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Human Nature and Respect for the Evolutionarily Given: a Comment on Lewens

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Abstract

Any serious ethical discussion of the enhancement of human nature must begin with a reasonably accurate picture of the causal-historical structure of the living world. In this Comment, I show that even biologically sophisticated ethical discussions of the biomedical enhancement of species and speciel natures are susceptible to the kind of essentialistic thinking that Lewens cautions against. Furthermore, I argue that the same evolutionary and developmental considerations that compel Lewens to reject more plausible conceptions of human nature pose equally serious problems for some prominent critiques of biomedical enhancement that presuppose the existence of a “given” biological potential that can be distorted by agentic cultural influences.

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Notes

  1. See Ghiselin (1974), Hull (1978), Sober (1980), Mishler and Brandon (1987), Okasha (2002), de Queiroz (2007).

  2. Cohen (2011, p. 209) goes further in arguing that some explicitly disvalued givens, such as bad aspects of human nature, should be accepted as givens from nature rather than shaped or controlled, since we should value the traits that comprise human nature irrespective of whether they are valuable for reasons other than because they are given.

  3. One could argue that coding regions of the genome carry information about the structure of their corresponding RNA transcripts, but the latter are far removed from the ultimate phenotypic outcome, which is modulated by a legion of intervening nongenetic developmental processes.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Guy Kahane and an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This work was supported by a Visiting Fellowship at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Boston University, 745 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Russell Powell

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  1. Russell Powell
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Correspondence to Russell Powell.

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Powell, R. Human Nature and Respect for the Evolutionarily Given: a Comment on Lewens. Philos. Technol. 25, 485–493 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-012-0090-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-012-0090-7

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