As this is a review of his latest book, I will merely observe that in the earlier one—Liberal Eugenics—Agar did not argue for the unlimited right of prospective parents to enhance their offspring. He explicitly stated that “liberal eugenicists should be open to the idea that some uses of enhancement technologies are just wrong and should be banned,” and he suggested that those liberal eugenicists needed to distinguish between uses of enhancement technologies that should be banned and ones that should be permitted.[1]

To articulate that distinction, Agar used Francis Fukuyama, Leon Kass, and Bill McKibben as his foils. Though McKibben is a political progressive, Agar labeled him and the other critics as “conservatives.” He construed them as being against enhancement, full stop, and reiterated that, while he was against some uses of enhancement technologies, he was for others.

He also contrasted his view and theirs by pointing out that, whereas they appealed to nature to say what ought not to be permitted, he appealed to nature to say what ought to be. Specifically, he argued that, “If it is morally acceptable to leave in place a given natural arrangement associated with enhanced ability, then it is morally acceptable to engineer an arrangement with the same effects” (pg. 89). That is, he argued that parents should have the right to use technology to produce the sorts of excellent traits or capacities that already occur “naturally” in some rare human beings, but that they should not have the right to seek more than that.

In the new book, too, Agar seeks to distinguish between enhancements that ought and ought not to be permitted. And again he appeals to nature, but this time he uses the techno-enthusiasts, Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, Nick Bostrom, and James Hughes as his foils. Whereas Kurzweil et al. advocate for what Agar calls radical enhancement, Agar advocates for what he calls moderate enhancement.

When I say that here, too, Agar builds his argument on an appeal to nature, I have in mind his foundational premise regarding what he calls “species relativism.”[2] The “relativism” part of that label might at first sound like a rejection of anything resembling an appeal to nature. But Agar holds that there is something good, something worth preserving, about the way members of our species typically or naturally find happiness. As he puts it, “Experiences typical of the ways in which humans live and love are the particular focus of my species-relativism” (pg.15).

So for an enhancement to count as moderate on Agar’s account, it has to be “relative” to our species. As distinct from a radical or “purported” enhancement, a moderate one has to enhance a way of being that is typical of homo sapiens. On his view, the main examples of enhancement found in the philosophical literature count as instances of moderate enhancement.

Take the familiar example of trying to engineer your embryo’s genome so that it will develop the intelligence of an Einstein. Because there’s a big gap in intelligence between Einstein and most ordinary physicists, if such engineering were possible, it would count as an enhancement; it would produce “capacities considerably beyond the norms for humans”(pg. 17). And, because such an enhancement would “not exceed the maximum attainable by any current or past human being”(pg. 17), it would count for Agar as moderate.

So, as he did in his earlier book, Liberal Eugenics, in Humanity’s End he also appeals to nature: to the form of the human species as we currently know it. As he says, “We assign individual organisms to species not on the basis of what happens in human or posthuman laboratories, but according to what occurs in nature”(pg. 22). The “biological species concept” provides the line between moderate and radical enhancement, between enhancements that would allow us to remain human and those that “might send us into biological exile”(pg. 27).

After sketching his primary line of argument in the first couple of chapters, Agar turns to the largest part of the book, made up of his critiques of the four advocates of enhancement I mentioned above.

Agar’s critique of Kurzweil

According to the brilliant cyber innovator, Ray Kurzweil, we have long been on the road to integrating the information-processing power of computers into our fleshly brains; just think, for example, of how the tiny computers in cochlear implants allow people who are born deaf to hear. According to Kurzweil, as the pace of this integrative process increases exponentially, it will be ever more rational to trade in our old-fashioned neurons and synapses for more efficient electronic circuits. This will make “the nonbiological portion of our intelligence…trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.” Ultimately, we will transfer our minds from our brains to our machines. Or, as Kurzweil famously puts it, we will “upload ourselves”(pg. 35).

Agar’s first line of critique is simply that, no matter how great the apparent appeal of infinite processing power, such an intelligence would no longer be a human intelligence. Instead of transforming our intelligence into something nonhuman, Agar suggests, we should adopt what he calls “rational biological conservatism”(pg. 57).

