Enhancing Evolution

"Harris is a brilliant essayist and the book explores and explodes a great deal of conservatism in bioethics. His arguments are compelling. He is sort of a radical utilitarian. He thinks that we should embrace any technologies that make life go better for humanity and not to turn these things down because either we feel squeamish or it sounds too radical. He says the basic test is: does it make life better? And if that is stem cell research or intervening in evolution to make humans longer-lived or more intelligent we should go and do it. Yes, I do by and large. I think his arguments are sound and that ethical conservatism hinges on a number of different fallacies, all of which he persuasively deals with. Well he makes a very interesting distinction. In sports drug-taking, or what we can call enhancement, is a very different thing from enhancement in life. If, for example, I take an enhancement that helps me to run faster, and that enhancement is denied to others, then I win at their expense. If, on the other hand, we all take a drug or enhancement that improves our times by ten per cent the relative performance is exactly the same. Yes, enhancing in any zero sum game can only help somebody at the expense of somebody else and so there is a valid case for making certain types of enhancements illegal in certain sports. But in life if you could enhance humanity so that you could engineer, for example, immunity from the common cold I would be happy to have that even if it meant interfering with the fabric of my DNA. If somebody said to me, ‘Do you want someone else to have that?’, I would say yes I do, because I want it for its own sake, not just so that I can improve my relative position. Yes and Harris deals with that. He talks about the dubious ethics involved in withholding enhancements for some until they are available to all. Because, if we did that historically, there would have been no education for anybody until it was universally available. If you delay enhancing and helping a group of people until you can help absolutely everybody, equally there would be no innovation at all. I suppose it hinges on the idea that if some people get that advantage eventually it will trickle down to others. And I think it is dubious ethics to withhold a really powerful benefit for humanity on the basis that not everyone can have it simultaneously. But sport is different. If you introduce enhancements which are not available for everyone, of course that would undermine its appeal."