Playing God with human nature.

Rebecca Roache on Ethics etc discusses arguments in favor and against that sort of bio-engeneering that she calls "human enhancement" ("that is, the use of medicine and technology to raise human capacities above what we might consider to be normal", as she writes) based on the notion of "human nature". I posted a reply there, saying that intuitively the strongest objection against the development or the making available of technologies for human enhancement has to do with their threatening human equality and diversity. (Equality, in so far as they will allows the richest and more powerful to develop their competitive advantage as against the poorest, and diversity in that the process is subject to market pressures and it will prize those capacities that are of current market value as opposed to those which are truly valuable or can be discovered to be valuable.)

This is the sort of reasons that I would give for my opposition against the development or availability of technologies of human enhancement. However, this argument relies on further undiscussed premises, namely that human equality and human diversity are valuable. These premises are far from self -evident (they are even contradictory, when diversity and equality are understood as referring to equality and diversity in the same respect.) I myself do not believe that equality as such is unconditionally valuable.

In this point, I shall try to explain why I think that the sort of equality and diversity that are threatened by human enhancement techniques are important. The funny thing is that my explanation for this connects back to the fundamental theme of that threat, namely whether human nature has direct normative implications.

In this post, I argued for a view of flourishing that was connected to the idea of human nature, where human nature is understood not so much in terms of empirical generalizations, but in terms of those features which are central for our self-image as humans, features such that if somebody were lacking them we would not recognize her anymore as a human being. This applies also at the species level: the philosophically interesting notion of human nature regards features such that we would not recognize as "human" a species that did not have such characteristics.

Now I think that human equality is a fundamental aspect of human nature in this sense. One of Aristotle's arguments in favor of "constitutional government" was the fact that no man on earth is superior to every other man and every other group of man in virtues and judgment. (Aristotle famously wrote - in the politics - that a group of somewhat average virtuous man can be wiser, collectively, than the most virtuous individual.) While Aristotle thought that this reasoning included only males and Greeks, I believe it applies to the human species in full generality. Similar remarks were made by Hobbes, who wrote in the Leviathan that no man is cleverer than others to a significant degree (he also wrote, relevantly, that no man was stronger than others to such a degree that a group of other people could not threaten his life).

Now such facts about humans are the sort of facts, I believe, that characterize the human species to such a degree that a species to which these facts did not apply would not be anymore recognizable as the "human" species anymore. Human enhancement, therefore, threatens a sort of equality which is deeply importance in that it characterizes ourselves as species in a way that is central for our self-image as humans.

This example is also useful to explain the sort of reasoning which leads, I believe, to determining something as an aspect of human nature in a normatively significant sense. The idea of human equality that I just spoke about is one of these truths which, although empirical or descriptive in a sense, is subject to moral learning of a sort. It became to be part of our self image as a species, historically speaking, in a process that is marked by significant moral change (some people would say "progress"). I believe that the statements that humans are equal in the sense I just described looks as a factual descriptive statement, on the face of it, but could cannot be justified in "purely" empirical terms, or better, to people who see the world through morally distorted lens and who are not cognitively impaired or irrational (in any other sense-if you like).

The process through which we acquired the image of ourselves as a species of individuals who can be different, but not so significantly different that any one man is distinctively superior to any other man (or group) was clearly marked by its dependence from the acquisition of a "moral" outlook. And I believe that still any possible justification for this claim cannot work if it is taken in isolation from a certain way of framing and weighing "empirical observations", which in turn is not independent from our moral outlook . And this is true, despite the idea that the business of descriptive propositions should be that of "mirroring" the world, according to the "naive realist view".

A similar reasoning can be made about the idea of diversity. The idea of diversity that I have in mind is one that is coherent with the sort of equality I have referred to above. Side by side with equality, a mark of the human species is the diversity in people's traits, characters, and faculties. This type of diversity is not in opposition with equality, on the contrary it makes it possible. For the reason why people can be said to be equal in some fundamental sense, is that there are so many different traits, characters, abilities, and so on, - in short - there are too many dimensions along which the value of a human being can be determined or appreciated. This makes it difficult if not impossible, to compare the "excellence" of two different people (as everybody who has more than one friend knows).