His second line of critique is that, if we pursued the radical enhancement of one capacity we value, we might inadvertently undermine other capacities of equal value. That’s of course a point that leaps to the mind of anyone who thinks of human organisms in “ecological” terms, where parts of wholes are interconnected in ways that are hard to discern, and where the results of tinkering are thus hard to predict. In particular, Agar worries that our species-specific form of intelligence might be inextricably entwined with our species-specific forms of desire. He worries that, while radically enhancing our intelligence may not “remove our capacity to protect, promote, and honor” our “strongest moral and political ideals,” it may nonetheless “remove our desire to do so” (pg. 70, ital. added).

While Kurzweil does not think in such “ecological” terms—embodiment is altogether inessential for him—the so-called bioconservatives that Agar critiqued in his previous book do. Agar doesn’t just share with the so-called bioconservatives his sense that radical enhancements could inadvertently produce impoverishments, but also shares with them the idea that there’s something good about the current form of our species that’s worth conserving. Moreover, like them, he thinks that some forms of technological shaping should be resisted—and even says straight out that we should beware of “overly simplistic assertions about the pointlessness of standing in the way of technological advance” (pg. 78).

Agar’s critique of de Grey

Whereas Kurzweil imagines that the way to immortality is uploading our minds to machines, the next subject of Agar’s analysis advocates a very different route. Aubrey de Grey, the computer scientist turned aging researcher, seeks to figure out how to repair or replace the individual parts of those pesky bodies that keep breaking down.

De Grey and his fellow travelers don’t only want to achieve radical life extension, they want to make the ethical case for it. Part of making that case entails leveling the charge of “deathism” against whoever disagrees with them. Essentially, the charge is that, to be against radical life extension is to be for death; but that’s tantamount to advocating for suicide, which no decent person would do. Thus, on de Grey’s view, being against radical life extension is irrational or immoral or both.

And thus it falls to Agar, to try to make the case for, as Leon Kass has put it, “the virtues of finitude.”[3] It falls to Agar to say, why, if we all think that a normal human life span cut short is terrible, it isn’t equally terrible to fail to try to extend a normal human life span. If a long life is good, how could an indefinitely longer one not be better?

Agar’s answer brings us back to his species-relativist premise. He argues that, while it is indeed reasonable to want more of “a recognizably human life,” it is not reasonable to want a form of life without the sorts of experiences that are typical for members of our species. As he says, there are some Galapagos tortoises that live up to 150 years, and they no doubt enjoy experiences that are pleasurable for members of their species, but no human being would trade our “distinctively human varieties of pleasure” for distinctively tortoise varieties of pleasure. Because, however, he grants the respect in which that example is unfair—becoming a tortoise would entail diminished cognition and radical life extension would not—he needs to say more.

He begins by suggesting that de Grey’s “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (SENS) might create an obsessive fear of death, which might come to completely dominate the lives of those who adopted such strategies. Agar worries that, because negligibly senescent people would have more years of life to lose if they failed in one of their projects, they would have a strong reason not to take any risks at all (pg. 116). Indeed, at this point he invokes the concern that later in the book he will call its central theme: the concern about alienation, about becoming separated from the kinds of, here, risky experiences that constitute human lives as we know them. According to Agar, de Grey’s ambition to radically extend our lives “is likely to alienate us from the things and people who currently give our lives meaning”(pg. 122).

Agar allows that there may appear to be a way around the obsessive fear of death that SENS could bring about. To get around the risks associated with going out into the real world, he allows, negligibly senescent people could use technologies to have virtual experiences instead. But the problem with that strategy, he says, is that it fails to appreciate the extent to which human beings want “direct” contact with the “real” world. It fails to appreciate that “We think differently about these kinds of indirect contact [with the real world] than we do about ‘being there.’” No one, he suggests, thinks that “seeing a Discovery Channel documentary filmed on Mount Everest substitutes for actually climbing it”(pg. 123).

Moreover, because de Grey’s program of negligible senescence could lead to more and more people living lives of indefinite length, it could lead to overpopulation. Because it would then be irresponsible to reproduce more beings of indefinite life span, the beings who underwent such radical enhancement would come to view cybersex as a perfectly adequate substitute for the old-fashioned varieties, which involve physical interactions between human beings. The problem with the cybersex solution, according to Agar, is that it fails to appreciate that human beings want contact with real human beings as they are, not with virtual substitutes.

Agar is not a prude or a Luddite. He does not appear to object to cybersex, tout court. He is arguing for the value or “truth” of the pleasures that human beings can experience when they come into contact with other human beings as they really are. That is, the lives of negligibly senescing people, like the very long lives of those tortoises, might contain a greater number of pleasurable experiences than the lives of senescing humans, “but those pleasures will not be ours”(pg. 127).

