2. The Dynamics of Modern Technology

Hans Jonas has explored the connection between the development of modern technology and the ecological crisis, tracing the origin of both to the Renaissance. At its core the Renaissance was a ‘revolution of thought’ entailing a ‘change in theory, in world-view, in metaphysical outlook’, the consequences of which have slowly played out over the last six centuries.Footnote ¹⁷ The old Aristotelian-Scholastic understanding of a teleological and hierarchical universe – the scala naturae – was decisively challenged by Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system. Newtonian physics then revealed the universe to be devoid of final causes, and was instead conceived of as matter in motion subject to causal laws – as Galileo famously stated, nature was an ‘all-encompassing book […] written in a mathematical language’.Footnote ¹⁸ At the same time the materialist revolution extended to the realm of living beings. In Descartes’ mechanistic biology both animal and plant life were stripped of ends, and finally, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Darwinian revolution allowed the human being to undergo similar treatment. In both cases – living beings and the wider universe – nature became ever more homogenous, machine-like, and devoid of teleological significance.

According to Jonas this new mechanistic metaphysics facilitated an approach to nature involving ‘actual manipulation in the investigative process’.Footnote ¹⁹ For this reason he claims modern science ‘is technological by nature’.Footnote ²⁰ By this I take Jonas to mean the following: whereas premodern science largely divorced contemplation of nature (theoria) from the realm of practical intervention (praxis), modern science's emphasis on mathematical quantification better lends itself to practical intervention. The distinction between theory and practice is then partially dissolved in experimentation by actively doing things to nature in the pursuit of empirical knowledge, and this practical bent allows actual instruments to take centre stage: from telescope, to microscope, to Large Hadron Collider, technology increasingly becomes the means by which scientific advances are made. With this fusion of theory and practice Jonas claims a merging takes place in the means-end relationship between them. Now, rather than scientific theory acting as the bedrock upon which technological innovation occurs, technological innovation is also at the heart of scientific discovery. Thus a circularity emerges: new scientific discoveries allow for technological advances, which in turn propel scientific research, which in turn generates novel technologies, and so on, ad infinitum. Jonas calls this forward thrust the ‘formal automatics’ of modern technology.Footnote ²¹

The industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries then saw scientific-technology put to the widespread use of capitalism. The fusion of research, innovation, and economic activity further dissolved the distinction between technological means and social ends and served to rapidly hasten development. In addition to market competition, technological advance was driven by the desire for greater production, efficiency, and safety from the new capital-intensive means of mass production. Finally military and political struggles between nations spurred on industrialisation. Initially this involved the market economies of Western Europe and North America (and later Japan), before the Cold War set them against the planned economies.Footnote ²² Market economies ultimately proved more efficient than their adversaries, and following the collapse of the Soviet Union the industrial capitalist mode of production spread worldwide. Although it has adapted to particular national institutions and circumstances, most countries can now be characterised to some extent as part of a global ‘scientific-technological-industrial civilization’.Footnote ²³

In market economies the dynamic of supply and demand informs both the sort of technology developed and its necessity. This accelerates the aforementioned forward momentum, as technology, intertwined with our social, economic, and political activity, ‘suggests’ and ‘creates’ new ends.Footnote ²⁴ In other words, we are encouraged to consume novel technology because prior technology makes it desirable, on both an individual and social level. Here is Jonas again:

Take the automobile as an example. Cars and trucks were not isolated technological inventions, but brought about tarmacked roads, motorways, petrol stations, speed cameras, traffic lights, new laws, taxes, and insurance, the driving instruction and mechanic professions, new opportunities for trade, and so on. All become desirable when accommodating the new technology into our socio-economic life, and any of these technologies or practices may serve to facilitate others. Langdon Winner, another substantivist philosopher of technology, has called this effect ‘necessity through aimless drift’, wherein ‘possibilities widen, but so do the demands’.Footnote ²⁶ This relation lies at the heart of an adequate philosophy of technology: the positive feedback loop of technological innovation and consumption strengthening our reliance upon ever more technology.

