http://futurisms.thenewatlantis.com/2012/12/autonomy-and-responsibility.html
Autonomy and Responsibility
The National Intelligence Council has just published one of
its periodic forays into thinking about the future: Global Trends
2030: Alternative Worlds. As even the title suggests, the report is
full of carefully qualified projections and scenarios, often noting the ambiguity
of technological development—the truism that the same technology can produce
both good and bad outcomes depending on how it is deployed. In its relatively
brief thematic discussion of human augmentation, however, there is really nothing
said about specific downsides of augmentation technologies beyond noting the
likelihood of their inegalitarian distribution over the next 15-20 years, a
problem which “may require regulation.” Instead, the passage closes with the
sentence, “Moral and ethical challenges to human augmentation are inevitable.”
Apparently, while it is helpful to anticipate what
enhancement technologies might allow in the future, there is nothing to be
gained by trying to anticipate what the moral and ethical objections to them
might be. Of course, it would be wrong not to acknowledge that such objections
will exist, but it is hardly worthwhile to actually attempt to think about
them.
This largely symbolic bow to ethics is common enough in such
reports, perhaps only to be expected. It is one of those moments we have noted
repeatedly at Futurisms, where the debate over human enhancement meets up with
our culture’s democratic libertarianism and moral relativism. Plainly, we don’t
think this outlook is a sound footing upon which to meet the undeniable
challenges of the future.
Indeed, we are hardly short on reasons to think we ought to
flee whenever possible from thinking seriously about moral distinctions, in the
name of protecting autonomy or free choice. Our decades-long social experiment
of eliminating “stigmas” and allowing people more and more to do their own
things has contributed to the weakening and impoverishment of families and
communities. Belief in what is now being called “neurodiversity”
has been a factor in making it harder to get the mentally ill the help they
need. If the latest election is any indication, the progressives among us count
it a boon when one
more casual method to escape from reality is legalized — presumably
eventually to be used, like the others, to shore up precarious state finances.
Periodically, some tragic event reminds us of the cost of our
laissez-faire morality, and an increasingly ritualized period of introspective
mourning will commence, one which probably reflects less well on our ethical sensitivity
than we might like to think, even though it serves its cathartic function and
we soon return to our nonjudgmental business as usual.
And of course that business as usual is not so bad for those
of us who are more of less insulated from its worst effects (even though no
insulation is perfect) and therefore have the bourgeois luxury of arguing about
the merits of human enhancement. But Global Trends notes as one of its “tectonic
shifts” how “individuals and small groups will have greater access to lethal
and disruptive technologies...enabling them to perpetuate large-scale violence —
a capability formerly the monopoly of states.” Some of these disruptive
technologies are of course directly related to human enhancement. Will we have
the wherewithal to say “no” or “not you” before these technologies become
lethal and disruptive? Why should we expect that, when our flabby moral judgments
have so weakened out ability to respond to the ideas that make even some of our
present technological capacities dangerous?
Although there is little sign of it prospectively, I would
like to believe that eventually, the greater moral challenge will elicit
greater moral effort. But recovering what that means will not be easy. It is no
sure bet that we will suddenly find the moral strength to deal with powers over
nature and ourselves yet greater than what we have now, particularly when those
advocating on their behalf will have been complicit in keeping us weak.
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