Transhumanism (sometimes known as posthumanism) is at the cutting edge of medicine. It speculatively investigates how technology may be used to create people who exhibit, in the words of Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrum, ‘a general central capacity greatly exceeding the maximum attainable by any current human being.’
It is an area that raises myriad serious ethical questions. For example, what are the implications of using methods of genetic manipulation to maintain high levels of physical and cognitive functioning far beyond what we now consider normal lifespans? Such manipulation raises the prospect that future generations may be able to pre-design their children, heralding an age of engineered humans that once seemed merely the product of science fiction. Or what of developing cooling processes so that individuals may be kept alive even as their heart ceases to work, existing in a state of suspended animation for hitherto impossible periods of time? On the one hand, this might allow a surgeon longer to complete complicated heart surgery, while on the other hand it could see humans kept in ‘deep freeze’ to be brought back to life at a much later date.
Transhumanist thinking is often traced back to the work in the 1920s of J. B. S. Haldane, a British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was convinced that the great scientific developments that he predicted would extend life and improve our mental and physical capacities were destined to be greeted initially with horror by the population at large. However, it was British evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley who, in the 1950s, introduced the term ‘transhumanism’ to the wider world. ‘Up till now,’ he wrote,
human life has generally been, as Hobbes described it, ‘nasty, brutish and short’; the great majority of human beings (if they have not already died young) have been afflicted with misery . . . we can justifiably hold the belief that . . . The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself – not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity.
Huxley’s ideas have been championed in recent years by thinkers including Britain’s Max More, the German metahumanist Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Sweden’s Nick Bostrom and British philosopher David Pearce. The latter two co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (later renamed as Humanity+) in 1998 and subsequently defined transhumanism thus: ‘The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.’
While that might sound highly desirable (the science writer Ronald Bailey has called transhumanism the ‘movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative and idealistic aspirations of humanity’), others harbour grave doubts. Among them is political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, who in 2004 nominated transhumanism as one of the ‘world’s most dangerous ideas’. ‘If we start transforming ourselves into something superior,’ he said, ‘what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind?’