Agar’s critique of Bostrom

Next Agar turns to a different sort of argument on behalf of radical enhancement, this one made by the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. Actually, much of Agar’s critique concerns an argument that Bostrom made with his co-author, philosopher Toby Ord. Bostrom and Ord suggest that claims against enhancement boil down to a preference for the status quo; they boil down to the assertion that, as Agar puts it, “current human intellects and life spans are best because they’re what we have now”(pg. 134).

To make that case, Bostrom and Ord introduce psychological research. One experiment featured two groups of students who filled out a questionnaire, and as compensation for their participation, received gifts of equal monetary value. Members of the first group received a decorated mug and members of the second a large Swiss chocolate bar. Members of both groups were then offered the option of trading their original compensation for the other; someone who received the mug was given the option of trading for chocolate and vice versa. Strikingly, about 90 percent of the participants chose to retain the form of compensation they received first.

Bostrom and Ord’s point is of course that any preference we state for our current level of human intelligence (or anything else) is a symptom of the same status quo bias that affected the recipients of the mugs and chocolate. We don’t want to retain our current level of intelligence because it is inherently more valuable than an enhanced level, we want it because it’s ours.

Bostrom and Ord then propose that, to detect whether status quo bias is at work in someone’s critique of human enhancement, the critic should have to submit to “the reversal test.” To understand how that test works, we have to notice first that most people who oppose the enhancement of human intelligence also oppose its diminishment. Nobody advocates, for example, for diminishing children’s intelligence by putting lead in their milk. According to Bostrom and Ord, the only way it could be rational to oppose efforts to enhance intelligence and oppose efforts to diminish it, would be if the costs or risks were just too high—or “if we could give a good reason for thinking that intelligence is currently at precisely the right level”(pg. 136). If the enhancement critic cannot give a good reason for the rightness of the current level of human intelligence, then, according to Bostrom and Ord, she suffers from status quo bias and her view is unwarranted.

Agar responds to the Bostrom-Ord challenge in a couple of ways. First he points out the difference in our attitudes toward the possible costs or consequences of radical enhancement. Bostrom and Ord say explicitly that “uncertainty of the ultimate consequences of cognitive enhancement, far from being a sufficient ground for opposing them, is actually a strong consideration in their support”(pg. 137-38). After all, Bostrom and Ord ask, what would have happened if our evolutionary forbearers had decided against attempting to enhance their intelligence (with everything from increased caloric intake to writing), on the grounds that they couldn’t foresee the long-term consequences of such enhancements? We would not now enjoy the higher, deeper, richer human experiences that go with having intelligences enhanced well above the norm of our evolutionary forbearers.

That is, Bostrom takes what some transhumanists have called a “proactionary” attitude toward our efforts at radical human enhancement.[4] Yes, he argues, there will no doubt be unintended consequences associated with such efforts, but some of them will be marvelous beyond our current imaginings. In contrast, Agar, adopts what he refers to as a “precautionary” attitude. Here, as well as elsewhere in the book, he invokes the example of global warming to support his case for caution. In addition, borrowing a page from the Bostrom-Ord playbook, Agar then suggests that they labor under the burden of a psychological error: “Focalism” is the human tendency to imagine all of the marvelous (or terrible) consequences of some single change in one’s circumstance—without trying to imagine the terrible (or marvelous) consequences that may attend the same change.

Agar’s second move in response to Bostrom and Ord’s status-quo-error-based argument is to suggest that it achieves less than they think. Even if their argument had succeeded in showing an error in the thinking of radical-enhancement critics, he suggests, it would not have succeeded in showing that radical enhancement is ethically desirable. So Agar takes it upon himself to attempt to say why radical enhancement is not desirable, which gives him another chance to articulate his fundamental argument.

In the first step, he reminds his reader of his species relativist view of value, “according to which some experiences properly valued by members of one species can lack such value for the members of another species”(pg. 139). It would not be “proper” for those Galapagos tortoises to value listening to Bach, even though we may imagine that they take their own kind of pleasure in listening to fish whoosh through the Pacific.

The second step of the argument simply reiterates Agar’s view that the sorts of radical enhancements envisioned by Bostrom et al. would likely “export its recipients from the human species”(pg. 140) to a different, trans- or post-human species. The traits or capacities that radical enhancement gave us might be in some sense superior to ours, but they wouldn’t be ours. He concludes: “Species-relativists should, therefore, be open to the idea that humans might have a rational preference for objectively inferior experiences”(pg. 140). That is, his opposition to radical enhancement does not depend on any bias toward the status quo, but rather on the recognition that radical enhancement might threaten ways of being that we properly value.