We come to realise that there is no single power directing technological development. It is rather a mélange of scientific technology on the one hand and industrial capitalism on the other, each containing ‘a variety of currents of innovation’, as Winner says, ‘moving in a number of directions toward highly uncertain destinations’.Footnote ²⁷ It has, however, a coherent ideological dimension in the notion of progress. This is essentially the idea that technological innovation as such is a good thing, and that problems encountered in its forward march will likely be solved by better technology. Progress has a more extreme counterpart in techno-utopianism: the belief held by Bacon,Footnote ²⁸ Descartes, and contemporary transhumanists, that technology will make us ‘masters and possessors of nature’.Footnote ²⁹

Successful ideologies, as Antonio Gramsci argued, ‘modify the average opinion of a particular society’ and obtain the status of common sense through a process he called ‘cultural hegemony’.Footnote ³⁰ Social structures such as the media, education, politics, art, and entertainment unintentionally serve to reproduce ideas beneficial to the general functioning of a particular system. These structures, widely available in contemporary capitalism, disperse appropriate ideas like progress throughout society. The ideology of progress is clearly not adhered to by all – no ideology is – but is prevalent enough to motivate consumer behaviour and further feed the dynamics outlined above.

3. The Systemic and Psychologistic Analyses of Technological Harm

Now, Persson and Savulescu explain the ecological crisis as at bottom a moral problem, citing ‘the selfish and short-sighted behaviour of masses of people’ that follows, they say, from the ‘limitations of our altruism and sense of justice’.Footnote ³¹ Our moral psychology is ‘designed for life in small communities with limited technology’, and therefore not fit for purpose in light of the looming, self-created ultimate harm.Footnote ³² In short, the problem is not technology but those who use it. This appears, however, to be a partial misdiagnosis. Much of our behaviour may very well be selfish and short-sighted, but the psychological ‘limitations’ invoked by Persson and Savulescu as the cause are questionable. Our senses of altruism and justice, while still felt most keenly toward those close to us in space and time, now extend both into the future and across the globe. As Michael Hauskeller points out, we need only think of the recent expansion of the circle of moral considerability to include not only other nations and races, but also future generations, non-human animals, and living beings as such.Footnote ³³ This last is the most contentious, but even so finds international agreement in the 1982 UN World Charter for Nature (voted against only by the United States).Footnote ³⁴ Each of these ethical positions, though certainly not universally held, are sufficiently common to challenge Persson and Savulescu's ahistorical claims about our inherently ‘myopic’ and ‘parochial’ moral purview.Footnote ³⁵

The question, then, is why we continue to act in short-sighted and ecologically deleterious ways in spite of our moral beliefs. Drawing on the substantive conception of technology, rooted in a historical and social critique, we are able to explain the ecological crisis as a predominantly systemic phenomenon. Individuals act within the framework described above which structures actions and their consequences. For this reason we cannot avoid the direct or indirect use of fossil fuels, production of unrecyclable waste, and consumption of resources from across the globe, simply because our social world is structured that way. As a banal example, consider the following: I wake up in the morning to the alarm on my mobile phone, a device made in China with materials including tantalum extracted in Africa. It is still dark so I turn on the light, running on electricity generated by nuclear power and burning coal, put on my dressing gown (made in Bangladesh), and go to the kitchen to make a coffee. The coffee beans were grown in Colombia and transported across the Atlantic before being packaged in an unrecyclable plastic wrapper somewhere in Europe. I turn on the stove, using gas extracted from the North Sea, to heat the coffee pot, before fetching some milk from the fridge which has been running all night.Footnote ³⁶ And so on. On an individual level my actions are innocuous, but they are of course only possible as part of a destructive socio-economic whole. Each act presupposes a chain of events which, on a large enough scale and over a long enough time, entail serious ecological harms.Footnote ³⁷

Such are the consequences of our collective patterns of behaviour. Of course, each of us has the ability to opt out of some ecologically harmful practices, from luxuries such as air travel to more prosaic activities like eating meat. Equally, we could choose to have no more than two children so as to arrest population growth. All these and more might be reasonable demands if we are serious about upholding our professed ecological, international, and intergenerational morals. But individuals can only opt out of certain harmful practices while remaining part of mainstream society, and here lies the crux of the matter: we have to live somewhere, work, travel, eat, drink, wash, clothe ourselves, and so on, and most of us can only do so in the society we already inhabit. “Dropping out” is simply not a reasonable option for the majority. As such, even well-meaning individuals, if they remain within industrial society, have only limited scope for lifestyle changes which would fully accord with their moral beliefs. The ecological threat of ultimate harm is therefore far more complex than Persson and Savulescu recognise, and the possible efficacy of moral enhancement more limited than they suppose. A further-reaching critique of technological harm reveals that the problem is more social and systemic than it is individual and moral.

