Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Morals/Ethics

Interesting and nicely symptomatic debates erupt periodically on especially the "transhumanist-flavored" technology discussion lists to which I subscribe and occasionally contribute, about the value of tolerance, about moral relativism (so-called), about the dream of a more "scientific" framework for normative belief, about the demands of technology advocacy as a "movement" soliciting membership at the level of personal identity, and similar questions.

I think it is almost always clarifying and useful in these discussions to distinguish morals, which derives from mores, from ethics.

Morals are normative vocabularies involving processes of identification and disidenitifcation with the communities in which one is and is not a member. Ethics are normative vocabularies that at least in principle solicit or strive to solicit universal assent.

There will always be interesting discussions about how ethical vocabularies end up expressing parochial identifications and so really amount to morals. And there will also always be interesting discussions of the ways in which the moral process of striving to reconcile the competing moral commitments introduced by one's membership in different communities over the course of one's life will sometimes give morals a dimension of generality that nudges in the direction of ethics.

But all that just fuzzifies the morals/ethics distinction. I think the distinction itself remains very helpful as a way of distinguishing the kinds of demands we make of normative language and the processes we undertake in assessing candidates for normative belief.

The projects to delineate the moral beliefs of various modes of "post-human" and "posthumanist" identity (among them, no doubt, various kinds of "transhumanist" affiliation and identification) will differ in important respects from the project to delineate an ethical framework in the face of an ongoing technoconstituted denaturalization (or, I suppose, "transhumanization") of human cultures.

Although I am not a "transhumanist" (I only play one on Google, it seems), I am enormously interested in the ethnography and conceptual/figural categories of various emerging posthuman moral communities (among them "transhumanist" ones). I am also deeply provoked and rather pleased with what I see as an ongoing derangement of normative claims (moral, ethical, ideological) made in the name of "nature."

It is a matter of indifference to me whether one wants to describe such a technoconstituted derangement of normativity as a "transhumanization," a "queering," a "prostheticization," a "biopoliticization," or a "radical democratization" of the world of peers. Whatever it is, whatever it ends up being described as, it is an incomparable occasion for emancipation, devastation, self-creation, violation. As far as I can see, this is where the action is.

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