Human essence, human flourishing and liberal rights.

The most important questions of ethics are, arguably, what is a virtuous behavior, and what counts as a good life.
According to a philosophy inspired by Aristotle, the answer to this question depends largely from our answer to another question, namely: what is human nature? This is because in order to live well or flourish one must exercise those activities that are characteristic of human nature to a high degree.

Many people think that human nature cannot be defined.

Other people think that, even if human nature can be defined, it has no importance for moral questions whatsoever, and even for the question "how should I live?", "how can I flourish?".

Those people are usually political liberals, who think that a human being should be free to give his life the shape he or she prefers, provided that they do not provoke serious harm in others. They also believe that if we take seriously the idea that human beings have a nature, and that questions concerning flourishing depend on them, we will sooner or later abandon liberalism, the idea that certain basic individual freedoms should be protected by the institutional arrangements of a just polity.

You will now see that illiberal consequences do not follow necessarily from thinking that the idea of human flourishing is partly determined by the idea of human nature . I shall now try to present what, in my view, was the biggest discovery of Ancient Greek reflection, and how this discovery puts us in the right direction to solve the question about the human good and the nature of the virtues, a direction that does not undermine, but on the contrary supports, the idea of a liberal community.

According to Aristotle the highest good is what is always wanted for its own sake and is never wanted for the sake of something else. This is widely agreed to be happiness. (Nicomachean Ethis, book I). But everybody can agree about this, and still disagree with anybody else about what happiness consists in. According to Aristotle, in order to answer this question we must ask ourselves what is the proper activity (function/ergon) of a human being. And this cannot be anything but that of living a certain kind of life. What kind of life? Since living is an activity, it must be the life that comprises the highest activity a human being is capable of. But what is this?

Aristotle's answer to this question was: rational activity, that is, the activity of the rational part of the soul. Aristotle, like Plato, identified the three most basic types of activity which are characteristic of a human living thing with the three parts of the human soul: the vegetative part (or activity) concerning growth and reproduction, the perceptual part or activity, and the rational part or activity. The reason why he picked up the rational part of the soul as the one in whose activity the proper business of a human being consisted is easy to see: while we share the vegetative and the perceptual function with other living things, only man (and women) can be said to be properly rational. Hence the proper function of a human being is the exercise of the rational part of the soul, and happiness consists in the excellent exercise of this function i.e. thinking and acting according to the excellence of the rational part of one's soul. (Nicomachean Ethics Book I, 7).

As an account of human happiness, this formulation, as Aristotle recognized, leaves still a lot of ambiguity. We still do not know, for example, what is the most excellent way of using the rational part of the soul consists in. As he himself put it, this is only "an outline of the good; for we must presumably first sketch it roughly, and then later fill in the details."

I think that we can follow Aristotle and start from the assumption that rationality is so characteristic of our own picture of ourselves as a species, that we should not accept any account of human flourishing which does not include the exercise of rationality understood in some way. I will now take some further ideas from other Greek authors and try to spell out a view of human nature and of human flourishing that fits most naturally with these Aristotelian foundations, and - as I hope it will be clear - can be appropriated by contemporary liberals. The view that I am laying forward - I believe - can fill some of the gaps that Aristotle's account left open, while remaining in substantial agreement with his way of conceiving the nature of such fundamental problems.

How do we know what it means to exercise the rational part of the soul well? In order to start this question, let us come back to the idea that the ideal of excellence which applies to a human being must have some connection to his nature. But what is human nature? In a way, we have already answered this question, by saying that human nature consists in the exercise of his rational activity. This is in fact what characterizes human beings in opposition to other living beings. But "rational activity" is very vague. It seems that rational activity can be the feature of a life that is very evil, and even of a life that is full of sorrow for the person who is living it.