4. Persson and Savulescu's Psycho-Politics

The neglect of social conditions at the expense of evolutionary psychology also serves to undermine Persson and Savulescu's analysis of liberal democracy, which they rightly identify as playing a role in the threat of ultimate harm. Liberal democracy is defined as a form of elected government prioritising individual freedom, in which the state only interferes to uphold the equal freedoms of others.Footnote ³⁸ The problem, as Persson and Savulescu see it, is that this liberty gives free reign to our moral psychology which is prone to selfishness and short-sightedness: ‘climatic and environmental problems stem from the very heart of democracy – the behaviour of the majority’.Footnote ³⁹ Despite the clear need to lower our levels of consumption, ‘[i]t seems unlikely that citizens of Western democracies will voluntarily consent to such restraint’ and, moreover, ‘governments in liberal democracies are likely to be disinclined to propose such regulations’ for fear of unpopularity and therefore electoral unviability.Footnote ⁴⁰ As our psychological shortcomings make such sacrifices unlikely, they believe ‘individual liberty, which is a mark of these democracies, will have to be curtailed’.Footnote ⁴¹

There is a sense in which Persson and Savulescu are correct whilst at the same time missing the mark. Liberalism (rather than democracy) is indeed part of the problem insofar as it grants excessive freedom in scientific research, technological innovation, and the marketplace, the amalgamation of which we have identified as the underlying cause of ultimate harm. It follows that this component should be curtailed, as it already is to some degree in continental European countries and less so in the Anglophone nations. Given that liberal democracies already permit degrees of freedom facilitating technological harm, subject to political control, it seems we ought to demand greater political control so as to tackle the ecological crisis. But having framed the issue incorrectly this is not the conclusion reached by Persson and Savulescu. Viewing liberal democracy as the quintessential political expression of our evolutionary psychology, rather than an ideological tradition forming part of a socio-economic system, they are led to underestimate the possibility of political transformation.

As indicated, much like the expansion of the moral circle, history tells us that liberal democracy is not immutable but rather open to change. Charles Taylor notes that to dispel any sense of political fatalism ‘[w]e need only think of the whole movement since the Romantic era […] and of the offshoot of that movement today, which is challenging our ecological mismanagement’.Footnote ⁴² The classic case is the campaign, following the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, to ban agricultural usage of DDT which contributed to the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency.Footnote ⁴³ For internationally-negotiated examples we could point to the apparently successful 1987 Montreal Protocol, banning substances contributing to the depletion of stratospheric ozone, or, more recently, the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change which aims to limit the global mean temperature rise to 1.5–2°C above preindustrial levels. The point is that some real political changes have been demanded and made. Once again this should make us wary of Persson and Savulescu's strong claims for our selfish, short-termist psychology which supposedly drives liberal democracy.

The alternative critique of technological civilisation I have offered is better able to explain how such reforms come about. Following Gramsci, we saw that ideologies such as progress are hegemonically transmitted through social institutions. It should be noted, however, that hegemony is not deterministic since the social structures which entrench ideology as common sense only do so via individual agency. Anthony Giddens has described how this works in a process he calls ‘structuration’. Whereas Gramsci explained how ideology becomes common sense on an abstract level, Giddens showed that concrete social structures are reinforced and ideologically justified through agents: those who are able to ‘exercise some sort of power’.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to Giddens, social actors, though possessing little agency individually, are yet collectively responsible for the structural reproduction of ideology. He notes that structural conditions are dialectically ‘both constituted by human agency, and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution’.Footnote ⁴⁵ That is to say: agents, who are to a great degree shaped by social structures, nevertheless possess the capacity to inform those structures in their reproduction of them. This is how seemingly monolithic structures are changed or even toppled – if enough agents challenge a particular structure, shifting collective opinion, that structure can be overturned.

Courtesy of Giddens we can explain how politically-driven changes to technological civilisation have come about and how they could continue to do so, provided they are sufficiently agitated for. There is no imperative of evolutionary psychology preventing us from establishing more powerful regulatory bodies to oversee scientific research and development, or imposing heavy taxes on the worst polluting industries and using the proceeds to transfer to renewable energy sources. Such policies would challenge core aspects of technological civilisation – in particular the free market – and for this reason are hard, though not impossible, to achieve. The most plausible solution to ultimate harm would therefore be political action rather than moral enhancement.