Agar’s critique of Hughes

The final subject of Agar’s investigation is James Hughes, who published his transhumanist manifesto Citizen Cyborg in 2004. There Hughes offered a distinction of decisive importance for him: between human beings (any being with a human genome) and persons (any being with self-awareness and desires and plans for the future). Thus, for example, some human beings with the profoundest of cognitive disabilities would not be persons, but gorillas and dolphins would be. Hughes suggested that those who saw things otherwise were “human racists.” That is, he charged them with committing the sin of investing moral significance in the fact of having a human genome, instead of where it properly belongs: in the capacity for self-awareness.

Because Hughes’s contempt for and anger toward those who didn’t share his view was so palpable, he made it easier than he should have for “human racists” to ignore Citizen Cyborg. Agar, however, takes Hughes, not at his worst, but at his best: as an advocate for a “democratic transhumanism,” in which all persons have access to the technologies they want to promote their own flourishing.

Though Hughes does mention that human persons may have a moral obligation to radically enhance and thereby “uplift” nonhuman persons such as chimpanzees and dolphins so that they can participate fully in the transhumanist community, he is also careful to insist that no one should be coerced into becoming posthuman.

That insistence does not, however, comfort Agar. As did Francis Fukyama in Our Posthuman Future, Agar worries that the existence of radically enhanced humans would make it increasingly difficult for anyone to “choose” to remain human. As the radically enhanced gained political power, and as their consequentialist philosophical leanings suggested to them that they had a moral obligation to use radical enhancement techniques to enhance the overall happiness of the society, the pressure to radically enhance would become virtually impossible to resist. Moreover, for those few strong enough to resist, the price would be becoming the member of an under class. Not only would the chasm between the haves and have nots grow still huger, now it would stretch between two different species, each warranting different kinds of respect. In such a scenario, Agar suggests, there is no room for the sort of vital democracy that Hughes envisions.

To make the prospect of radical enhancement darker still, Agar imagines that, because posthumans will have so far surpassed the scientific achievements of mere humans, they will not need the sorts of old-fashioned medical experiments that human scientists perform today. This, he suggests, would open up the possibility that “there will be posthuman purposes that both require the sacrifice of human lives and lead to consequences sufficiently good to justify it”(pg. 169).

Given such prospects, Agar says we have two options. We can enforce the radical enhancement of all, or we can ban it. And, like in his earlier book, he recommends the latter. He does not, however, say how such a ban might be implemented.

And implementation would be no mean feat. In the context of the “treatment-enhancement” debate, Eric Juengst long ago observed that, insofar as many of the very same technologies that could be used to achieve treatment could also be used to achieve enhancement, and insofar as it’s hard to imagine banning a new technology aimed at treatment, it’s hard to imagine how one might actually ban enhancement.[5] It seems equally hard to know how to ban “radical” enhancement, while permitting “moderate” enhancement. That’s not to say it can’t be done, only that it may be easier to say than to do. Moreover, to be fair, though, Agar never promised practical advice.

Alienation: On becoming separated from proper human experiences

In the conclusion of Humanity’s End, Agar names “alienation” as the theme that underlies his critique of radical enhancement. As he puts it, “Radical enhancement alienates us from experiences that give meaning to our lives”(pg. 179).

Agar is acutely aware that talk about the threat of becoming alienated from experiences that give our lives meaning sounds awfully like those “bioconservatives” he used as foils in Liberal Eugenics. And he is acutely aware of the contempt that can be heaped upon anyone who dares to suggest, as he does, that suffering can sometimes be an essential feature of some meaningful and valuable human experiences. Watch out she who dares to ask the “ecological” question, concerning the possible interconnectedness of what is hardest about our lives, including suffering and death, and what is most meaningful! Next she’ll have to answer the enthusiast’s question, “Oh, and do you think that we should reintroduce small pox to give more people more opportunities to find meaning?”

To his credit, Agar isn’t cowed by that question. Indeed, he says that it exhibits “an overly simplistic view of the human significance of disease and suffering”(pg. 181). It fails to duly acknowledge the ecological insight and thus fails to take seriously a reason for exhibiting caution in our efforts to extirpate what’s hardest. Like the so-called “bioconservatives,” Agar explicitly seeks a way to reject the opportunities for meaning making that disease might give us—and to affirm the fact that our species has evolved such that what’s hardest and what’s most valuable or meaningful can sometimes be distressingly interconnected.

