance of technological change—recognizing that twenty-first-century technologies are globally pervasive from their emergence and that the days of national or regional experimentation are past;

• tomorrow’s planet—focussing on the large, tightly coupled technological and natural systems, such as energy and climate or water, agriculture, and energy;

• technology and inequality—facing the challenge of creating opportunities for technology to ameliorate, rather than exacerbate, social and economic inequality;

• tomorrow’s civilization—exploring issues of community identity, and the roles of citizens and consumers in a global technological society;

• tomorrow’s people—investigating the implications of radical changes in health technology and the potential for radical life extension and human capacity enhancement.

When Princeton University Press invited us to propose a series of lectures on a subject close to the institute’s heart, we had no hesitation in selecting the sixth theme as an exciting and provocative topic, with implications for several of the others. There was immediate consensus on the individual we would invite to deliver the lectures on three successive evenings in March 2006, coinciding with the first James Martin Institute World Forum on Science and Civilization, which tackled the same broad topic. Professor John Harris is not only a distinguished academic, but an engaged and engaging public-policy commentator and advisor, well-known to the public through his many broadcasts on television and radio. We were very gratified by his enthusiasm for the project.

The resulting book speaks for itself with characteristic clarity and forthrightness. It is, of course, a work of philosophy and is committed to an ethical position located in the liberal, democratic, utilitarian tradition, and broadly in favor of both extending the human lifespan and embracing human capacity enhancements both physical and intellectual. Professor Harris’s approach to life extension and enhancement is generally permissive. Therefore, his presumption is that such technologies should be pursued unless someone comes up with a compelling reason not to. His engagement with diverse arguments is both cogent and comprehensive. He provides us with a view of the intellectual landscape at the same time as taking on the hard arguments of other commentators who have expressed strong reservations or even outright opposition to transhumanist applications of medical technology.

In doing so, he touches on several themes that are of more general interest to the broad range of topics to which the institute addresses itself. For example, in relation to tomorrow’s technologies, some commentators (both for and against) represent technologies of life extension and enhancement as novel, revolutionary breakthroughs liable to turn the world upside down for good or ill. This book tends to view extension and enhancement technologies as incremental extensions of existing ones, such as eyeglasses, binoculars, and even writing. Elsewhere, I have described the tension between claims of technological discontinuity and continuity in policy debates as the novelty trap, and David Edgerton addresses it in a recent book, The Shock of the Old.³ However, the same tension seems to be a consistent feature of the emergence of new technological fields, from nuclear power in the 1970s to nanotechnology in the present decade. Claims of novelty generate excitement and funding, but can also prompt concerns about novel, unanticipated risks—what Harris, in his lecture, called the shift from wow to yuck. This tension is clearly an important issue for our studies of tomorrow’s technologies and governance of technological change.

Professor Harris also raises another significant issue for the governance of technological change in the specific context of embryo selection. This is an area where the United Kingdom’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) consulted widely with the public prior to deciding against allowing sex selection of embryos, except to prevent transmission of serious genetic disorders. He proposes that the United Kingdom could issue a significant but limited number of sex-selection licenses and monitor the effects that

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