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Notes
Bernard Williams, “The Human Prejudice,” in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, ed. Bernard Williams (Princeton University Press, 2008), 135–52. See Section 5.2 for further discussion of Williams’ arguments.
The impact my commitments about moral status will have on my arguments deserves its own separate investigation.
Agnieszka Jaworska and Julie Tannenbaum, “The Grounds of Moral Status,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018).
Whether potential or rudimentary sophisticated capacities constitute grounds for moral status is left open. All the cases I will deal with involve beings possessing at least sophisticated capacities. Moreover, an entity’s possessing these capacities are the grounds for an entity’s interests mattering for the entity’s own sake, therefore these capacities must be morally relevant.
The intuition that human persons have a higher moral status than non-human animals due to their higher sophisticated capacities is a common justification for these last two assumptions. See David DeGrazia, “Moral Status as a Matter of Degree?,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 46, no. 2 (2008): 181–98; Jeff McMahan, “Our Fellow Creatures,” Journal of Ethics 9, no. 3–4 (2005): 353–80; Mary Anne Warren, “The Concept of Moral Status,” in Moral Status (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Christine M Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
I assume inviolability tracks moral status. Higher status entities’ interests to continue to live matter more than the equivalent interests of entities of lower moral status. Therefore, higher moral status will imply higher inviolability. Some might object to differences in inviolability, but absolutism of inviolability does not fit our intuitions. For instance, most people accept it is permissible to kill a person if necessary to prevent a vast number of deaths. Many others accept it is permissible to kill an enemy combatant in certain circumstances. Some who accept non-human animals have some inviolability also accept they may be sacrificed to save a person. I will briefly address the specific objection that nothing could have higher inviolability than persons shortly but given that I will be assuming supra-persons are possible, I will also be assuming inviolability is not all-or-nothing. For arguments against absolutism of inviolability and supra-persons having higher inviolability, see Jeff McMahan, “Cognitive Disability and Cognitive Enhancement,” Metaphilosophy 40, no. 3–4 (2009): 598–600.
Neil Levy et al., “Are You Morally Modified?: The Moral Effects of Widely Used Pharmaceuticals,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 21, no. 2 (2014): 111–25; Dimitris Repantis et al., “Modafinil and Methylphenidate for Neuroenhancement in Healthy Individuals: A Systematic Review,” Pharmacological Research 62, no. 3 (September 2010): 187–206.
Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, chap. 5.
M Crockett, “Moral Bioenhancement: A Neuroscientific Perspective,” Journal of Medical Ethics 40, no. 6 (June 2014): 370–371; Thomas Douglas, “Moral Enhancement,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 25, no. 3 (August 2008): 228–245; Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, “The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 25, no. 3 (2008): 162–77.
Notwithstanding feasibility issues, arguments about supra-personal moral status can have implications for the moral status of current persons. See David DeGrazia, “Genetic Enhancement, Post-Persons and Moral Status: A Reply to Buchanan,” Journal of Medical Ethics, no. 38 (2011): 135–39.
Allen Buchanan, “Moral Status and Human Enhancement,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 37, no. 4 (September 2009): 346–81.
The position that persons have the highest moral status is compatible with my definition and assumptions about moral status. It is also compatible with the possibility of moral status enhancement, but denies it is conceptually possible for persons to undergo moral status enhancement.
Jeff McMahan, “Cognitive Disability and Cognitive Enhancement,” in Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson (John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 345–67.
Thomas Douglas, “Human Enhancement and Supra-Personal Moral Status.,” Philosophical Studies 162, no. 3 (February 2013): 479.
Jason T. Eberl, “Can Prudence Be Enhanced?,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 43, no. 5 (September 2018): 506–526.
Some might believe preferences matter on their own due to having certain properties. The preferences have moral status, but not the agents who possess them. In that case, if those properties could be enhanced, then we could create beings whose preferences matter more than our preferences. I expect that most of my arguments could be recast in that terminology without talk of supra-persons, but I will not be pursing that avenue here.
Again, I do not want to specify which of these capacities are necessary or sufficient to producing higher moral status. Instead, I merely assume that the orchestrated radical enhancement of some of them would plausibly lead to a higher moral status. It also does not matter for my arguments the technical method used, I mention embryo selection merely as an illustration and because this method can produce drastic changes (see Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom, “Embryo Selection for Cognitive Enhancement: Curiosity or Game-Changer?,” Global Policy 5, no. 1 (2014): 85–92.).
If they are likely to be wrong, then all the worse for the case for creating supra-persons. In that case, the investigations here can still be justified as a matter of risk assessment but are unnecessary to establish the fact that attempting to create supra-persons carries important risks.
One can counterargue that the difference in moral status between persons and supra-persons is unlike the one between non-human animals and persons. The supra-persons’ advocate would have to establish this additional fact; my arguments show that the mere increase in moral status is not sufficient to obtain his desired conclusion. The case of our treatment of non-human animals shows there is nothing in the increase of moral status alone that indicates supra-persons will not harm us wrongly. If there is some further fact about supra-persons beyond them having higher moral status than persons (e.g., having vastly higher moral status), then we lack arguments for it and for believing it implies they will not harm us wrongly.
A promising new argument is to claim that non-human animals lack some relevant capacity that partially grounds moral status and that once increased would vastly decrease the likelihood of wrongful harms. For instance, non-human animals might lack moral agency and, therefore, be incapable of acting wrongly in the first place. However, increasing our moral agency would vastly decrease wrongful harms. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this argument. I lack space to properly address it. However, it is still true that we wrongly harm non-human animals more than they harm each other even if they are not wrong in doing so. It would be odd if increasing moral agency (or some other capacities only persons currently possess) vastly decreased wrongful harms but introducing moral agency (or other capacities) had no effect on harms.