It seems that in order to account well for the idea of human flourishing, we cannot simply identify it with the excercise of rationality. We need a thicker characterization of our object. Following Aristotle, it is natural to try to develop this thicker characterization taking it from an examination of human nature.

But here a fundamental difficulty arises: it seems that - beside human nature - human beings live in too many different ways - think about the life of an opera singer, a fisherman, a priest, the member of an aboriginal tribe, a computer programmer, a thief, a womanizer, an Islamic fundamentalist attempting to bring out some political change by means of violent means (e.g. terrorism), so that to identify one of these ways of living with human nature means to either deny the fact of human diversity, or to express some arbitrary preference for one way of life and against some other.

I believe that, at this stage of the inquiry, we cannot reject or close our eyes in front of this fundamental truth of human existence. This means, in a way, that there is no way to circumvent the problem the diversity of human ways of life presents us with. On the other hand, we should ask us whether this is really a problem for our account. Some philosophers have reached this stage and have concluded from it that the whole Aristotelian project of understanding the virtues in terms of human flourishing, itself understood in terms of the perfection of human nature is bound to fail.

On the contrary, I believe that what we have found at this stage is simply the beginning of a plausible answer. What we should do is simply to examine what is common and irrenunciable in all those ways of life for which the question whether they are valuable or worth pursuing arises at all. I shall assume at the outset that all ways of life for which the previous question can be sensibly asked.

What all these ways or project of life have in common is their being projects. By this I mean, that the way of life of the an opera singer, a fisherman, a priest, the member of an aboriginal tribe, a computer programmer, a thief, a womanizer, an Islamic fundamentalist are all ways of life in which we can presume that the subject whose life it is in question sees something in that life as good or worth pursuing, and does some short term (or even long term) planning of her actions in such a way as to achieve the desired result.

But what does it imply that one regards some goal of life as worth pursuing? It implies, at least, that one asks oneself the question whether that goal is valuable in the first place. For what distinguishes a human being from an animal, and what clearly applies to all the people which we have described, is that the main aims around which their life is adopted as an aim in virtue of the implicit or explicit recognition of its worth. The life the an opera singer, a fisherman, a priest, the member of an aboriginal tribe, a computer programmer, a thief, a womanizer, an Islamic fundamentalist is something more than a sum of instinctual responses or automatic reactions. It is a life which, even when it is not fully autonomously chosen, is still chosen in some minimal sense or at least endorsed and valued.

I believe that the following transcendental principle is true: we cannot regard a way of life or one of our life's structuring goals as good or worth pursuing if we are not able to entertain the question whether they are good or worth pursuing. A person who is not able to conceive what it would mean that his own life goal is worthless cannot be said to be able to appreciate its worth. This is not to say that a person must often or at least more than seldomly actively doubt the worth of her own life project, an attitude that certain historically minded philosophers identify with the rise of "modernity". In some extreme cases it may only mean that one is able to regard other goals as worthless or less worth, and has therefore the conceptual resources to understand what it would mean for his own life project to be worthless or to have less worth than she currently ascribes to it. (That is to say, he is able to conceive a goal as viewed, from a subject's point of view, as an unworthy goal.) Without this capacities, a person could not be said to value a life goal or project at all.

But if we concede this, we must also concede that such a person must have the capacity to question the worth of his or her own project- if only in a way that is emotionally superficial and practically ineffective. And if this must is conceded, it is not so difficult to conclude that human beings are at the most fundamental level beings whose nature is that of asking themselves the question concerning what is good and worth pursuing. For if I am not able to ask this question, I cannot have the conceptual capacity of distinguishing worthy from worthless activities, and therefore - in virtue of the former reasoning - of regarding anything as worthy at all, and of having a life which is a human life in the fullest sense.

