Both anciently and now, and always and is always perplexing, is what is being, end quote. Does this question apply to the being that is asking, to us . Be so and it seems so if so, and it seems so, then to paraphrase aristotle, the inquiry and perplexity in early times and now and always is this what is human being . Our panelists are christopher toll left seven, distinguished professor of philosophy, university of south carolina, charles rubin, associate professor of political science, Duquesne University and author of eclipse of man Human Extinction and the meaning of progress. Adam kuiper of the ethics and Public Policy center, editor of the new atlantis. Christopher. Thank you very much. Its a pleasure to be here. Unlike most of the panelists so far, im not a former student of leon kass. In fact, only was introduced to you yesterday morning. So i feel the need to ask permission, can i call you leon in the [laughter] thank you. Okay. With that down, nevertheless even though im not a student, i did feel a special kinship with leon yesterday. My wife and i home school our children, and i was very surprised to hear him describe so accurately at the end of the q a session our high school curriculum, first year, bible [laughter] [applause] but i, this might be on cspan, so im not going to say more about that. [laughter] so our panel title is bioethics and the transhuman future. And in an email to me, brad wilson actually also threw into the subject heading the word posthuman future just for good measure. So the question im going to ask today is what do posthuman and transhuman mean. And im going to argue that they have no meaning. Theres no condition that could reasonably be described in either of these ways. All the conditions that receive these names are either, a, impossibilities; b, deficient human conditions; or, c, amplifications but not changes of human nature as it already exists. Everything in category c is, i think, intrinsically permissible. But some of it might be impermissible because of its side effects, and much of it is impermissible in approach; that is, the ways its reasonable to expect that we could achieve instances of c are themselves often morally impermissible. And that, ill suggest at the end, tells us something familiar about our likely future. The terms posthuman and transhuman are thought to refer to a kind of being descended from or perhaps caused by or created by human beings but i no longer of that species. So we consider our generations living now and imagine various modifications and transformations of our descendants to the point at which looking forward were no longer willing to say that those descendants are human. And this is the possibility that i deny, because everything falls into one of the three categories that ive mentioned. So three imagined possibilities that seem to me to be instances of a are the following. And the first, which leon yesterday referred to as the big enchilada, just by nature gets capitalized is that our postbe human descendants will be immortal. The second possibility as related, might primarily be forms of information that can be downloaded on to various platforms. And, third, our descendants might be transformed over time by a procession of brain computer interfaces to the point that their intelligence is in some important sense artificial. Our posthuman future would then be the future of a certain kind of machine. Now, if there were entities of my of these three sorts, they would legitimately bedeserve to be called post or transhuman. Form is nevertheless immaterial and intellective soul which itself is not identical to the person that any of us is. This description of ourselves gives us the essence of what we are, were rational animals. So anything that is not a rational animal cant be one of us, and none of the three possibilities just mentioned would or could be rational animals. Therefore are, they would not be one of ours. One of us. So could they constitute a different kind of person . Rational beings that were not rational animals . I think the answer is no for i dont recognize these three imagined outcomes as real possibilities. No material persons could by their nature be immortal, because were bodily beings and we, thus, contain the inevitable seeds of our own decay and decline. So animal in this world is immortal. But neither could a principle, or person, rather, in principle be reck lickable or downloadable as software because persons are, as certain medieval theologians thought and some contemporary personalists put it, incommunicable. This idea of the incommunicability of persons concerns their intrinsic uniqueness and seem circular in an argument like this. Persons cant replicated because theyre unique. But i think the idea can be linked to the idea of Human Dignity as found in the capacity for reason and choice. Choice is, by its nature, unreplicable and nonexchangeable. A choice that you make can always only be your choice, and it couldnt be inheritedded by a clone or repeated by the realization of a piece of software on multiple platforms. Anything not numerically identical to you, that is, not the very same living organism as you that thinks that its made a choice that you made is in error. An error, in fact, that compromises that beings autonomy, saddling it with the choices to which it has not concepted. It lives under consented. It lives under an illusion. The idea of replicable persons, downloadable persons or multiple realize bl persons is a solution. It is the only way to think about immortal persons descended from us since no merely material being can be immortal. The project of keeping material beings alive forever seems cue marichal, but i think its conceptually incoherent. There are no possible beings who could reasonably be called transhuman or posthuman who would be descended from us. I think these reasons also rule out future machine persons as envisaged in Artificial Intelligence scenarios. Merely material things are replicable, and theyre not capable of free choice and rational thought since theyre entirely determined by the laws of nature. So im not really worried about the rise of machines. Although i found many of the movies that are based on that premise enjoyable. [laughter] so the idea, the things, rather, that are envisaged that really would be posthuman for thinking into the future and