This argument does not imply certain strictly individual interests matter more than impersonal interests nor does it suggest some measure of comparison between the two. It merely relies on the fact that we have reasons to avoid an outcome that would make our lives worse, regardless of impersonal gains.
Douglas, “Human Enhancement and Supra-Personal Moral Status.”
How persons count these harms might not matter in impersonal terms, but they matter when assessing our reasons for and against creating supra-persons.
David DeGrazia, “Enhancement Technologies and Human Identity,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 30, no. 3 (June 2005): 261–283.
Psychological connections are strong psychological relations. On David Lewis’ terminology, psychological relatedness measures the overall strength of all relevant psychological relations between two person-stages' psychological properties. Psychological connectedness measures the minimal psychological relatedness among all pairs of person-stages belonging to a given set. Psychological continuity refers to the minimal psychological relatedness between all sequential person-stages. Usually, psychological relatedness is lower between distant times, thus connectedness decreases as we grow older, but continuity tends to stay the same. It is continuity that matters. In cases of extreme longevity, the same Methuselah lives to 969 years even though his 900 years-old self barely resembles juvenile 100 years-old Methuselah. Although he loses connectedness, he does not significantly lose continuity.
David Lewis, “Survival and Identity,” in Philosophical Papers Volume I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 55; Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing (Oxford University Press, 2002), 39; Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984), 196.
Josh Shepherd, Consciousness and Moral Status (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
Parker Crutchfield, “Moral Enhancement Can Kill,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 43, no. 5 (September 2018): 568–584; Nina Strohminger and Shaun Nichols, “The Essential Moral Self,” Cognition 131, no. 1 (April 2014): 159–171; Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, chap. 5. There would still be a difference on how they ground it. Possessing a certain level of moral capacities would ground a certain level of moral status, whereas the continuous holding of sufficiently similar moral capacities would ground personal identity.
Buchanan, “Moral Status and Human Enhancement.”
Nicholas Agar, “Why Is It Possible to Enhance Moral Status and Why Doing so Is Wrong?,” Journal of Medical Ethics 39, no. 2 (February 2013): 67–74.
McMahan, “Cognitive Disability and Cognitive Enhancement,” 2010.
I do not mean the unenhanced would necessarily share more. In a careful and gradual change, supra-persons might share even more connections with past persons by virtue of having more mental states to connect with and because those changes could be intentional. My goal here is to argue that there is a real possibility they would share less, not that they would necessarily do so.
McMahan, The Ethics of Killing.
One might counter that we should take supra-John’s interests into consideration, but we do not normally consider the individual interests of non-existent people. That supra-John’s life might be extremely fulfilling can only present an impersonal reason for creating him, which is not under consideration in this argument.
McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 231.
Samuel Scheffler, Why Worry About Future Generations?, Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Nick Bostrom, “The Future of Human Evolution,” in Death and Anti-Death: Two Hundred Years after Kant, Fifty Years after Turing (Ria University Press, 2004), 339–71.
Persson and Savulescu, “The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity.”
If one believes all moral reasons should be impersonal reasons, one will still have to concede that individual interests do offer a basis for action and hence reasons against replacement. Additionally, the continuity of generations might have impersonal value, but this matter will not be explored here.
As stated by Derek Parfit “most of us believe that we also have some agent-relative moral reasons” Derek Parfit, On What Matters: Volume Three (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 365.
For instance, see Michael Smith, David Lewis, and Mark Johnston, “Dispositional Theories of Value,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 63 (1989): 89–174.
A repenting drug addict desires the drug but does not desire to desire the drug. He values being addiction-free and thus desires not to desire it even though he desires it.
Scheffler, Why Worry About Future Generations? This disposition is not limited to those who expect to have children, therefore it cannot be completely explained by the desire to have genetic descendants. It also extends into the indefinite future, while few people desire that their specific line of genetic descendants extends into the indefinite future (see pp. 60-61 of the above work).
Williams, “The Human Prejudice.”
Julian Savulescu, “Moral Status of Enhanced Beings: What Do We Owe the Gods?,” in Human Enhancement, ed. Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Agar proposes a different argument that appeals to species membership. He claims that species-specific experiences determine what is moral to that species. Therefore, although harm to persons would be morally permissible from the standpoint of supra-persons, it might be morally impermissible according to that of persons, because they would not value the benefit gained by supra-persons who have not had specific human experiences. My own arguments here are more modest in that I do claim humans have their own sphere of morality, only that certain individual interests (that are not tied to one’s species) will be harmed if current human persons are replaced by radically different supra-persons. See Nicholas Agar, Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (MIT Press, 2010), 13; Agar, “Why Is It Possible to Enhance Moral Status and Why Doing so Is Wrong?”
.Joao Fabiano, “Virtue theory for moral enhancement,” AJOB Neuroscience 12, no. 2–3 (2021): 89–102.
Acknowledgements
I am thankful for the several rounds of feedback I received from Jeff McMahan, Julian Savulescu and Joshua Shepherd. Roger Crisp, Samuel Scheffler, Allen Buchanan, Guy Kahane, Tom Douglas, Stephen Campbell and Parker Crutchfield also offered valuable commentary. Any remaining shortfalls are my sole responsibility.
Funding
Research supported by Grant #2019/22383-5 from the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).
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Fabiano, J. Persons vs. supra-persons and the undermining of individual interests. J Value Inquiry 58, 53–72 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09868-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09868-0