Democratic Transhumanism
James Hughes, Ph.D.
page 6 of 8
My argument is that there is no genetic basis for human rights. Is hairlessness an element of our genetic rights? If you have too much 
hair on your body, should you not be a member of our polity? Great apes, for instance, meet many of the criteria for a basic entry into our society, as members of our polity who should have certain kinds of rights. Conversely, you could be human and not a person; you could be a fetus or brain dead, which is argued in abortion rights and in the case of Terry Schiavo.
Establishing a new code for legal personhood and for citizenship in general that is personhood-centered as opposed to humanness-centered is one of the central struggles. It is a struggle that goes back to John Locke[1], who defined a citizen as a person who is a thinking being, which means this struggle is an intrinsic part of the liberal democratic tradition.
Another consequence of this focus on individual personhood as the core of our new politics is that we need to ground this progressive vision in the claim that individuals have a right to be supported in their fullest flowering of personal possibilities. We want a society where we can be all we can be as ordinary citizens. Part of being all you can be in this coming period will be having available to us, and having the rights to use, the full panoply of technological opportunities to control our reproduction, our brains, and our bodies. We will be able to overcome the disabilities that we were born with, just because we were born human 1.0.
Bioethicists are moving in this direction with us. Arthur Caplan is considered the dean of American bioethics. He and most other American bioethicists were stunned when Leon Kass was appointed to the President's Council on Bioethics and have been in serious reaction against him ever since. As a consequence, Arthur Caplan uses every opportunity he gets to preach his gospel, saying things like, "Enhancing intelligence, changing personality, or modifying our memory should be available to everyone as a guarantee of equal opportunity." Caplan takes very seriously the notion that enhancement is not only possible, but that it is coming down the road. It is not intrinsically bad because of some kind of “yuck factor”[2], and if people are concerned about equity, then we need to make it universally available.
Growing Transhumanism
Transhumanism is moving beyond some of the cultural, political, and gender constraints that it was under in the 1990s. It is becoming a much more diverse movement, one that could build and be the basis for the kind of coalition for which we are hoping. We currently have about 3,000 members in the WTA and thirty chapters around the world.
Ms. Abdhi is the Vice Chair of the Kenyan Transhumanist Association. She is a Muslim, Somali refugee and has been considering whether to return to Somalia (which does not even have a government), in order to spread the word about transhumanism. She stands out as an example of the mind-boggling diversity that the WTA currently encompasses in our global movement, under our chair, Nick Bostrom, at Oxford.
Footnotes
1. John Locke (b. 1632, d. 1704) was a British philosopher, Oxford academic and medical researcher, whose association with Anthony Ashley Cooper (later the First Earl of Shaftesbury) led him to become a government official charged with collecting information about trade and colonies, economic writer, opposition political activist, and finally a revolutionary whose cause ultimately triumphed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Locke's monumental "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" concerns itself with determining the limits of human understanding in respect to God, the self, natural kinds and artifacts, as well as a variety of different kinds of ideas. It thus tells us in some detail what one can legitimately claim to know and what one cannot. Locke also wrote a variety of important political, religious and educational works including the "Two Treatises of Government", the "Letters Concerning Toleration", "The Reasonableness of Christianity" and "Some Thoughts Concerning Education". http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/ April 17, 2006 12:09PM EST (back to top)
2. The Yuck Factor: The things that are just too yucky for a civilized society to tolerate. ProfessorBainbridge.com http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2004/02/the_yuck_factor.html March 23, 2006 4:54PM EST (back to top)