thinking of something that really would be reasonable to describe as posthuman, immortal persons or persons that arent rational beings, i think, are, in fact, impossibilities. Related in certain ways to those aye just discussed, julian [inaudible] and ilk mar person have argued that the top priority for any human Enhancement Program should be moral enhancement, making human beings to be a more morally developed species. Otherwise, they say, the vast new powers would likely be used for ill with extremely bad consequences. Right . Wed be still bad people, but smarter bad people. So the project, this project, i think, is also kaymer call. Morality is, in the final analysis, about having an upright will, and this isnt something that can be made to be the case for another person. Only ones own choices and active selfconstitution can make one to be a person of a morally up right character. The attempts to make human beings moral or more moral is one that, by its own nature, cant succeed. So what about b . There are modifications to human beings that are envisaged by the prophets of the posthuman that are conceivable and perhaps will be realized to some extent in the future. Prospects that, while viewed often as unambiguous benefits to human beings by their defenders are, i think, not best thought of in that way. The most plausible, maybe was, in some case, already actual concern the parameters of human reproduction as a specifically sexual process. Obviously, reproduction without sex is a reality with ivf babies comprising a notinsignificant part of the population of the developed world. Some would like to see this become more the norm both ethically and descriptively. Those who undertake to have children should do so responsibly, screening out defective children and eventually modifying embryos or gametes. Failure to do so is viewed as a clear violation of moral responsibility. And social pressure being what it is, eventually most people will agree that the best way to have children is one that puts as much power as possible into the hands of their parents and doctors in order to bring about the desired results. Among the more extreme proponents of the posthuman its sometimes suggested or argued that this process inevitably will or should give rise to human beings becoming nonsexuallyreproducing species. And here utopian philosophy apparently meets dystopian fiction, as leon has pointed out. But for a variety of reasons, we shouldnt think of the widespread loss of sexual reproduction as a gain, even if it meant that only healthy, smart, good looking children were the result. As has already been indicated to a certain extent over last two days, of the work of thinkers like leon, c. S. Lewis, paul ramsey and many catholics give reason for thinking that the activity of sexual intercourse between loving spouses is the uniquely appropriate way for human persons to come into existence. The manufacture of persons in a lab is incompatible with their dignity as existence of a thing is be called into being at will. Loving intercourse can proceed in the hope that it will come to fruition, but this is incompatible with having confidence that one will get what one wants. And if thats true in the singular case of cloning, say, or even as i think invitro fertilization, its much more so in thinking about the future of our species. For human beings to evolve in such a way that their sexual reproductive capacities fall into disally tuesday would be a disaster for Human Flourishing. So its not a posthuman, but to use a word that we find in leons work, its not posthuman, its a form of dehumanization. What makes a proposed enhancement be on side of the boundary between b, the side of i dehumanization, and c, that which is intrinsically permissible even if it might be practically illadvised or immoral in its pursuit . Almost ten years ago with Ryan Anderson in an article edited by adam kuiper, ryan and i argued that the framework for answering this question is set by those basic goods that are con tissue bitive of Human Flourishing including life and health, knowledge, aesthetic experience, work, play, friendship, marriage, personal integrity and religion. Each offers a foundational reason for action imcommensurable with the others, each reflects an aspect of our complex, variegate nature which has potentialities pointing in many different directions. Hence, enhancement proposals and projects, the point of which is to block, damage or destroy avenues of pursuit of these basic goods, we argued, are always impermissible. And those that threaten to degrade our avenues of pursuit as a side effect are to be treated with great is the mission. Any effort to make us a nonsexuallyreproducing species falls into the first category. It directly threatens the good of marriage insofar as the realization and fruit of that good is to be found in children conceived in the marital act. And there are other possibilities. The president s council noted the possibility of using drugs or other techniques to block painful memories. This seems at odds with the goods of knowledge and personal integrity. Use of such drugs isnt necessarily a step on the road to the posthuman, but one could, i think, imagine enhancements or interventions that could similarly be disto havetive of these goods. Deliberately creating a line of human beings that couldnt see or hear, for example, would be an attempt to deprive some persons of capacities that are intrinsic to our ability to seek knowledge and would also be contrary to the good of health. Less directly, i think, some proposals or possibilities that we could imagine could distort the boundaries that enables friendship on one hand and necessary forms of privacy on the other. So some current or evolving technologies do this either by creating artificial boundaries between persons or by destroying natural but essential boundaries between persons. Technologies threaten to do the former, efforts to make human beings more or even maximally transparent as in some forms of neuroimaging or scanning threaten to do the latter. But in eroding privacy, these technologies also erode the sovereignty of the self that is necessary for selfgiving in the form of truthful communication and interpersonal trust. These are technologies and not maybe directed forms of evolution, but maybe they could be made into direct forms of