Words&Dirt

“It was all spoiled in one day, in a couple of minutes, not by fits and starts, struggles, hopes and losses, in the long-drawn-out way that such things are more often spoiled. And if that’s true that things are usually spoiled, isn’t the quick way the easier way to bear?

But you don’t really take that view, not for yourself. Robin doesn’t. Even now she can yearn for her chance. She is not going a spare a moment’s gratitude for the trick that has been played. But she’ll come round to being grateful for the discovery of it. That, at least––the discovery which leaves everything whole, right up to the moment of frivolous intervention. Leaves you outraged, but warmed from a distance, clear of shame.

That was another world they had been in, surely. As much as any world concocted on the stage. Their flimsy arrangement, their ceremony of kisses, the foolhardy faith enveloping them that everything would sail ahead as planned. Move an inch this way or that, in such a case, and you’re lost.”

––Runaway: Stories, by Alice Munro, pg. 268-9

“The apparent inevitability of enhancement generates serious moral and policy issues. One possibility is that there is simply no acceptable way to stop enhancement. The parallel to the war on drugs is obvious. I suppose we could avoid an enhancement regime by installing a fully surveillant and otherwise intrusive prohibition and enforcement system, and even then it would be imperfect. The ‘least worst’ option is to find some way, in athletics, education, the workplace…to install acceptable enhancement systems. In real life, we will never tolerate total market freedom, either because of clear market failures or situations that seem morally akin to them. In athletics, for example, even those calling for the removal of flat bans on enhancement concede that they will have to make room for systems to promote medical safety and promote access. (Black markets are more dangerous to health.) They will, one hopes, not be anywhere near as intrusive and morally questionable as I think the current regime is.

Difficulties in formulating distributional criteria for access to education and employment are compounded because there is, in principle, no determinately sound and complete system for selecting the traits to be used in forming different kinds of persons. Nozick’s ‘genetic supermarket’ (in theory not limited to genetics) avoids the problem of centralized decisions, but provides no guidance for individual choice for conscientious decision-makers who seek sound criteria. The ‘procedural solution’ is often fairly empty (as in ‘Let’s settle this through conversation” what does one converse about?). But the market is not a general solution across the board, although it is an indispensable starting point, if autonomy is a prime value.

In any event, we are bound to look for the least worst system, even if we can’t discover or implement the best.

Finally, enhancement obviously impacts our basic values, which vary, in this domain, from congruence with each other to near-total conflict in assessing enhancement situations. Any practices that involve collisions between liberty, on the one hand, and its externalities and effects on equality in its various forms, on the other, will call forth government action. In turn, this will raise constitutional claims––because the constitution, expressly and by fair implication, embeds (at a high level of abstraction, to be sure) our basic moral values: autonomy, fairness, justice, equality, and social welfare or utility.”

–– “Performance Enhancement and Legal Theory,” by Michael H. Shapiro, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More, pg. 288