On Transhumanism And Eugenics

Transhumanism as anti-ableist praxis

Wikimedia informs me that this is a picture of a “transhumanist breakfast” with “lots of antioxidants, fibers, nutrients and placebo effect.” Anders Sandberg from Oxford, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I.

The philosopher Emile Torres is very against transhumanism¹ because they think it’s “eugenics on steroids.”²

To be sure, an upsetting number of transhumanists endorse racist, classist, and ableist viewpoints. Far too many transhumanists believe in scientific racism: partially because they grew up in a racist society; partially because many transhumanists alieve that if some information is forbidden, it must be because it’s a profound truth the Man doesn’t want you to know; partially because it’s difficult for anyone to grasp all the subtleties of the complex field of behavioral genetics. And even transhumanists who don’t agree with scientific racism can be profoundly weird about intelligence, valorizing it over many other equally important traits for a person to have.³

But not all racists or people who are kind of weird about intelligence are eugenicists. Eugenics is a specific thing.

Eugenics was a late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideology that argued that people should be selectively bred the way we selectively breed dogs or rosebushes. In some cases, eugenicists supported forcible sterilization. The Nazis are the most famous example, but support for forcible sterilization was pervasive among eugenicists. For example, the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell found that the state could forcibly sterilize disabled people: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

But the eugenics movement made more profound errors. Eugenicists often assumed that race and class were a good proxy for desirable traits. They completely failed to realize that people of color and poor people might tend to be sicker and less well-educated because of the effects of poverty and racism. British eugenicists had particularly puzzling views: Britain had very little class mobility, and it’s unhinged to think someone has superior genes in the twentieth century because one of their ancestors was a key ally of the Tudors during the War of the Roses.  I’ve written more about my thoughts on the eugenics movement and the lessons longtermists can learn from it here.

None of this has anything to do with whether it would be desirable for humans to echolocate? Science fictional, yes; racist, no. No race of humans can echolocate.

Eugenics involves ranking humans as they actually exist. Transhumanism mostly concerns itself with traits no human has ever had—from immortality to voluntary control over your hormones to the ability to copy yourself millions of times over—and as such is not eugenicist.

II.

But the prospect of echolocation isn’t really what makes people cringe about transhumanism. What makes people cringe is proposed technologies that alter people’s brains, making them smarter or kinder or happier.

There’s this sort of liberal taboo on the idea that different mental abilities are in your brain. It’s an instinctive flinch, not an explicit belief, because if you make the statement explicit it’s obviously wrong.⁴

I am worse at controlling my emotions than the average person is. My difficulties controlling my emotions are likely genetic: many of my relatives have similar problems, which they handle in better and worse ways. It’s not a choice: in fact, I’ve put significantly more effort into learning to control my emotions than a normal person, because I have to if I want to live a normal life. It’s unfathomably cruel to my parents to say it’s their fault and if they’d done their jobs I would have grown up normal: they did their best, and many parents far worse than them wound up with neurotypical children because of a different roll of the neurochemistry dice.

I have friends with learning disabilities, developmental disabilities, and intellectual disabilities. It’s not kind or fair to say that, if they tried harder or had been better-educated, they would be able to read a map or learn French or work a job that involves sending emails. Some people are born unable to learn a second language, and even an extraordinary effort won’t allow them to do so.

A lot of people might object that I’m talking about disabilities, and no one ever said that disabilities aren’t inborn. But my genes can’t read the DSM. Mental and psychiatric disabilities are created through a social process of identifying kinds of mind that, in our society as it’s currently arranged, tend to cause difficulties for others and the person themself. There is no reason to believe that this process would identify all and only the mental differences that are biological.

Further, a lot of mental and psychiatric disabilities, such as ADHD, are nothing but the far end of traits that are normally distributed in the population. This is one reason that a lot of mental health diagnoses seem like they don’t carve reality at the joints: they’re drawing an arbitrary line to separate out the people whose problems are bad enough that the medical system wants to help them. So if we agree that severe ADHD has a significant biological component, we should agree that ADHD traits in general have a significant biological component—including for normal people and people with a below-average number of ADHD symptoms.

Further, these biological traits can sometimes be changed through biological means. I take a daily pill that makes my emotions more manageable. I still have far bigger reactions to things than most people, but I’m less likely to spiral into a pit of despair. Sometimes I take a pill that makes me more energetic and eager to work. Other people take pills that make them less anxious or more anxious or less depressed or less interested in sex or any number of other changes.

The transhumanist point is that biological means don’t stop at treating disability. Stimulants and anti-anxiety medications make everyone more energetic and less anxious, respectively, even if they don’t have a diagnosis. If I can take a pill to make my emotions more manageable, maybe a neurotypical could take a pill to become even calmer—or more overcome by storms of feeling. As we learn more about the world, we’ll gain more and more power to shape our own minds, and we must think how to exercise this power responsibly.

III.

