A Brief Critique of Two Claims about the Social Value of Biotechnological Enhancements

Introduction

Enhancement technologies are often described in such a way as to emphasise the welcome altered state they confer on users; this state differs in degree from what is an expected range for human capacity. A comprehensive list of enhancements may therefore include uncontroversial social arrangements, such as wide access to education, improved sanitary conditions or nutrition, or the implementation and use of a vast array of novel technologies, such as psychoactive substances, gene therapy, prosthetics and computer interfaces, which may (or may not) enhance specific physical, mental or cognitive traits of the individual user.

A philosophical approach broadly connected with libertarianism has become synonymous with a pro-enhancement technology debate.¹ Ethical libertarianism ranks liberty or freedom at the core of socio-political relations; defining the freedom to choose one’s own life path without others’ interference as the source and condition of all other moral goods.² Morality flourishes in a free society: meaning that there must follow unconditional access and use of certain (enhancement) technologies, as long as this freedom is mutual and is not used to harm others.³ This shift to consequentialist ethics—how our actions benefit and affect others—involves a second claim: that society is ethically obligated to provide people with these kinds of choices.

Our principal object is to review these two claims separately; although they are often considered as logically following. Our critical comments are confined to some major deficiencies within each of the individual claims made, and how they fit in an overall libertarian framework. Our article is therefore only a modest start to a critique of libertarian ethics in respect to the enhancement debate.

Defining Libertarianism

Libertarianism is a kind of ethical egoism:⁴ judgements (in terms of the means decided as best to achieving goals) are made from an internal perspective that presumes to take on a self-interest motivation.⁵ The protagonist values their own preference satisfaction above all else. How egoism is logically articulated need not detain us for too long. Libertarianism can be thought of as a theory of ethical rationalism that involves the application of reason, rather than feeling and mere inclination, to find moral truths.⁶ It is also universal in the sense that the propositions apply to each and all persons in all relevantly similar circumstances; and impartial in the sense that the propositions apply to persons irrespective of their arbitrary considerations. The distinguishing feature of libertarianism, however, is that it maintains that prudential choices ought to be left to the individual to make, and therefore imposing one’s will on another robs their actions of moral value.

The libertarian axiom is freedom from interference (i.e., a negative right), which excludes compulsion and external coercion. People want access to technologies without frustration, interference, domination, or need for approval or permission from any other. Interestingly, while this keeps paternalism at bay, freedom is also “the joy of choosing (and changing at will) our own path through life”.⁷ We might surmise that freedom, in this sense, is not merely an inference that we may do something, but also that we must also be able to do it and have the means to do it.⁸

Libertarianism has attracted a number of detractors in recent years—perhaps because of the tendency for related capitalist theories of liberty, property rights, and self-interest to excuse activities which many see as socially unjust.⁹ The enhancement debate, however, is an opportunity to narrow in on the particular ethical deficiencies of a theory of liberty. In this article, we intend to avoid being sidetracked into a larger debate about libertarianism, and confine our review to just two, related claims: enhancement as a moral good, and the social imperative of technological enhancement.

I. Enhancement as a Moral Good

This is the claim that an “enhancement” raises a physical or psychological state of the protagonist: “[i]n terms of human functioning, an enhancement is by definition an improvement of what went before”.¹⁰ Technologies, therefore, are...