So, where are we at? At the beginning of the series, I introduced the concepts of transhumanism and radical bioenhancements, of technology that will profoundly alter our relation to our bodies and to the world around us. Over the next three weeks, we explored what I call an ethic from nature, a way of thinking about morality that builds on the insights of natural law theology and ordinary language philosophy. This ethic emphasizes what we know intuitively and, more importantly, what we can reason out without reference to external authorities. It is a way of thinking that moves slowly and reflects on what already lies before us.
But this is all theory. What would it possibly look like to use in practice? The second half of my dissertation is dedicated to answering that question, specifically in regard to transhumanist technologies. I take up three case studies of increasing extremity: pharmaceuticals that could make one more virtuous, brain implants that could allow for something like telepathic communication, and finally the possibility for uploaded consciousness, that is, humans escaping their biological bodies altogether.
Rather than rehearsing all three of these case studies (you’ll have to read the actual dissertation for that), I want to focus on the first one, using pharmaceuticals to increase virtue. We already use a variety of methods to increase virtue in everyday life—we teach children right and wrong, we go to church and read books, we meditate or learn strategies for healthy thinking—and so the use of pharmaceuticals would be just one more tool in the arsenal. Additionally, of all the fantastical bioenhancements, the possibility for drugs to make us more ethical seems both likely (we currently have psychoactive pharmaceuticals that affect our mood and disposition) and even desirable (some have argued we are morally obligated to pursue such technology, claiming it is the only way to ensure the human race doesn’t achieve its own destruction). There is something intuitively attractive about this use of technology.
To consider how it might work at an individual level, one of my committee members, Jason Eberl, gives this example: consider a mother who is prone to impatience but wishes to better herself. In a stressful situation, say, one with an aggravating child, she may choose to respond by leaving the room, closing her eyes, and counting to ten as she takes deep, purposeful breaths—or, she might choose to take an as-yet-uninvented pill—that alters her neurochemistry to calm her down and help her be slow to anger in that moment. In both cases, the woman has made a good decision and acted rightly.
But how might a natural law perspective think about this situation? Eberl, who is a Thomistic philosopher specializing in natural law and virtue, suggests that taking some sort of patience pill is not actually producing the virtue of patience but rather the consequences of virtue. The entire idea of virtue within natural law theology is that we build habits that allow us to live within the grain of the universe, and counting to ten forces one to reside in that grain, rather than skipping right over it.
Still, Eberl would say (and I would agree) that it could be worse; there is still moral merit in the woman’s decision, even if she is not fully experiencing virtue. The bigger concern, however, is how the woman makes the decision. A patience pill—or a courage amplifier, or a temperance enhancement—these all sound great, but all virtue requires prudence and love, that is, virtue requires that we already know what is good. The virtues presuppose we know what we ought to do before they help us do it.
And here is where philosophers of language begin to offer some useful insight. The immediate inheritors of Wittgenstein were quick to point out how our communities (in which we learn how to speak) are the bodies that shape our sense of virtue. This leaves open the possibility that our community might disagree with another community or even that we as individuals might be ostracized from our community. Accounting for this possibility, ordinary language philosopher Cora Diamond agrees with Eberl that our moral reasoning counts for very little if it is not oriented in the right direction. Diamond draws this out by identifying two types of ethical conflicts: simple disagreement and fundamental difference. A disagreement might arise, for instance, between proponents of just-war theory and pacifism. While their ethical conclusions diverge, both parties share a framework that suggests we ought to protect human life, and this makes dialogue possible—they’re playing by the same rules. By contrast, a fundamental difference occurs when one party’s ethical reasoning is so alien to the other that they are perceived as having thrown out the rulebook—they exist in different moral worlds. Diamond describes this as the kind of ethical thinking in which people not only disagree but find the other’s framework entirely incomprehensible or morally bankrupt. She gives the example of a teenager who doesn’t see anything wrong with torturing a cat or a plantation owner who regards some human beings as property. Focusing on historical debates over slavery, she explains:
There are disagreements about ethics where one group of people thinks that the other side has got things wrong, but there are also, I think, disagreements in which people take some way that other people are thinking about ethics not just to be wrong, not just to be something they disagree with—but to be a case of the other people’s thinking having gone off the rails. I’m suggesting that the dispute about slavery involves a disagreement of that sort. That is, one response to all ideas that take some group of people to be natural slaves is: thinking that way is thinking that has gone off the rails, it is not merely mistaken. There’s a road that you are going down, and thought that goes down that road has gone profoundly astray. Signs ought to be put up saying: ‘Don’t go down that road.’ And indeed there was such a sign that was put up, the statement that men are by nature equal, or the statement that all men are created equal.
We find ourselves already in a human community that has marked off the boundaries; to transgress these boundaries is to entertain the obviously evil and therefore, as we have been warned, to put ourselves at dissonance with the forms of life around us. Whereas with simple disagreement, what is needed is an alignment to keep us going, with fundamental difference we have already jumped the tracks.
What Diamond is helping us see is how radically we can be blinded to what is good. And in such cases, no enhancement is going to save us—it’s like shoveling coal for a train that’s already off the tracks. Returning to the earlier example: the moral merit of the woman depends on her ethical discernment to know that she ought to be calm in a scenario; and whether she counts to ten or she takes a pill, the woman has done something wrong if she walks away from a child who is in urgent need, even if they are being aggravating.
In all of this, what I think is crucial is our ability to step back and take a slow approach to the moral question we face. Rather than immediately appeal to some principle—‘it is cheating to do with drugs what we could do on our own,’ ‘to be calm is to be virtuous,’ ‘anything that makes us virtuous is a good worth pursuing’—rather than stating the principle and moving on, there is something valuable in unhurriedly reflecting on our life and words. A natural ethic does not require citing thinkers as I have done but rather asking those same sorts of questions: What would a patience pill actually do? Is that actually the virtue of patience, and what do we mean by “virtue”? What makes displaying patience good? Have we already assumed something about what is good?
While I was working on the dissertation, I kept coming back to the need to develop an elevator pitch, a condensed form of my project I could share in 60-second elevator ride. I never quite got there, so five lengthy blog posts is going to have to do. (It’s condensed down from a couple hundred pages, so I’m pretty happy.) More than anything, though, this sort of summary project helps me solidify in my own head what an ethic from nature really is and how it is relevant to Christians facing a changing world.