The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism by Steve Fuller & Veronika Lipinska

Author:Steve Fuller & Veronika Lipinska [Fuller, Steve & Lipinska, Veronika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137433091
Amazon: 1137433094
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2014-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

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At the level of rhetoric, and often substance, contemporary transhumanism presents itself as advancing, if not accelerating, ‘evolution’.

(The term is put in scare quotes to encourage the reader to query the exact process that we are supposed to be talking about.) Thus, a leading work of transhumanist bioethics is called Enhancing Evolution (Harris 2007). Moreover, transhumanists do not mean ‘evolution’ as a mere synonym for ‘development’ but rather as a process that can

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legitimately draw on

Neo- Darwinism for support, not least as an

account of how natural history might bear on our future prospects.

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Thus, the most well- articulated transhumanist manifesto bears the title, ‘The wisdom of nature: An evolutionary heuristic for human

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enhancement’ (Bostrom and Sandberg 2009). We shall argue that contemporary Neo- Darwinism, under its official philosophical interpretation, goes against the spirit of transhumanism, largely because the theory does not ascribe to Homo sapiens any species- transcendent,

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let alone global, capacity to control the process of natural selection.

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To be sure, Darwin modelled natural selection on the long- standing benefits of artificial selection – that is, animal and plant husbandry –

but he was well aware of the creative limits of these processes.

The person of Charles Darwin remains a talisman for people who have lost their original faith in the face of scientific evidence yet 10.1057/9781137302922 - The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipińska Proactionary Biology 81

without being converted to another faith. Wishful thinkers – not least in the transhumanist community – like to interpret Darwin’s doxastic trajectory as pointing to a sort of autonomy to which even non- Darwinists aspire. But then Kant kicks in. To be freed from constraints previously placed on your will implies simply that you take responsibility for the constraints to which you now submit yourself. It does not follow that you will see the world as affording more opportunities – let alone the transhumanist’s endless horizons. Indeed, the world may seem to provide fewer opportunities, as in Darwin’s own case. The ethos he had inherited from his non-conformist Christian parents, which in his younger years led him to

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rail against slavery and racial inequalities, was replaced in later years by a de facto atheism that served to depress his sense of self and lower

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his expectations for humanity more generally (Desmond and Moore

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2009). Darwin’s pessimistic reading of the evidence was based on his

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belief that the burden of the past – the legacy we share with the other animals – would ultimately prove too great to overcome.

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Transhumanists should regard Darwin as someone who fell at the final hurdle of the Enlightenment project, at least when it came to the full redemption of humanity’s divine entitlement. This was the hopeful message of Jesus that the Enlightenment wished to deliver through the advancement of science but which ‘Christendom’ as the institutional expression of Christianity had so far betrayed, most singularly in the trial of Galileo. Pace Darwin, we cannot simply be capable of adaptively responding to changes in the natural

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environment.

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