Perhaps in his next book, Agar will offer even more specificity regarding which sorts of valuable experiences from which radical enhancement might alienate us. In the final chapter of this book, however, he limits himself to a rather brief survey of three contexts in which he says we should be especially wary of radical enhancement. First, he reiterates that radical enhancement would make it much harder for individuals to have the sorts of “mature interests and attachments” that are made possible by the finite structure of our lives as they have evolved so far. Second, he argues that if parents were to radically enhance their offspring, they could inadvertently create barriers to the sorts of relationships that human parents seek with their children. And finally he suggests that radical enhancement would “alienate us from our sporting heroes” (even more than performance enhancing drugs already do); if our sports heroes become too unlike us, he suggests, we will become alienated from the opportunities for vicarious enjoyment that are currently ours.

It’s time to scrap the label “bioconservative”

I hope I haven’t exaggerated the extent to which Agar’s arguments in this book resemble the arguments of those he called “conservatives” and used as foils in his earlier book. My point hasn’t been that he has switched sides, much less that he is inconsistent. I admire his consistent engagement with thinkers on both sides of the argumentative spectrum.

In showing the extent to which his own arguments resemble those made by the writers he now calls “bioconservatives,” one of my points has been to suggest the respect in which that label is deeply unhelpful. As far as I can tell, Agar is (like me) a political liberal who is impressed both by our extraordinary capacity to use technology to enhance our experiences and thereby ourselves, and by the extraordinary importance of affirming and protecting many of the ways of being that we have evolved to experience. To use language I have floated elsewhere, he seems committed to embracing the “creativity” that has allowed our species to transform itself—and equally committed to exhibiting “gratitude” for our characteristic ways of being human, which we have not created.[6]

Those thinkers Agar calls “bioconservatives”—and Agar himself—bring to our public conversation about human enhancement a willingness to ask questions that too many of us have learned not to ask. Questions like: What is the nature of animals like us? What has to be conserved for members of our species to continue to have the sorts of valuable experiences we’ve evolved to have? What’s the difference between an intervention that can help to make us more whole and one that puts us at increased risk of becoming alienated from ourselves? What’s a true, as opposed to a phony, enhancement?

Indeed, the title of Agar’s new book, Humanity’s End, draws our attention to such questions. The “end” in that title of course refers first to the fact that, in the absence of proper caution, our technological interventions could destroy homo sapiens. But it also seems to refer to the “end” of humanity in Aristotle’s sense of telos: the purpose or nature or proper functioning of human beings. Agar’s inquiries concerning enhancement over the last decade have driven him to raise the enormous, never-finally-answerable questions concerning the end—or perhaps, better, ends—of human beings.

Those of us who have tried to stop asking such questions have had good reason. We are aware of the stupidity and cruelty that have marched under their banner. But as Agar has shown in his last two books, those of us who want to think about how we ought to use new technologies can’t escape them.

Erik Parens, PhD, is a senior research scholar at the Hastings Center.

References

[2] For more on “appeals to nature,” see Gregory E. Kaebnick, The Ideal of Nature: Debates about Biotechnology and the Environment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming 2011).

[3] Leon Kass, “Mortality and Morality: The Virtues of Finitude” in Toward a More Natural Science (Mankato: The Free Press, 1985), p. 299-317.

[4] Max More, “The Proactionary Principle,” Version 1.2, July 29, 2005, available at http://www.maxmore.com/proactionary.htm.

[5] Eric Juengst et al., “What Does Enhancement Mean?”In Erik Parens, ed. Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications (Georgetown University Press, 1998), p.29-47.

[6] Erik Parens, “Authenticity and Ambivalence: Toward Understanding the Enhancement Debate,” Hastings Center Report 35 (3) (2005): 34-41.

But Levin’s better angels, and much of the book, seem committed to the valuable task of understanding the insights and errors of the liberals—and conservatives—who engage in debates about science and technology in general, and about biotechnology in particular. The better part of the book explores the different anthropologies, or conceptions of humanity, from which he says the left-wing boosters of biotechnology and right-wing knockers proceed to the debates.

Ultimately, I will suggest that his organizing typology—the political left, science, and a commitment to innovation on one side; the political right, tradition, and a commitment to children and future generations on the other—is flawed, and will suggest why that flaw matters. But first I want to try to give a fair account of the better part of the book.

