Francis Fukuyama

Agency or Inevitability: Will Human Beings Control their Technological Future?"

In discussions of a posthuman future shaped by innovations in biotechnology, many people argue that it is fruitless to try to control or regulate the development of technology or the science that underlies it.  Even if single societies could impose rules on technological innovation, there is a common belief that globalization and competition make it inevitable that whatever can be done will be done.  But is this really true?  Is it the case that dangerous or problematic technologies of the past like nuclear power have escaped human control?  And is biotechnology somehow different insofar as its harms are subtle while its advantages obvious?  The talk will discuss the degree to which we can shape our future politically, and whether we will even want to.

Anders Sandberg

How much is a better brain worth? Cognition enhancement and the personal and social benefit of cognition

Human cognition has many limitations, ranging from the mildly troublesome to the tragic. Some are evolved adaptations that may no longer be optimal in our current environment, others are due to the limitations of biology and some due to the discordance between human desires and evolutionary fitness maximization. In addition there exist many individual variations that reduce the chances of living a good life. This talk aims at examining how much cognitive enhancement could affect human well-being, and the social and economic effects of enhancement.

Søren Holm

The Medicine of the Future – Long life and happiness?

Developments in medicine has long been seen a one of the main ways in which the human condition can be improved. Better medicine is going to bring us not only better health, but also longer life and perhaps even more happiness. But what can we realistically expect from medicine and what is the connection between medicine, treatment and enhancement? This paper has three aims: 1) to briefly trace the historical development of ‘the promise of medicine’, 2) to predict what medical developments we will be able to enjoy in 25 and 100 years time, and 3) to outline some of the ethical and social issues that the prediction brings into focus. It will be argued that although it is almost certain that all of the specific predictions made in the second part of the paper will turn out to be wrong, this may not be particularly important for the ethical and social analysis.

Klemens Kappel

Subversive Knowledge: Being in error about who we are

One reason that human enhancement and posthumanist thinking stirs controversy is, I believe, that it conflicts with many peoples' deeply felt views about who we are, their self-conception as one might say, or their views about what our self-conception is. In my contribution I want to take seriously this idea. The aim will be to clarify what a self-conception might be and to understand the nature of disputes involving our self-conception. The questions I want to address comprise: what is for an individual or a collective it to have a self-conception? How should we characterise moral conflicts that arise from what is allegedly a conflict regarding self-conception? In what ways can self-conceptions be wrong? Is a self-conception criticisable if based (in some sense) on false beliefs? What should we say about cases of dangerous knowledge, that is, cases where knowing the truth about some matter undermines our self-conception?

Torbjörn Tännsjö

Biological egalitarianism: A Defence

Biological egalitarianism has been used as a descriptive term, with the meaning that genetic differences between people are insignificant. If used in this way biological egalitarianism is false. However, the term can also be used in a normative manner, to the effect that we ought to level out biological differences. Should we do that? In the present paper I discuss a narrow aspect of this question: cognitive egalitarianism. I have argued elsewhere that we should not try to enhance our cognitive capacities beyond the species normal variation. Here I defend the claim that we should level out our cognitive capacities among us. At what level? I consider levelling down and levelling up, and also the idea that we should go for diversity, where each individual is granted at least one particular gift, and I argue tentatively that we should aim at a common level near the upper bound of our present species typical cognitive performance.

Lene Bomann-Larsen

A liberal view on liberal enhancement?

Should parents be legally permitted to enhance the physical and psychological traits of their children? This is a question for political philosophy insofar as it concerns which procreative measures the state may legitimately permit or prohibit citizens to take by means of law. It is also a question for political philosophy when we consider the relationship between parent and child as being in one sense a relationship between political persons. I suggest that even if enhancement does not harm the child or undermine her future autonomy, there are liberal reasons speaking against allowing current citizens to select the traits of future citizens; i.e. selection is constrained by respect for future citizens as entitled to their own conception of the good. I argue that enhancement is permissible only if it does not give the future citizen a just cause of complaint that her entitlement to her own conception of the good has been violated. I thus conclude that on the condition that we can establish an overlapping consensus between reasonable conceptions of the good such that the converging conception will include the future citizens’ possible conceptions (if reasonable), then enhancement of traits conducive to the converging conception is not a violation of her entitlement and thus not at odds with political  liberalism. However, I do raise some questions about the prospects of such convergence.

Gert Balling

Art as Experimentarium for Consequences of Technology Insinuating Itself Into the Human Body

Arts for art's sake is a thing of the past. Art does not only refer to itself, but reflects the outside world and often acts as a catalyst for certain tendencies in society. That also goes for the merging of man and technology. Some artists reflect contemporary technology and use it as material for considerations on the role of technology in society, and imagine, sometimes even visualize, how this cohabitation will turn out. To the society at large the technical development in the form of gene therapy, cloning etc. is what matters today, but to the individual, what matters is finding new points of reference, that can define the nature of human existence. In my presentation, the back cloth will comprise the disappearance of the representation of reality into the information society, as well as an account of the bearing, which modern technology – in the form of the computer – has on the artistic analysis of this reality. The drama itself will display contemporary artists that all include the human body in their works and have a very direct approach to the abolition of the difference between natural and artificial – or rather address the consequences of technology insinuating itself into the human body.

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen

Treating symptoms rather than causes? On “enhancement” and social oppression

Some enhancements of human beings are enhancements irrespective of oppressive or otherwise objectionable social norms and ideals, e.g. increasing people’s life expectancy. Others are partly, or wholly, enhancements for those involved only because of the existence of unjust norms and ideals. For instance, certain kinds of genetically determined “disabilities” are often said by defenders of the social model of disabilities to be disadvantageous only, or largely, because of discrimination against “disabled” people. Suppose we could ensure through identity-preserving genetic manipulation that in the future no one would be born with such "disabilities": should we do so? Some theorists think that we shouldn’t. In their view to “enhance” human beings in the relevant dimensions would be to treat symptoms of unjust social norms through a technological fix that ensures that everyone conforms to these norms. What we should do instead is to address the underlying causes of the relevant regrettable state of affairs, i.e. the existence of unjust social norms pertaining to "disabilities", by reconfiguring these norms. In my talk I will discuss the cogency of this view.

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

The new human and the last human in 20th century fiction

Literature has presented many visions of what a new human could be, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to contemporary science fiction. This paper will argue that literature in the 20^th century shifted its emphasis on the character of the new human twice: from a spiritual change predominant in the era after Nietzsche over a reaction to the rhetoric of the new human in societal changes to fictions concerning with the bodily changes made possible by technology. Drawing on examples from work throughout the period with an emphasis on later contributions by Kazuo Ishiguro and Michel Houellebecq, I will argue that literature’s primary contribution to the debate on new human and last human lies in its demonstration of the inter-human consequences of a posthuman condition.

Updated: 7 April 2010