The role of human enhancement technologies in ongoing wars, genocides, and political battles make it clear that the transhuman is a matter of urgent moral reasoning. How may technological enhancement protect mere humans, even in pursuit of a less violent humanity? This session, beginning with our first paper, interrogates the progress of moral enhancement in explicit consideration of race and slavery. Our second paper investigates the violent implications of Nietzsche’s “superhuman” for merely human life and suggest better transhumanist visions in the interest of humanity. The (lack of) appeal of human enhancement in African traditions is developed in our third paper. With this session, we push past weighing the risks and benefits of technological enhancement in order to more critically analyze the morality of mere humanity. Such work is urgent to address the challenges of technological enhancement in service of just peace.
That the core of our humanity can be enhanced and edited innately by biotechnological and scientific innovations presupposes that the human being is essentially a biological, scientific, and technological creation. The bio-techno-scientific mode of being human no doubt enlivens transhumanist ideologies and other enthusiast about the possibilities of these innovations, as we all are inundated by a host of current and future projected technological developments which have defined and continue to redefine what it means to be human in diverse ways. This excitement however is not shared by the African traditional understanding of virtue, morality and what it means to be human. This paper highlights the ontological and normative perspective to being human within African tradition and argues that bio-moral enhancement has little to nothing to offer the African worldview, despite the acclaims it has garnered in current milleu.
This paper examines the “superhumanist” legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy in contemporary reactionary movements, and shows that they promote a dark metaphysics that contains a hierarchized eschotology of exclusion and violence. The paper looks at two specific strains of this reactionary “superhumanism” – effective accelerationism, and “BAPism” – traces their legacies in Nietzsche’s thought, and argues that they owe their popular appeal in part to their superhuman ambitions, their "eschtaological" scope. In other words, I suggest that while these movements engender frightening political programs and messages, their appeal and power is ultimately grounded in their visions of superhumanity, and therefore speaks to an ontological dissatisfaction with merely “human” life. I conclude with thoughts about how to respond to these reactionary movements, and consider what competing visions of superhumanity might be able to contest them.
This paper is concerned with moral bio-enhancements (MBE) and parsing out what we might reasonably expect from such a technology—and where we might remain skeptical. To this end, I take up Jason Eberl’s argument regarding the role of prudence in moral enhancement, demonstrating how, from a distinctively Thomistic perspective, bio-enhancements may offer us a real possibility for moral improvement, including in ways Eberl himself discounts. Yet, despite these possibilities for moral enhancement, there remains constraints for what MBE can provide. By noting similarities between Eberl’s account and American philosopher Cora Diamond’s analysis of moral reasoning concerning race and slavery, I suggest that the limitations we encounter in MBE should temper our hopes for substantial moral progress. Diamond demonstrates to us that the ability to reason more rigorously concerning moral questions—to exercise our prudence—cannot guarantee even the most basic level of moral agreement necessary for a healthy society.