Now, Persson and Savulescu would respond by saying that moral enhancement could help in motivating the political struggle for such reforms.Footnote ⁴⁶ Perhaps it could: let us follow this train of thought. If changes to technological civilisation are driven by public will, as I suggest, then the current level must be insufficient to pose a fundamental challenge. If this is the case, and more people need to be engaged – numbering in the millions or perhaps even billions – moral enhancement would have to be comparably widespread in order to have the desired effect. However, there seems to be no reason for such uptake to occur voluntarily. Why would anyone not already agitating for action to tackle the ecological crisis be willing to undergo moral enhancement in order to agitate for action to tackle the ecological crisis? There seems to be a problem here in that those most in need of moral enhancement are those least likely to volunteer for it, and vice versa.

If voluntary moral enhancement is unlikely to work on the necessary scale it would presumably have to be compulsory, as Persson and Savulescu initially proposed.Footnote ⁴⁷ This raises the following question: if Persson and Savulescu are willing in principle to countenance an authoritarian application of moral bioenhancement to address ultimate harm, why not just advocate authoritarian solutions to the ultimate harm itself? It seems unnecessary to take the detour through moral bioenhancement if one can, with Persson and Savulescu, accept authoritarian means in principle. After all, a government with the power to implement compulsory moral enhancement on the necessary scale would presumably also have the power to implement the sorts of policies to tackle the ecological crisis mentioned above. This would be a more straightforward approach, which, to be clear, is not one I am advocating – it simply seems strange, given their previous commitments, that Persson and Savulescu do not take this position.

Let us give them the benefit of the doubt, however, and assume that moral enhancement is a more efficacious solution to ultimate harm than political action alone. In this case, is there any reason why in principle we ought to be sceptical of moral enhancement – voluntary or otherwise – to assist the kind of political action I have suggested is necessary? I want to argue that there is such a reason, drawing once more on Jonas’ work and that of Jürgen Habermas.Footnote ⁴⁸

5. Freedom and Dignity

Neither Jonas nor Habermas wrote about moral enhancement specifically, but both made important contributions to the ethical debates around genetic engineering which, as one of the methods envisioned, can be brought to bear on the topic. Jonas offers an ‘existential critique’ of genetic engineering, by which he means a reflection on what it would be like to be an engineered being, in order to reveal problems that would be raised by the practice.Footnote ⁴⁹ This method leads him to make two observations: firstly that genetic engineering could undermine our existential freedom, and secondly that it would corrupt the relation between those who performed it and those who underwent it. These concerns pertain not to the physical consequences of manipulating the genome, which is not deterministic, but instead to the significance of such an intervention.

The first change Jonas points to is that the process of self-becoming is disrupted by the knowledge of having been manipulated in order to be a particular way. Regardless of whether that manipulation works as intended, the intention itself changes the person's self-understanding as they second-guess the authenticity of their physical or psychological being. As Jonas says, ‘it does not matter one jot whether the [engineered] genotype is really, by its own force, a person's fate: it is made his fate’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In knowing that I am intended to be a particular way I am bound to this intent, whether in conformity to it or rebellion against it. What is lost, in other words, is the spontaneity of becoming by instead measuring ourselves against a pre-established design:

Note that this freedom invoked by Jonas is not the same as the ‘freedom to fall’ defended by John Harris, which pertains to the possibility of agency and moral responsibility.Footnote ⁵² It is a different sort of freedom: the existential freedom to become oneself in the absence of an ingrained idea.

It might be objected that this would only hold in the case of persons who actually knew they were engineered. This much is true. Perhaps, then, we could morally enhance foetuses or infants; after all, if we never informed them it would thereby preserve their existential freedom through ignorance. This brings us to the second of Jonas’ concerns: that genetic engineering corrupts the relation between the generations by becoming one of manipulator and manipulated. This is particularly apt given that Persson and Savulescu do in fact advocate the moral enhancement of children, with a view to taking advantage of their more malleable psychology.Footnote ⁵³ Jonas’ concern is that this creates an entirely one-sided control ‘of present men over future men, who are the defenceless objects of antecedent choices by the planners of today. […] [P]ower is here entirely unilateral and of the few, with no recourse to countervailing power open to its patients’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Here the concern is not to do with self-understanding, but one's objective relation to others. In my being manipulated in a particular way – again, even if not deterministically – I become the object of someone else's design. The worry is that this one-sided power relation once more undercuts freedom, although this time not of the existential sort. As Robert Sparrow says, drawing on the work of Philip Pettit, this state of affairs threatens our freedom understood as non-domination by others.Footnote ⁵⁵ This is not an implausible libertarian concern for maximum negative freedom, but a weaker desire to simply be free from arbitrary subordination.Footnote ⁵⁶