How Science Threatens Democracy

Levin begins with a critique of what he takes to be our mainstream way of thinking about science and technology today. (The critique will be familiar to those who are familiar with the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Leon Kass.) According to the mainstream view, while science can be put to good or bad uses, science itself is morally neutral. Levin argues that, to the contrary, science “is driven by a profound moral purpose,” which is to gain power “over our natural limitations and afflictions [9].” That is, the moral purpose of modern natural science is to reduce the suffering that goes with being the sorts of vulnerable and finite organisms we are.

Levin is not arguing that reducing suffering is a bad moral purpose. He is arguing that it’s bad for it to become our primary moral purpose. When it does, it creates what he calls a “crisis mentality,” where the urgency of reducing suffering is so great that we are willing to sacrifice other, higher values to achieve it. Indeed, our pursuit of the lowly purpose of forestalling death blinds us to the fact that there are other, higher moral purposes, such as trying to live well.

Up until this point, this liberal is following him. I, too, sometimes worry that our commitment to reducing suffering compromises our ability to remember that there are other purposes worth pursuing. One doesn’t have to be a conservative to believe that, for example, our commitment of health care dollars is growing perilously out of proportion to our commitment to other sorts of goods, like education and music and art. I can’t follow him, though, to conclude that our commitment to reducing suffering blinds us to the specific moral value that is human dignity. Later I will discuss the key premise that motivates his conclusion, but for now will point out only that he worries that our commitment to cures makes us willing to sacrifice embryos—and thereby the value of human dignity.

In his critique of the view that science is morally neutral, Levin does more than just argue that reducing suffering is a thoroughly moral, if relatively low, purpose. Science, he suggests, is moral in another sense. To begin, he argues that science has become not just a way, but for too many, the way of understanding ourselves and the world. Modern natural science (as opposed to, say, Aristotle’s science) reveals ourselves and the rest of the world to us as matter in motion. Ultimately, and most destructively, it reveals ourselves and the rest of the natural world, as “raw material,” as aimless stuff, which we can do with whatever we want. This way of understanding ourselves, he argues, “must necessarily leave out some elements of the subjects it examines that do not aid the work of the scientific method.” That is, what modern science leaves out (and what Aristotle put front and center) is our purposiveness. It leaves out that, in addition to being objects, we are also subjects, beings who pursue purposes. The more that the power and prestige of modern natural science grow and provide us with material benefits, the less we notice that science is but one way of knowing the world, the less we remember that there are any other terms in which to understand ourselves. I would only point out, again, that one does not need to be a conservative to feel some sympathy for that concern.

Moreover, he argues that, if relieving suffering becomes our primary moral purpose, and science is better than any other institution at promoting that purpose; and if, more generally, science becomes the way of knowing the world; then science comes to enjoy imperial status. It begins to reign over other social institutions, like politics, which draw on sources such as human experience and tradition. He urges us to remember that it was not scientific and technological prowess that allowed the United States to triumph over the USSR in the Cold War. Rather, it was non-scientific values, like freedom and dignity.

He also says, however, that the divide within the United States about science policy isn’t between those on the left who are committed to science and those on the right who are committed to non-scientific or traditional values. Instead, he suggests, the conflict is between different conceptions of the proper place of science, which rest on different anthropologies and different conceptions of the future.

How Progressives Threaten Democracy

Again, Levin asserts that different attitudes toward science and technology—in particular, toward biotechnology—align fairly neatly along party lines. On his account, the differences between progressives and conservatives are ultimately rooted in “different intuitions about the character of human life [55]” and different conceptions of the future. According to his typology, progressives think in terms of future innovations, and conservatives think in terms of future generations. And, his better angels add, “Each is too easily caricatured by the other… but if taken seriously, each also offers a rich and compelling anthropology of progress [56].”

The anthropology of innovation holds that life is “an array of individual experiments and choices,” aimed at achieving “ever greater control over nature and chance [56].” While Levin acknowledges the huge material benefits wrought by this worldview, he flags what he takes to be its two weaknesses. The first is its proneness to being seduced by utopianism; if we become intoxicated with our capacity to master the world, we are prone to imagine that, with perhaps just a bit of violence, we can perfect it.

But the second weakness is more pressing. Those who think of the future in terms of innovation tend to think of it “as something to be judged and understood in terms of the interests of the free, rational, individual adult now living.” What is missing from the anthropology of innovation, he suggests, is the child. If we focus on the rational adult pursuing material comforts, we fail to remember what children need most: the non-scientific, moral values that make life not just long, but good.