It follows from this, that whatever goal a man or a woman has, it must also have the goal of discovering what human flourishing or happiness is.

The activity of looking for an answer for the question "what is the good life" is - I believe - the most certain among the characteristic or essential features of human nature. If this is true, we can understand why some philosophers believe in the existence of an unsurmontable "is-ought" gap. It is true that there is no direct connection between how most people live and how one ought to live. (This the only way in which there is an is-ought gap.) But this is true only because human nature is not defined by a statistical generalization about human behavior. The truth about human nature is that human beings are not born with knowledge of what is they ought to become, and that they need to conquer this knowledge, because they cannot have lives that are fully human without it.

This is, I believe, the deepest truth which was expressed in the philosophy of Socrates, and - to a lesser degree - in that of the philosophers which viewed themselves as his followers. For the ever lasting heritage of Socrate's thought was, beside the idea that a good life is a virtuous life, an even more revolutionary principle, namely, the importance of an examined life.

Someone wrote that the essence of man is that of not having an essence. This sentence is a truth hidden by a contradictory form. For we can ascribe an essence to a human being, which is, as the former statement suggests, that we need to discover what truly defines our flourishing, perfection as human beings. So we both have and do not have knowledge about the human essence, since what we know is that its essence is that of needing to discovery what its essence is.

Aristotelian philosophers believe that the notion of human flourishing is connected to the notion of human nature. Therefore, if flourishing consists in acting according to the excellence of one's nature, and a man or woman's nature is that of having to discover what flourishing is, human flourishing includes the activity of discovering what a good life is (and the virtues that are necessary for it).

Let us finally come to the question of what are the virtues. If flourishing consists in acting according to the excellence of one's nature, and a man or woman's nature is - most deeply- that one has to discover what flourishing is, a man or woman cannot reach perfection or flourish in the fullest sense without those virtues which are required for the possibility of this discovery. We can therefore conclude that the following principle is plausibly true:
V-F:
If x is a stable disposition, required for leading a life which has among its goals that of discovering what human flourishing is, x is a virtue.

This account includes traits which are related to the characteristic ways in which human beings, as a species, learn to find answers about human flourishing, namely, by joint activity and dialogue. (This is clearly an anthropological universal if there is any.) It therefore includes traditional virtues such as honesty, but also patience, perseverance, tact, openness towards others, open-mindedness, trust, intelligence, respect for established traditions, etc.

Moreover, the Aristotelian conception of flourishing which is conceived as an excellent development of one's being, leads to view the virtues are not only means but also aspects of human flourishing, because virtues can be conceived as aspect of the mind or aspects of rational activity. They are both conditions of flourishing and aspects of that which flourishes.

Notice that in this reasoning I have started from the life of a person whose actions are structured around a goal to which he or she ascribes some worth. Of course, there might be someone who spends her own life sitting in front of tv eating chips without finding anything good or worthwhile in what she is doing, keeping on on that kind of life just out of inertia, just out of lack of or inability to desire to do anything different from that. But these lives enter in our account of the diversity of human ways of living in a different way from the former ones. The life of such a couch potato is not even a "way of life" in the fullest sense, by which I mean a way of living which might challenge our beliefs about the good life and the virtues, in the same way as we might feel challenged by the other ways of life I quoted. Alternative ways of life are not cases in which action, thinking, control and meaningfulness are reduced to some minumum, but lives which are built around a goal that are different and sometimes unconciliable. They are actualized by people who are able to take that goal as a premise for action and as a source of meaning for his daily movements and actions.

We can now finally see why there is no real contradiction between this sort of Aristotelian moral theory, which grounds statements about the good in statements about human nature, and liberal institutions. For this moral theory clearly supports in its own way liberal institution: it contributes to what Rawls calls an "overlapping consensus" over the way our polities have to be ruled.

