You probably remember the television show, “The Six Million Dollar Man,” featuring Lee Majors as Col. Steve Austin, the bionic man. I always found it puzzling that, in order to suggest that Austin was moving extremely rapidly, they would show him moving in slow motion. While six million dollars apparently doesn’t buy what it used to, researchers have made surprising advances in developing, to name a few, artificial limbs controlled by the brain, exoskeletons to help people with limited mobility, and artificial retinas.
The field of neuroethics addresses ethical issues that may arise when we enhance our abilities to control our bodies and brains through machinery. I think that many of the concerns expressed by ethicists about human enhancement are overstated. As is frequently noted, we have long been using technology to enhance our bodies, and these technologies can radically improve our opportunities to interact with the world without creating some dystopic, dehumanized future.
An acquaintance of mine, Caroline Benn, had virtually no hearing for most of her life. Though she is a remarkably good lip-reader, about a year ago, she received a cochlear implant to enable her to hear much better. Six months later, she wrote, “Then there are the sounds… WOW. Just mind blowing. So I always used to think a sound was a sound and nothing else. I now realise it totally ain’t that simple… sounds are now having a distinct emotional component for me.” After six more months, she reports:
In 3 weeks, it’s going to be the one year anniversary of when I had a hole drilled into my head!!! Now that I am coming up to my one-year point, I am so, so happy that I went ahead with this huge step and the whole experience. Definitely one of the better decisions in my life. There haven’t been any huge drastic improvements over the last 4-5 months or so – it’s been slow and steady. Having said that, I am still on the up and up. One thing that I like the most is that occasionally, I’ll pick out words or sentences without lipreading them. . . . It’s still hit-and-miss and I seriously doubt that I could have a phone conversation unless I was feeling like it was a good day, but it’s definitely there. The other MAJOR thing is that I am now seriously addicted to “American Idol” – which is kind of equivalent to the British “X-factor”. For the first time in my life, I am enjoying listening to people sing… and during the auditions I was hugely entertained by the people who really couldn’t sing! I am just blown away by the fact that I can tell the difference between them and that I can tell whether I enjoy someone’s voice or not. Wicked awesome!
Of course, going from having almost no hearing to having limited hearing is typically described as “therapy,” rather than “enhancement.” Why this line is thought to be morally significant, though, is often quite puzzling.
Posted by Adam Kolber on April 6, 2006 at 11:14 AM
Comments
Hi Adam,
It seems like the distributive consequences of enhancement would be about the same as the distributive consequences of elite education, i.e. an increased path-dependency from initial resources. To born rich = better education = superior earning prospects one can add born rich = access to enhancements = superior earning prospects. So it would be a culumative problem rather than a unique situation.
That being said, that doesn’t make it any less a problem.
Posted by: Paul Gowder | Apr 7, 2006 11:26:29 AM
Paul, A fair question, to which I don’t think I have yet formulated my own answer. I think a starting point for the conversation is to ask whether human enhancement presents a unique distributive justice issue or is just a variant of every other situation where resources stand to benefit some more than others. One might think the situation different because human enhancement is directed at the very raw materials that we use to make our place in the world. On the other hand, I’m not sure that financial resources are so different. I’ll keep an eye on the comments to see if anyone will purport to answer this one.
Posted by: Adam Kolber | Apr 7, 2006 10:46:17 AM
What about the distributive justice problem?
Posted by: Paul Gowder | Apr 7, 2006 9:37:40 AM