The proponent of moral enhancement could argue that we regularly engage in a practice which conforms to this type of power-relation, one that we not only tolerate but actively champion: education. In both education and moral enhancement one person seeks to inform the character and values of another, so if the former practice is permitted presumably the other should be also. Drawing this comparison, Persson and Savulescu say that ‘[t]here is no reason to assume that moral bioenhancement to which children are exposed without their consent would restrict their freedom and responsibility more than the traditional moral education to which they are also exposed without their consent’.Footnote ⁵⁷ To challenge this equivalence I turn to Habermas, who addressed it by building on Jonas’ insights.

Habermas notes that education and genetic engineering in fact embody fundamentally different principles: the former operates according to the discursive principles of communicative rationality, and the latter according to the technical principles of instrumental rationality.Footnote ⁵⁸ What this means is as follows. Education, relying as it does on sensible communication, presupposes the mutual capacity for reason. Even if the pupil does not at the time understand the reasons behind a particular lesson, as a rational being in development they are in principle able to – and in time hopefully will – comprehend those reasons. When they do, they are then free to accept or reject those reasons. This shared ground allows for a fundamental equality between agents despite the asymmetry inherent in the practice of education. As Habermas says, ‘expectations underlying the parents’ efforts at character building are essentially “contestable” […] the adolescents in principle still have the opportunity to respond to and retroactively break away from it’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, one might go so far as to say that developing the ability to question what one has learned – to think for oneself – is an objective of education. However, this is not required for the present point. Even in instances where learning to think for oneself is not an objective of the educator, the nature of education itself means the content can always be subsequently contested, as Habermas’ own schooling in Nazi Germany starkly demonstrates.

By contrast, genetic engineering lacks the mutual ground of reason which allows for equality between participants. Instead, as a technical procedure carried out on the child as an object, the manipulation makes retrospective disagreement impossible:

The difference in principle, therefore, is that the power-relation of genetic engineering is not only unilateral but also incontestable: the child is bound to an intent from which they cannot be released. Habermas himself does not consider this a problem if the child subsequently ‘affirms’, or identifies with, the intent behind the intervention.Footnote ⁶¹ One could go further, however, and argue that whatever the child's appraisal of the intervention turns out to be, the intervention itself curtails freedom insofar as the child is aware that invasive and domineering biotechnological means, rather than readily available reflexive and communicative ones, were chosen by their predecessors.Footnote ⁶² There is, as Habermas says, no scope for autonomous contestation of the former. By contrast, education, courtesy of its basis in rational communication, possesses an inherent reflexivity and thereby presupposes freedom as non-domination. Education is for this reason different in kind, and not simply degree, from cognitive or moral enhancement.

Here Persson and Savulescu fundamentally disagree. They claim ‘common sense and science’ tell us that ‘it is surely evident that when small children are taught language, religion, basic moral rules, or whatever, this education is just as effective, irresistible, and irrevocable as biomedical intervention is likely to be’.Footnote ⁶³ In fact common sense tells us no such thing, for the reasons provided by Habermas. Even education as fundamental to psychological development as religion, moral rules, or metaphysical beliefs can be questioned and rejected (although whether fundamental moral rules should be questioned and rejected is another matter). The reason, in short, is that critical reflection breaks the ‘quasi-natural’ status of educative content: even if it is subsequently accepted, one's relation to the content is altered through contestation.Footnote ⁶⁴ The most obvious exception is language, which holds a unique status due to its hermeneutic centrality: it is the foremost ground on which understanding occurs, allowing subsequent learning to take place.Footnote ⁶⁵ The first language learned, one's mother tongue, is incomparable even with additional languages which are learned on the basis of the first. Even so, in grammar language possesses an internal logic which allows its usage to be refined or mastered, including in opposition to the way one was taught, thus preserving the fundamental symmetry of a shared rational ground. Moral enhancement, as a unilateral and incontestable intervention, therefore remains qualitatively distinct.