If you are an Aristotelian in political theory, you will think that that one of the goals of the community and of the government it express is that of fostering the good life of the individual which compose it, and that the "good life" in this sense is also a virtuous life. Or more succinctly, a government must not only protect the life or the interest of its members but also (and for that reason) attempt to make them more virtuous.

Many philosophers think that if you believe this, you cannot favor liberal institution. But if my account of human nature, flourishing and of the virtues is right, this is wrong. For only an institution which guarantees certain basic liberties, such as freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of political partecipation and activity does not preclude its members the most fundamental opportunities to flourish and develop the virtues, as they are conceived here. Without basic liberal rights there cannot be the soil in which flourishing human beings, who possess virtues such honesty and open-mindedness, can grow.

Humeans, Kantians and Aristotelians as parents.

What would be the characteristics of a Humean, a Kantian or an Aristotelian parent?

The Humean mother would give a lot to her child, moved by the sentiment rather than by an abstract sense of duty. She would support the son in everything he does and see his satisfaction as hers. She would be moved by sympathy.

But the human mother may not be the best type of mother when she has more than one child. If you have two children, you must be fair between them. And acting from sentiment may not be the best way to achieve fairness. Notice that treating your children as equals does not mean giving them equal amounts of resources (i.e. money).

Consider the following example: one of your children has a great musical talent, and she is accepted by a prestigious school. You need 2000 $ a month to support him and give him this chance. The other child goes to the university in the same city where the family lives. Suppose she has failed her applications to a better college in another city, or support she did not even apply. Does it follow that the mother should give 2000 $ to the other daughter, say, to live on her own, or, if she prefers to live with the family, to spend for holidays or other leisures? I do not think so.

Treating children as equals does not mean giving them equal share of resources. It requires to achieve more complex objectives such as for example, supporting their talents equally, giving them the same opportunities equally, and the like. And this is not done, in most cases, by giving them equal shares of resources, to spend as the two children like.

The humean mother can be a very good mother when she has only one child, but may have troubles when she has more than one child. For in order to treat her children as equals, she cannot simply be guided by her sentiments. If you let your action be guided by the sentiments you may very easily end up favoring a child over the other. This will especially be when the mother finds one of the two children easier to get along with, or nicer. (According to some psychologists even beauty could condition such responses.) Or, to make a more usual example, when you recognize yourself in the career of one child more than the other. The typical example is that of a parent who wanted to become a philosopher (or a pianist, or a novelist, or to get a degree), but could not do it, and projects this ambitions on her children. (I'm sure you are familiar with this from your life, or novels and films) Suppose that such a parent has two children: one that wants to study philosophy at the university (or to study piano, or to become a writer, or simply to get a degree), and another who does not like education and finds a job immediately after the high school. The first child is much lazier than the first, she does her degree very slowly and unsuccessfully; the second is hard-working, and has even chances of setting an activity on her own. But the Humean parent treats the first child much better than the second, he favors all of her aspirations, pays her summer schools, etc... The Humean parent, who follows the voice of her hearth, is very supportive with the one of the two children, but not enough supportive with the other, the one, let us say, who has not studied but has a good idea for a business and needs the support of her family to realize her dream.

The Kantian mother, by contrast, tries to deal with the requests of her child by applying principles. In this way she avoids being misled by sentiments and prejudices. The Kantian mother adopts the principle, for example, that she should not spend the family's money to support the living expenses of a child who does not want to find a job to support herself, or the principle that she should deprive herself of money, if one child has a real opportunity, but not simply to support the hobbies or leisure activities of the child. She tries to assess if she is following a reasonable principle, instead of listening to what her hearth tells her. If the principle sounds reasonable to her, she applies it. She can be consistent because she applies the same principles to all her children: hence she can be do what fairness requires, even in complicated situations. So she will use the money for her children , when the children really need them, and she will have the strength to say “no”, when the son asks for them, even if, had she followed her hearth, she would have give him money, just to see him happy. This mother knows that if she is unable to say “no” to a son, because she loves him a lot, she will be depriving all her other children, who do not ask so much, of resources that they are entitled to have. If any other child will be in a similar situation, she know that she will follow the same principle. In this way, she can assure herself that she is treating her children as equals, and that she is not being swayed by prejudices or emotions.

