The ethics of transhumanism

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Alan Bond, remember that name? The billionaire businessman, America's Cup winner, and his wife, Big Red.

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Natasha Mitchell (0:39)

If you were given the scientific levers to shape your future offspring, the choice say to tweak children's genes to make them stronger or smarter, fitter, maybe faster, would you take it? Well, today on Big Ideas, biotechnology and the brave new future of bodily augmentation, enhancement and life extension. The Ethics of Transhumanism.

Natasha Mitchell bringing you big thinkers at the best live events right here on ABC Radio National, ABC Listen and as Podcast. From the United States, let's meet Jason Eberl. He is the Hubert Mäder Chair in Bioethics, Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Albert Gnaegi Center for Bioethics at St. Louis University.

He's delivering the annual Plunkett Lecture at the Australian Catholic University on Gadigal Land in Sydney, with an audience that includes theologians, health workers and the Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher. He's titled his talk, Enhancing Human Beings. Possible? Desirable? Ethical? Here he is.

Jason T. Eberl (1:59)

Thank you very much, Xavier, for that wonderful introduction. Thank you all for being here. So I've been writing on this topic for about a little over 12 years now.

And this talk is kind of a summative thesis of all my work in this area. And so it's not just one paper. I'm sort of drawing on all these different papers. As such, this is probably like four different talks, each of which could have been 45 minutes on its own. I'm going to try to kind of get through everything, because if I do my job right, you'll see how they all kind of connect up with each other. So basically what I'm going to do first is just, I know we're going to have a diverse audience. We have, again, professional bioethicists, philosophers, theologians, physicians, other people in health care. So I don't want to presume any particular knowledge. So we'll start with some of the basics, defining what these terms enhancement, transhumanism mean. I'm going to raise some primarily theological concerns, some also philosophical concerns about transhumanism in particular. Then we're going to kind of do a little historical deep dive into the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, because I think a lot of what we're seeing now with transhumanism and other things that are happening is sort of a return of a eugenics mindset. Then we'll get into how a particularly Thomistic concept, so philosophers in the room, Thomas Aquinas, Thomistic concept of human nature and flourishing can help us appraise various moderate forms of human enhancement. I'll go ahead and spoil in case someone needs to leave the room early. My thesis is that transhumanism is philosophically problematic, theologically problematic from a broad Christian, theologically Catholic perspective. But I do think some moderate forms of human enhancement could be conducive to human flourishing in the model that I'll be outlining. But I think there's a lot of insurmountable practical hurdles that really kind of prevent us from being able to pursue even those moderate forms of enhancement in today's culture.

So first of all, what do we mean by enhancement? First of all, it can be one of two things. Either A, we increase the human being's capabilities beyond what we kind of refer to as a species typical norm.

So people who are hyper intelligent or super muscular or things of that nature. Of course, some people are naturally at the far end of the bell curve on these things, but enhancement is taking people even beyond what the highest levels of achievement might be in those areas. But it can also mean endowing human beings with whole new capabilities that we currently don't have. Favorite example I like to use that pops up in the literature is echolocation. That bats and some other animals have. So I can imagine like cave spelunkers, or maybe something that could assist people who are visually impaired.

This is something I'll come back to throughout the talk. A lot of the technologies that are driving enhancement have been or currently under development for the sake of assisting people with various types of disabilities. So there's an interesting relationship between human enhancement and disability.

How do we do enhancement? Well, there's all sorts of different technical means. I'm a philosopher. I'm not a biomedical expert or anything like that. I learned through osmosis. But these are the basic technical means we have at our disposal. So genetic manipulation, particularly with CRISPR-Cas9 or gene editing. Pharmacological interventions, I mean, off-label use of Ritalin and Adderall, that's rampant on college campuses. That's a form of pharmacological enhancement. Other novel drugs coming out and regulating hormones, neurotransmitters. And then, kind of, you know, what I could maybe call the sexy one that people like to talk about now, especially with the advent of AI, is cybernetic integration. So brain-computer interfaces, a lot of people have heard of Neuralink that Elon Musk is developing, nanotechnology and then artificial intelligence.