evolution. And one would then need to the to worry about their effect on our capacity to pursue human goods such as friendship. Where intended to erode that capacity, they would be intrinsically wrong, but even in a case of something that was a side effect that was good in another way, there would be no real reason to think of it as transcending the human condition. Still, the sort of fluidity of this category indicates the existence of category c, forms of enhancement permissible in themselves, possible and yet in no real way post or transhuman. Is there any principled way of identifying that boundary . Are there any reasonable grounds many which to be weary of possibilities in that category . I think theres both. As for the first, my proposal which is rudimentary and in need of refinement, might be Something Like this enhancements to aspects of our bodies including our brains that are instrumental to our pursuit of basic goods are, in themselves, permissible. If we consider a range of physical enhancements that might be possible, stronger, smarter or faster human beings, more fertile human beings, diseaseresistant human being, all these are possible ways of enhancing the human that really would be conducive to the pursuit of general human goods. Moreover, human beings might evolve in time naturally towards any or all of these states, and wed have no real reason to mourn that situation. There are probably very gray areas here, and ill mention just one that i think is kind of interesting. The human form and the human face are each and sometimes both together capable of great beauty. Could human beings be modified in ways that enhance that beauty . I think they probably could. And by my argument, that would in itself be permissible. Could they be modified for the worses esthetically . Again, yes. Some of the possible motivations make the project immoral. The decipher to make desire to make human beings ugly and, thus, the attempt to modify the human to be retill january or a feline, for example, these all seem to be, in fact, denials of that good, the good of human beauty and so intrinsically impermissible. But theres going to be a gray area here, it seems, for enhancement for the sake of the beautiful and its op opposite ad plenty of disagreement. You see this even in the most basic case of tattooing. For instance. Returning to the general question of enhancing that which is instrumental to our pursuit of good, in a sense, the field seems fairly wide open. We could enhance human being into the future in many ways that would, in the short and long run, augment our capacity for the pursuit and realization of music human goods. Yet even if we did this radically, to extents not even currently imaginable, we would not be changing our nature. Human beings are rational animal, and if our descendants are rational and living beings as they would need to be, then they like us would also be with human beings, however different from us. So rather than sowing the seeds for the posthuman, wed be merely amplifying our naturallygiven capacities. But the field ought not to be quite so open for two reasons. First, as i pointed out in discussing the second cat goings side effects are always an issue, and even the intrinsically permissible can bring side effects that pose moral quandaries that should obviously be avoided entirely. What effect on competition and sport would enhancement of physical capacities have whether pursued as a familiar instance of this. The general difficulty of even knowing what are the possible side effects of conceivable enhancements makes responsible research in this area very difficult, almost to the point, it seems to me, of impossibility. And then there is the second reason. Its difficult to imagine really significant progress being made on the project of genetically improving human beings that doesnt involve research, experimentation and eventually interventions upon human embryos in ways that are morally wrong. Interventions to the discussion of those that are merely attempts to enhance. Again, the boundary here between enhancement enhancement and therapy is know tier obviously vague and this was mentioned yesterday, but seems to me essential. If there are to be interventions in human beings that fake our species morphology is an attempt to seek the good in news superior ways and which are not attempts to cure disease or alleviate disable, they should only be pursued with consenting human subjects. If expect that they path towardes the modified but in no way transcendent human would be much lower than we might otherwise expect. But heres my final point. I dont expect the Scientific Research will go forward only in morally permissible ways. So where genuine enhancements are at us a others opposed to futile attempts to create the possible or attempt that result in dehumanization, i expect our situation will the this. Many good things enjoyed by human beings will be the result of the amoral, unjustice and occasionally horrific actions of those human beings ancestors ask that is not opposed or transhuman situation to be in at all. Thank you. [applause] charles rubin. I am honored to be included in these panels honoring dr. Kaff and much appreciate the kidness of robby and brad in inviting me. Unlike so many other on these panels, my facetoface contact with dr. Cass has been quite limit. I thought i would win the least contact with him until but i am nonetheless deeply and gratefully indebted to him. His voice is one of those that i am in dialogue with in my head as im writing a presentation like im making for you today. I hope what im about to say does justice to the gratitude i feel to him, but i guess i have also have to say that the peter lawlers voice is the other the other guy in these interior monologues. He is usually considerably less patient than mr. Cass. More critical. More likely to point out the weakness of my faith, but greatly valued for all of that. Today we see wide interest in and Ongoing Research and development of artificially intelligent robots as companions, as caregivers, as sexual partners. Japan has become famous but is hardly alone, for developing caregiver robots to deal with the oncoming deficit of its own citizens for look after an aging population but its happening all over. In yesterday in the Scientific American blogs there was a posting headlined, grand