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Nicholas Agar (born 1965) is a New Zealand professor of ethics at the University of Waikato. [1] Agar has a BA from the University of Auckland, an MA from the Victoria University of Wellington, and a PhD from the Australian National University. He has been teaching at Victoria since 1996.
Agar has written extensively on the debate about human enhancement and eugenics. [2] His first significant contribution was the 2004 book Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement. [3] In the state-sponsored eugenics defended by the followers of Francis Galton individuals would defer to the state and its experts empowered to impose on all a centrally-determined conception of the good life. Agar argued that a vigorous defense of procreative freedom could turn the morally misguided authoritarian eugenics into a morally defensible liberal eugenics. Agar would encourage prospective parents to consult their own conceptions of the good life to choose some of their children's characteristics. A liberal state should ban choices judged injurious to children's well-being. It would exercise the same kinds of control over harmful genetic choices that it currently does over choices about how to raise children.
Later work clarified Agar's philosophical focus on enhancement. The 2010 book Humanity's End argued against the doctrine of radical enhancement sometimes identified with the transhumanist movement. [4] Agar claims that enhancement is a good thing that it is nevertheless possible to overdo. He advances a species-relativist view about the value of human experiences and achievements. Viewed from the perspective of our species-relativist preference a little enhancement goes a long way. Humanity's End was a 2011 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title.
In his 2013 book Truly Human Enhancement Agar presented too much enhancement as an instance of transformative change. [5] Agar defines transformative change as altering "the state of an individual's mental or physical characteristics in a way that causes and warrants a significant change in how that individual evaluates a wide range of their own experiences, beliefs, or achievements." [6] He uses examples from the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers to make the case that there are transformative changes that we correctly predict we will endorse once we have undergone them but that conflict with our prudential values. The central characters in the body snatchers movies resist snatching by the aliens even if they expect to be content about this change once they have undergone it. We may predict that we will enjoy life as a radically enhanced being but nevertheless be justified in rejecting it.
The 2015 book The Sceptical Optimist: Why Technology Isn't the Answer to Everything was a departure from Agar's focus on the debate about human enhancement. [7] Agar challenges the techno-optimist view that expects great things from technological progress for human flourishing. He describes a phenomenon called hedonic normalization that leads us to significantly overestimate the power of technological progress to improve our well-being. We overlook hedonic normalization when we suppose that because we would be unhappy to find ourselves permanently transported back in time to the middle ages that people living back them must have been miserable too. The same distortions apply when we imagine a future with cures for cancer and colonies on Mars. Technological progress may make us happier but not nearly so much as we imagine it. This has implications for our collective prioritization of technological progress.
In a 2019 book How to be Human in the Digital Economy Agar continues his defense of human values and experiences. Agar responds to the challenge from automation and artificial intelligence to human work and agency. Agar argues for a hybrid social-digital economy. The key value of the digital economy is efficiency. The key value of the social economy is humanness. A social economy would be centered on connections between human minds. We should reject some digital automation because machines will always be poor substitutes for humans in roles that involve direct contact with other humans. A machine can count out pills and pour out coffee, but we want our nurses and baristas to have minds like ours. In a hybrid social-digital economy, people do the jobs for which feelings matter and machines take on data-intensive work. But humans will have to insist on their relevance in a digital age.
Eugenics is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not.
Pessimism is a negative mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. A common question asked to test for pessimism is "Is the glass half empty or half full?"; in this situation, a pessimist is said to see the glass as half empty, while an optimist is said to see the glass as half full. Throughout history, the pessimistic disposition has had effects on all major areas of thinking.
Posthumanism or post-humanism is an idea in continental philosophy and critical theory responding to the presence of anthropocentrism in 21st-century thought. It encompasses a wide variety of branches, including:
Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition.
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I.J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.
An information society is a society where the usage, creation, distribution, manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity. Its main drivers are information and communication technologies, which have resulted in rapid information growth in variety and is somehow changing all aspects of social organization, including education, economy, health, government, warfare, and levels of democracy. The people who are able to partake in this form of society are sometimes called either computer users or even digital citizens, defined by K. Mossberger as “Those who use the Internet regularly and effectively”. This is one of many dozen internet terms that have been identified to suggest that humans are entering a new and different phase of society.
Pleasure refers to experience that feels good, that involves the enjoyment of something. It contrasts with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad. It is closely related to value, desire and action: humans and other conscious animals find pleasure enjoyable, positive or worthy of seeking. A great variety of activities may be experienced as pleasurable, like eating, having sex, listening to music or playing games. Pleasure is part of various other mental states such as ecstasy, euphoria and flow. Happiness and well-being are closely related to pleasure but not identical with it. There is no general agreement as to whether pleasure should be understood as a sensation, a quality of experiences, an attitude to experiences or otherwise. Pleasure plays a central role in the family of philosophical theories known as hedonism.
