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I'm tempted to argue, What do we have to lose by embracing technologies that allow us to become smarter, feel better, live longer? But you suggest in the book that the benefits of such technologies are unlikely to be evenly distributed.
That's already happening as a result of better public health and dropping fertility. The median age in most of Europe by the year 2050 absent massive immigration is going to be something close to 60 years old. Meanwhile in the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, the median age is going to be 21 and 22—where it's always been through human history. And so you're going to have this little island of well-to-do elderly people surrounded by vast numbers of people who are a good deal younger and poorer, all wanting to move to the island.
But biotechnology carries the potential for much greater inequality. If the human race in effect starts speciating into different genetic types, this will bring about the world that Nietzsche wanted to welcome in. If you can change the essential nature of human beings, then I think you change—perhaps destroy—the basis on which we assign human beings' rights.
That would be the "posthuman future" you're warning us about in the book. But you aren't saying that such a future is inevitable; in fact, you are saying just the opposite.
That's right. We have a choice—we can regulate this new technology, just as we have already chosen to regulate human experimentation, for example. We greatly slow down the rate of scientific advance by making it really hard for doctors to injure patients. If you could do clinical trials where you could take advantage of poorly educated subjects as they did in the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, you could move a lot faster. But we've decided for ethical reasons we don't want to do that, despite all the great things we could gain as a result. It's a matter of political will, exercised for the common good.
The history of the United States is a history of blacks, women, and others struggling to get admitted into the charmed circle of people who are endowed with political rights and considered full human beings. Despite some ongoing problems, that battle has been won—that's one of the great accomplishments of twentieth-century politics. We declared in 1776 this principle that all men are created equal and then we gradually fulfilled it. Genetic engineering has the power to undo all that we have accomplished, in fact creating different classes of people who would not be by nature equal and therefore not entitled to equal rights.
Why is a clear understanding of human nature so critical as we wrestle with these questions?
Human nature is not infinitely malleable. For us to flourish as human beings, we have to live according to our nature, satisfying the deepest longings that we as natural beings have. The modern language of rights is just a translation of Aristotle's language of human goods. For example, our nature gives us tremendous cognitive capabilities, capability for reason, capability to learn, to teach ourselves things, to change our opinions, and so forth. What follows from that? A way of life that permits such growth is better than a life in which this capacity is shriveled and stunted in various ways. That's what's meant by the basis of rights in nature. It's to understand natural goods and promote the fullest expression of them.
The problem with modern ethical doctrines is that they either reduce human ends simply to utilitarian ones—pain and pleasure, or some other reductionist view of what human beings seek—or elevate individual autonomy to be the good of all human goods, so that as long as you have autonomy you don't need any of these substantive human goods.
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