Transhumanism
Is More Dangerous Than You Might Think
If there is nothing special about being human,
there is no essence of our humanness that we
must hold in trust for future generations.
That means we are free to use the new
technoscience, as the transhumanists advocate
we should, to alter humans so that they become
"post-human," that is, not human at
all as we know it. In other words, there would
be many less or perhaps no ethical barriers to
seeking the transhumanists' utopian goal, that
humans will become an obsolete model. This
would be achieved through our redesigning
ourselves using technoscience -- or perhaps
robots doing so. Instead of our designing
them, they could redesign us! We used to
regard humans as special on the basis that
they had a soul, a divine spark, and animals
did not. But, today... unethical interventions
that contravene that dignity, such as
designing our children, making a baby from two
same-sex people, creating human-animal
hybrids, cloning humans, using human embryos
as a "manufacturing plant" to
produce therapeutic agents, euthanasia, and,
with the new neuroscience, perhaps most
worrying of all, designing, controlling or
intervening on our minds are in planning.