The Emerging Techno-Ethical Terrain: Some Key Definitions

Bio-conservatism: A stance of strong or even total opposition to the genetic, prosthetic, or cognitive modification of human beings. Whether arising from a conventionally right-leaning politics of religious/cultural conservatism or from a conventionally left-leaning politics of environmentalism, bio-conservative positions oppose medical and other technological interventions into what are broadly perceived as current human and cultural limits in the name of a defense of “the natural” deployed as a moral category.

Tech-progressivism: A stance of active support and even enthusiasm for technological development in general and for human practices of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification in particular. Tech-progressives believe that technological developments can be profoundly empowering and emancipatory when they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that their costs, risks, and benefits are all fairly shared by the actual stakeholders to those developments.

Note that both bio-conservatism and tech-progressivism, in their more reasonable versions, will share an opposition to unsafe, unfair, undemocratic, undeliberative forms of technological development, and both recognize that such developmental modes can facilitate unacceptable recklessness and exploitation, exacerbate injustice, and incubate dangerous social discontent.

I want to emphasize that it is not right to imagine that these sensibilities cleave off into two perfectly separate tribes, squaring off as if on a vast historical playing field for some cosmic-scaled battle. Many individuals will support both bio-conservative and tech-progressive positions on particular issues in the politics of technological development. And most people will sense the tug of reasonableness in particular formulations arising from either broader sensibility from time to time, according to the vicissitudes in their own personal experiences. These two sensibilities, often deeply at odds in particular campaigns of advocacy, activism, policy-making, meaning-making, and education, will nevertheless usually share at least enough common ground for productive dialogue to be possible among their adherents.

It is also crucial to recognize that both bio-conservative and tech-progressive sensibilities, rhetorics, and politics have arisen and exert their force uniquely in consequence of what I describe as the ongoing denaturalization of human life in this historical moment.

This denaturalization is a broad social and cultural tendency, roughly analogous to and probably structurally related to other broad tendencies like, say, secularization and industrialization. It consists essentially of two trends: First, it names a growing suspicion (one that can provoke either fear or hopefulness, sometimes in hyperbolic forms) of the normative and ideological force of claims made in the name of “nature” and especially "human nature," inspired by a recognition of the destabilizing impact of technological developments on given capacities and social norms. Second, it consists of an awareness of the extent to which the terms and pace of technological development, and the distribution of its costs, risks, and benefits, is emerging ever more conspicuously as the primary space of social struggle around the globe.

It is a truism that the technical means to eliminate poverty and illiteracy for every human being on earth have existed since the eighteenth century, but that social forms and political will have consistently frustrated these ends. The focus for most tech-progressives remains to use emerging technologies to transform the administration of social needs, to provide shelter, nutrition, healthcare, and education for all. To this end, a deepening and widening of democratic participation in and accountability of governance through emerging networked information and communication technologies is also crucial. Beyond this, many tech-progressives also champion the idea of morphological freedom, or consensual practices of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification considered as personal practices of self-creation rather than as the technological imposition of social conformity figured questionably as "health."

It is difficult in my view to see how bio-conservative defenses of “human nature” could finally help us much in these worthy democratizing projects. I do not mean to be dismissive of humanism, but it seems to me that historically speaking the so-called universal accomplishments celebrated under the banner of humanism from the Renaissance to the present day have rarely been available to more than a privileged group of males, and occasionally a few females, within strictly limited socioeconomic strata. Even at its most capacious, any anthropocentric human-racist grounding of ethics will stand perplexed in the face of the demand of Great Apes, dolphins, and other nonhuman animals for standing and respect. Further, the category of “humanity” seems rarely to have provided much protective cover for even fully sane, mature, "exemplary" human beings caught up in the genocidal technoconstituted dislocations of the modern era.

A number of post-humanist discourses have emerged to register these dissatisfactions with the limitations of the traditional humanist project. It is important to recognize that the "post-human" does not have to conjure up the possibly frightening or tragic spectacle of a posthumous humanity, an end to the best aspirations of human civilization, or even an outright repudiation of humanism itself, so much as a new effort emerging out of humanism, a moving on from humanism as a point of departure, a demanding of something new from it, perhaps the demand that humanism live up to its universalizing self-image for once.

Bio-conservatives often express a general fear that new technologies will "rob" us of our humanity. But for me the essence of our humanity, if there could be such a thing, is simply our capacity to explore together what it means to be human. No sect, no tribe, no system of belief owns what it means to be human. I believe prosthetic practices are contributions to the conversation we are having about what humanity is capable of, and those who want to freeze that conversation in the image of their pet platitudes risk violating that "humanity" just as surely as any reckless experimentalism would.

I believe we have all grown too queer and too prostheticized to be much seduced by the language of innocent “nature,” or sweet bio-conservative paeans to the so-called “human dignity” and "deeper meaning" to be found in pain and suffering from potentially treatable diseases. Tech-progressives believe that we can demand fairness, sustainability, responsibility, and freedom from the forces of technological development in which we are all immersed and in which we are all collaborating, and that this demand is the contribution of this living generation to the ongoing conversation of humankind.