Moreover, Levin believes that the left’s anthropology of innovation and embrace of science put it at odds with two of the left’s own fundamental commitments. First, the left has failed to understand that science makes possible the technological power and environmental destruction that so many on the left lament. He writes that “the environmentalist ethic calls for a science of beholding nature, not of mastering it [92].”

In fact, many on the political left do agree that we need a science that is better at beholding, and less hell-bent on transforming, nature. Or at least we would agree that we need to get better at beholding, quite apart from whether that is a function of our science. It is too bad that Levin does not consider more seriously the possibility that, if, according to his typology progressives are the champions of science and innovation, and in reality progressives are champions of regulating science and innovation to protect the environment, then maybe something is wrong with his typology.

But he believes that the left’s position vis-à-vis science is much more confused—and dangerous—than its embrace of environmentalism suggests. The far deeper problem is that the left fails to see that “Science poses greater and deeper challenges to our belief in human equality than any other force in American life [97].”

According to Levin, science challenges our belief in equality in two ways. First, it cannot give us reason to believe that we are equal in our humanity. Science, after all, investigates the natural differences among us. This does raise an interesting empirical question, which in fact many on the left have long asked: as we learn more and more about the biological correlates of our behaviors and attitudes, will it be ever harder to believe that we are equal in our humanity? Or, will it be ever easier to believe that some of us, in virtue of our natural strengths, are entitled to more than others? Though he asserts that this danger is huge, to his credit, he also allows that scientific “evidence against material human equality” does not “in itself … undercut the case for equal humanity” [101] (italics added).

But, he argues, science poses a second challenge to our belief in equality. Science “also sometimes proposes means to material ends—to comfort, to wealth, to power, to health—that rely upon unequal treatment of human beings at the margins [101].” That is, as a powerful tool to achieve material comfort, science can seduce us to do virtually anything, including mistreating human beings at the margins of life. So this road, too, leads back to embryo research. The “twofold challenge of science,” he argues, “has crystallized in recent years in the heated public dispute over embryo research [103].”

To understand that claim, one has to understand his view of embryos. It is obvious to him that—“as a biological fact”—human life begins when an embryo is created, and that embryos are therefore human beings. If you grant that embryos are humans, you see the twofold challenge that science poses. First, insofar as science teaches us about the physical differences among us, it weakens our commitment to the equal humanity of us all. We’ve let the size and shape of embryos obscure the fact that we are of no greater value than they. Second, insofar as science holds out the promise of reducing suffering and improving material comfort, we have let it seduce us into sacrificing human embryos merely for the sake of medical research.

For now, I will mention only two problems with this view of embryo research. For one, it succumbs to the fantasy that Nature can tell us (“a biological fact”) what to imbue with value; it fails to accept our responsibility to determine what standing to accord embryos. (Before we on the left snicker, we should remember that more than one of us have suggested that we can know, as a scientific fact, that embryos are not human beings.) But as Levin knows well, even some of the people he most respects do not agree that embryos should be accorded the same respect we accord to humans. By making the line in the sand so clear, he risks needlessly alienating some people on the left and right who think that, though embryos aren’t human beings, they deserve respect.

Second, he fails to take embryo research as an opportunity to investigate a tension in his own thinking. On the one hand, he is disquieted by modernity, because its science and politics both fail to recognize natural hierarchies. He longs for the aristocratic affirmation of natural differences, and for the intellectual and spiritual hardness he finds in the ancients. On the other, he denies that there is a meaningful difference between the dignity of a grown human being and an embryo, thereby exhibiting a strikingly “democratic” softness with respect to embryos. Yet nowhere does he tell us how he reconciles his love of ancient hardness in general and his embrace of modern softness for embryos in particular. This is not to try to catch him in a contradiction, but to emphasize that, since we are the products of multiple traditions, each of us inevitably holds views that are in deep tension. Holding views that are in tension is not the problem. The problem is failing to engage the tension. Were he to face it more squarely in himself, perhaps he would worry less about the shallowness of the souls of those whose interpretation of the status of embryos are different from his.

How Conservatives Might Threaten Democracy

According to Levin, when those on the right think about the future, they don’t think first about innovation, but about the continuity of generations. Those who truly care about children understand that what children need most is the wisdom accumulated in our traditions. Moreover, children deserve to receive from us bodies that have not been altered in ways that could deprive them of the sorts of experiences our bodies have allowed us. Were we to “reorder and transform some prime ingredients of the human experience,” we risk making changes “in the relations between parents and children, between effort and performance, [and] between body and soul,” which “could hardly help but influence humanity’s understanding of itself and so our very sense of what a human life entails [76].”

