[ExI] Is Transhumanism Coercive?

[Anders Sandberg]

Joseph Bloch wrote:
> An interesting article by Ron Bailey over at Reason, concerning his
> debate with Peter Lawler last week:
>
> http://reason.com/archives/2011/10/18/transhumanism-vs-bioconservati
>   
Similar themes came up in my debate yesterday evening at the Manchester 
University student union, where I was debating David king from Human 
Genetics Alert. He argued (from a pretty leftist standpoint) that 
enhancement embodies the ideal of capitalism and since capitalism is bad 
for human value and diversity hence most enhancement is bad. As he saw 
it, western liberal individualism promotes uniformization in respect to 
the market. I argued that the fact that his claim already disproves 
itself: we live in a society where diversity is highly valued - if it 
wasn't we couldn't care less if enhancement reduced it. The coerciveness 
of enhancement is like the coerciveness of fitting into existing 
culture: there are plenty of things to be concerned with, but we do have 
plenty of freedom *in liberal individualistic open societies* to try to 
change them.

Best line from King: "You can tell that the previous two speakers are 
bioethicists, since they were constantly using the word 'we'" - he has a 
point. Ethicists tend to assume there is a big set of ethical humans who 
we all belong to who try to act right. King seemed to assume that most 
problems were due to an unseen 'they' group responsible for most bad 
things, but conveniently forgot that his own reasoning suggested most of 
the problems he saw with enhancement was due to the social organisation 
of society - us.

Now off to London to talk ethics of brain interfaces and do a BBC 
interview on enhancers... ah, the life of the jetset (or rather, 
train-set) bioethicist! ;-)

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University