The term superhuman refers to humans or human-like beings with enhanced qualities and abilities that exceed those naturally found in humans. These qualities may be acquired through natural ability, self-actualization or technological aids. The related concept of a super race refers to an entire category of beings with the same or varying superhuman characteristics, created from present-day human beings by deploying various means such as eugenics, euthenics, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and/or brain–computer interfacing to accelerate the process of human evolution.
Technological utopianism is any ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal.
Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, superintelligence risks, and the reversal test. In 2011, he founded the Oxford Martin Program on the Impacts of Future Technology, and is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. In 2009 and 2015, he was included in Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list.
A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. "Superintelligence" may also refer to a property of problem-solving systems whether or not these high-level intellectual competencies are embodied in agents that act in the world. A superintelligence may or may not be created by an intelligence explosion and associated with a technological singularity.
New eugenics, also known as liberal eugenics, advocates enhancing human characteristics and capacities through the use of reproductive technology and human genetic engineering. Those who advocate new eugenics generally think selecting or altering embryos should be left to the preferences of parents, rather than forbidden. "New" eugenics purports to distinguish itself from the forms of eugenics practiced and advocated in the 20th century, which fell into disrepute after World War II.
Human enhancement (HE) can be described as the natural, artificial, or technological alteration of the human body in order to enhance physical or mental capabilities.
Mark Alan Walker is a Canadian-American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at New Mexico State University, where he occupies the Richard L. Hedden Endowed Chair in Advanced Philosophical Studies. Prior to his professorship at NMSU Prof. Walker taught at McMaster University in the department of philosophy and the Arts & Science Programme. He is the author of Happy-People Pills for All and Free Money for All. Walker founded and was president of the former nonprofit organization Permanent End International (2003–2007), which had been devoted to ending hunger, illiteracy and environmental degradation through the dissemination of modular aquaponics systems for farming. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Evolution and Technology and on the board of directors of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He is a former board member of the non-profit organization Humanity Plus.
Julian Savulescu is an Australian philosopher and bioethicist of Romanian origins. He is Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, co-director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. He is visiting professorial fellow in Biomedical Ethics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and distinguished visiting professor in law at Melbourne University since 2017. He directs the Biomedical Ethics Research Group and is a member of the Centre for Ethics of Pediatric Genomics in Australia. He is a former editor and current board member of the Journal of Medical Ethics, which is ranked as the No.2 journal in bioethics worldwide by Google Scholar Metrics, as of 2022. In addition to his background in applied ethics and philosophy, he also has a background in medicine and neuroscience and completed his MBBS (Hons) and BMedSc at Monash University, graduating top of his class with 18 of 19 final year prizes in Medicine. He edits the Oxford University Press book series, the Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics.
iLabs is a non-profit Milan-based organization pursuing multidisciplinary research on radical extension of human life-span. It was founded in 1977 by Gabriele Rossi and Antonella Canonico, who advocate the scenario known as “Semi-Immortality”, an elaborate vision of an era of quasi-immortal individuals, that is philosophically linked to other instances of Transhumanism and futurists’ theories.
Technological determinism is a reductionist theory that assumes that a society's technology progresses by following its own internal logic of efficiency, while determining the development of the social structure and cultural values. The term is believed to have originated from Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), an American sociologist and economist. The most radical technological determinist in the United States in the 20th century was most likely Clarence Ayres who was a follower of Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey. William Ogburn was also known for his radical technological determinism and his theory on cultural lag.
The term directed evolution is used within the transhumanist community to refer to the idea of applying the principles of directed evolution and experimental evolution to the control of human evolution. In this sense, it is distinct from the use of the term in biochemistry, which refers only to the evolution of proteins and RNA. Maxwell J. Melhmanh has described directed evolution of humans as the Holy Grail of transhumanism. Oxford philosopher Julian Savulescu wrote that:
Humanity until this point has been a story of evolution for the survival genes - survival and reproduction ... we are entering a new phase of human evolution—evolution under reason—where human beings are masters of their destiny. Power has been transferred from nature to science.
Transhumanist politics constitutes a group of political ideologies that generally express the belief in improving human individuals through science and technology.
Bioconservatism, to Deakin University Lecturer in Health Ethics and Professionalism Tamara Kayali Browne and University of Oxford Senior Research Fellow Steve Clarke, is "a term that is often used to describe those who wish to conserve humanity as it is, and so oppose human enhancement."
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