Not only does he grant that it will be enormously difficult to put into the language of the public square what we might lose if we pursued such transformations, but he also thinks that trying is dangerous. The real danger, he fears, is that, by using arguments to articulate what might be lost if we violate what is now taboo, the political right could destroy exactly what it seeks to preserve.

Until now, he suggests, the source of our daunting obligation to provide for the next generation has been veiled in mystery. He invokes Edmund Burke, who suggested that our moral duties have arisen for us out of “physical causes,” which are “unknown to us, [and] perhaps unknowable [119].” When we lift the veil from that mysterious source, we risk destroying our bond to the next generation; in looking at embryos in the way that embryo research requires, we “sever the generations by exploding in a flash of light the mysterious ties that bind them [120].” If we seek reasons to ground the daunting demands that children make upon parents, if we lift the veil for long enough, we will find that reasons alone are impotent. By doing research with embryos we look upon what was “never meant to be looked upon,” we violate a mystery, a taboo. “There is,” he says, “no clearer example of a profaning of the sacred in our time [128].”

To suggest that people who do research on embryos are blasphemers is strategically unhelpful, if one genuinely wants to make progress in this conversation. But does he even really believe that all embryo research pushes us across our generation’s moral Rubicon? Even the embryo research that allows people to create a family, so that they can pass on to their children their ways of loving and respecting life? If he thinks that the embryo research that helps people to create families is blasphemous, he should say so clearly and give reasons. If he doesn’t, he owes his readers a more nuanced account of embryo research.

Better Angels

After he has carefully laid out his worry about the damage that the political right might cause in its attempt to defend taboos, he says explicitly, if somewhat abruptly, that the right cannot rely on sentiment, but must come up with better arguments [129]. That is, he takes a step back from the strong claim that, to make arguments in defense of the taboos that a good life depends on, is to jeopardize the foundations of that life.

Then, in his conclusion, apparently listening to his better angels, he takes one more step back, when he suggests that the two anthropologies and two political traditions, which he has spent the book setting against each other, are actually two parts of one larger project.

[America] must not lose sight of the careful balance it has always sought between material advancement and moral progress; the protection of our own rights and liberties, and the passing down to our descendants of the great traditions we inherited. This is neither quite a conservative nor a liberal project. It is the American project, and it is grounded in the view that concern for present freedom and regard for future generations are not two aims but one [134].

Those words could have been spoken, and meant, by Barack Obama. We do need a way beyond the partisan, ideological spitting that has for too long substituted for public conversation in this country. And there are at least two reasons why biotechnology could be a good place to start the sort of bipartisan, respectful, non-ideological, “bioethical” conversation that I would like to think President Obama will stand for.

First, the debates about biotechnology can help us remember that, regardless of party, we share a fundamental question: What is real human flourishing? I say “real” to emphasize that everybody is for a technology that will “really” promote flourishing. Our disagreements are about whether a given technology will really promote flourishing, or will inadvertently thwart it. Maybe our conversations would go better if we remembered that we share that question.

Second, the debates about biotechnology could help us to, as we used to say, “disrupt” the right-left distinction. We could begin to see that, actually, it is not the case that progressives are boosters of science and conservatives its critics. Our views about biotechnology just do not align neatly with our party affiliations. It’s awfully hard, after all, to construe left-leaning critics of “the new eugenics,” or left-leaning critics of medicalization and normalization, or left-leaning environmentalists as boosters of science and technology. And it’s equally hard to construe right-leaning defenders of embryonic stem cell research, or right-leaning biotech-free-marketeers, much less the Ronald Reagan of Star Wars, as knockers. Instead of using our discussions of biotech policy to reinforce the ever-higher wall between progressives and conservatives, we could use them as a chance to lower it. At the risk of lapsing into what Levin might call “lovely foolishness,” maybe such discussions could even be a way of cooling some of the contempt that we’ve come to find so sweet.

Erik Parens, PhD is a Senior Research Scholar at The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, NY. He also teaches in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Sarah Lawrence College. Most recently, he is editor of Surgically Shaping Children: Technology, Ethics, and the Pursuit of Normality (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and co-editor of Wrestling with Behavioral Genetics: Science, Ethics, and Public Conversation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).