Not all deliberate attempts to change the next generation's traits are eugenicist. If we eradicate lead pollution, the next generation will be smarter,⁵ but Torres agrees that we shouldn’t keep pouring lead into the atmosphere. The largest selective breeding program in the world is Dor Yeshorim, which provides genetic testing so that Orthodox Jews who are carriers for genetic diseases can avoid marrying other carriers. If you went up to a participant in Dor Yeshorim and called it eugenicist or compared it to the Nazis, they'd punch you in the face and you’d deserve it.

The usual way of squaring this circle, I think, is to valorize normality. It’s all right to avoid creating disabled people or to bring disabled people up to normal. But it’s not all right to try to create people who are more abled than normal or to use medicine to become more abled than normal yourself.

I think this viewpoint is profoundly ableist.

Disability rights advocates have long distinguished between disability and impairment. If you’re impaired, you can’t do something. If you’re disabled, society doesn’t accommodate your disability.

Normality is about disability, not impairment. From the perspective of a Martian, not being able to walk is no different than not being able to fly. The difference is purely that, because most humans can walk, we build things like stairs that assume that everyone can walk. If you lived in a society of birdpeople, you would have equal difficulties with stairless buildings that assume everyone can fly up to the second story. Many universal human impairments are shockingly grave to a Martian eye: if nearly all humans were immortal, how horrific would we find aging?

The transhumanist alternative is morphological freedom: the right of each person to self-determine which changes to make to their own body and mind.⁶ I want to highlight the fundamental difference from eugenics. A eugenicist believes they know the right sort of person to be, and it’s suspiciously similar to the eugenicist herself. A transhumanist humbly admits her ignorance, admires the diversity of possible ways people can be, and believes we should allow each person to decide for herself.

Some impairments, like Tay Sachs, are really bad and we can predict that no one would choose to have them. But many people with certain disabilities—such as autism and Deafness—want to continue to be disabled. If the goal is to be normal, it’s irrational for a Deaf person to refuse a cochlear implant or an autistic person to refuse a hypothetical cure. If the goal is morphological freedom, disabled people who prefer to be disabled can do so—an enormous protection for the rights of the disabled.

But the morphological freedom mindset also helps people who would prefer not to be disabled. In the public imagination, disability is a tragedy. It’s impossible to imagine a disabled life worth living; disabled people just lie in bed all day contemplating how badly they want to walk. Whenever disabled people manage to do anything but suffer, it’s so inspirational that we might as well throw a parade.

To someone who really believes in morphological freedom, different kinds of impairment aren’t fundamentally different. You might prefer to be able to walk or fly, see or echolocate, but not having these abilities doesn’t make your life a pit of unimaginable suffering. Everyone, under current conditions, lacks some abilities that they would really rather have. It is true that some are better-accommodated than others, and we should work on accommodating everyone as much as we can. But, if someone really internalizes morphological freedom, disability is just a natural form of human variation.

A morphological freedom mindset concretely benefits disabled people. For example, many people reject using a wheelchair because it makes them “feel disabled”—even if using a wheelchair allows them to do more things with less pain. Nondisabled people often view disabled people using a wheelchair as “giving up,” instead of as taking advantage of human enhancement technology to transcend their natural limitations. Of course, no one has to take advantage of a particular piece of human enhancement technology if they don’t want to (morphological freedom!). But I think many people would be happier if they were exposed to the idea that what matters is your ability to reach your goals, not whether you’re a member of a group that society stigmatizes.

I have a friend who had cancer and had to choose between a surgery that had a higher chance of cancer recurrence and a surgery that would leave her using a prosthetic. Of course there are many good reasons to accept a higher risk of cancer recurrence in order to keep your leg: morphological freedom means it’s okay to value your body image over some increased risk to your life. But it seemed clear to me that her transhumanism helped her think clearly about making the decision. Instead of flinching away in horror at the prospect of being visibly disabled, she could think about it as a situation with tradeoffs and decide that her goals for her life were best met with the prosthetic. The near-universal reaction among her transhumanist friends wasn’t grief or sympathy, but appreciation for the triumph of medicine over nature and her getting to have a badass robot leg. I think very few amputees experience that level of community support. And, of course, both prosthetics with microprocessors in them and leg-sparing cancer surgeries are human enhancement technologies.

Many individual transhumanists are ableist; we live in an ableist society. But properly understood transhumanism is, I think, one of the least ableist philosophies about disabled people. And so it is very different from eugenics.

1. The belief that we should develop and make available various forms of “human enhancement” technologies that would give people longer lives, new senses, wings, better math skills, emotions incomprehensible to baseline humans, and anything else you can imagine.

2. This was originally a section in my recent article for Asterisk that was cut due to not fitting in the flow of an argument.

3. I blame Former Gifted Kid Syndrome.

4. Of course, in reality, all complex human behaviors are the product of the interaction between biology and the environment. A person might have a brain that is naturally less good at sound-shape correspondences than normal, and get an excellent education and become a skilled reader. A different person might have a brain that is naturally somewhat better at sound-shape correspondences than normal, and go to a terrible school and wind up functionally illiterate.

5. You don’t have to have a strong opinion on the complex subject of what IQ actually measures to know that lead poisoning lowering people’s IQs points to something real.

6. Questions of what kind of people we should create are complicated and many transhumanists disagree about them.