But even the Kantian parent is not a perfect parent, even if she may be in general fairer than the Humean parent. The problem of a Kantian mother is that there is no antecedent criterion to establish which concrete rules should be applied in a situation that presents itself in the novel way. The Kantian mother wants to apply the principle “treats your children as equals”. She understands this as “apply the same concrete rules in your decisions towards both of your children”. But the the rule “treats your children as equal” is silent on what specific behavior should be used to deal with the first child, when the mother faces a novel situation concerning his life. The only thing that fairness commands, is that, whatever rule the mother applies to the first child, she ought to apply the same rule when she deals with a similar situation involving the second child. But the imperative of treating your children as equals is silent on what counts as a good rule to apply in the first case. The Kantian mother risks to make twice as much mistakes as the Humean mother, and to do them for the sake of respecting her principle of fairness.

For, if the Kantian mother makes a wrong decision when dealing with the situation of the first child, for example because she does not support her ambitions enough, she is going to do a wrong decision when dealing with the situation of the second child by applying a similar principle,even if she realizes now, dealing with the second child, that she could have been more generous with the first as well as with the second.

The problem arises because the Kantian mother, as well as the Humean mother's behavior, is not free from the influence of (possibly uneducated) sentiments. Suppose that the Kantian mother loves the second child more than the first, or tends to favor the second child more because she identifies more easily with her. Suppose that this mother has failed to be appropriately supportive of the first child's ambitions (because she does not identify with her, or does not love her enough.) Now the situation materializes, in which the second child has an important opportunity. The mother realizes now that it would not be generous enough towards her child, if she does not do some extra sacrifice in order to support her ambitions. She also realizes, a fortiori, that she has not been as supportive with the ambition of the first child as she should have been. She realizes, that is, that the principle which she applied in the first case was not reasonable, or that it was not reasonably applied. But given that she wants to treat her children as equals, she must decide not to support the ambition of the second child as well. A humean mother would have acted unfairly, by supporting the ambitions of the second child even thought she behaved in a different way with the first. A Kantian mother acts with fairness, but in this way fails to be appropriately generous with both children.

The problem of the Kantian mother shows the limitations of the Kantian approach in ethics. Sticking to principles and applying them in an universalistic fashion is not a guarantee of acting in the right way, unless the decision made in the first case of the application of the rule was a reasonable one in the first place.

The Aristotelian mother should overcome the problems of both the Humean mother (who acted as her sentiments or feeling moved her to act) and of the Kantian mother. The Aristotelian mother understands that it is not enough to apply reasonable rules consistently, if she does not have the practical wisdom to know how a certain rule should be applied in the first place (for example knowing how to apply the rule “be generous and supportive of your children's ambitions when they face good opportunities" in practice). Aristotelian morality realizes that knowing how to apply such rules means also having well-developed and rational sentiments and dispositions. For the problem of the Kantian mother was that she was had not been generous enough with the first child, and had failed to support her adequately when she needed this support. What prevented her to act with the right degree of generosity was her insufficient degree of empathy towards the aspirations of the first child, or her (unconscious) lack of sympathy towards the first child (a problem that did not arise when the second child found herself in a similar situation.) Aristotelian ethics knows that without a therapy of this mother sentiments towards the first child, this mother cannot apply the right rule and make the right decision in the first case. The Aristotelian mother tries to act reasonably, but knows that reason cannot tell her how much to give to her children, if it is not accompanied by well-developed emotions.

These are roughly the reasons, which lead me to favor the Aristotelian picture of morality, in which reason penetrate and shapes the sentiments, to both the Humean, based upon the sentiments, and the Kantian one, based upon pure reason.