Jon Teets: Book Review

Our Posthuman Future
Francis Fukuyama

One of the clearest statements of Fukuyama's purpose is this quote from the final chapter:

On the other hand, many bioethicists have become nothing more than sophisticated (and sophistic) justifiers of whatever it is the scientific community wants to do, having enough knowledge of Catholic theology or Kantian metaphysics to beat back criticisms by anyone coming out of these traditions who might object more strenuously. The Human Genome Project from the beginning devoted 3 percent of its budget to studying the Ethical, Social, and Legal Implications of genetic research. This can be regarded as commendable concern for the ethical dimensions of scientific research, or else as a kind of protection money the scientists have to pay to keep the true ethicists off their backs.

It is an unfair tactic to sum up an entire book with a single quote, but the context afforded in this case is illuminating. Fukuyama boils the debate down to that between the “true ethicists” —himself among their numbers, naturally—and the professional bioethicists paid off by the industry, which involves a large percentage of university professors.

In any discussion of cloning, stem cell research, germ-line engineering, and the like, it is usually the professional bioethicist who can be relied on to take the most permissive position of anyone in the room. * But if the ethicist isn't going to tell you that you can't do something, who will?

Who indeed? Dr. Fukuyama, of course. Never mind that many "industry" bioethicists might have spent a good deal more time thinking about the concerns than he has. He makes it clear in the footnote to the above quote that he regards industry bioethicists (which includes many academics) compromised by cash:

This phenomenon is a common one and is known as regulatory "capture," whereby the group that is supposed to be overseeing the activities of an industry becomes an agent for the industry. This happens for many reasons, including the dependence of the regulators on the regulatees for money and information. In addition, there are the career incentives that most professional bioethicists face.

The irony of this can't be clearer when one considers the constitution of the President's Council on Bioethics, of which Fukuyama is a panelist. We find not bioethicists of this flavor (which the administration also appears to mistrust) but a smattering of cherry-picked doctors, columnists, scientists and philosophers united and distinguished not for their profound knowledge of the science and the intricacies of ethical theory, but by their alignment with the President's prior convictions. The only member of the group who might lay claim to the title of bioethicist is its chairman, Leon Kass, whose claim to fame is his history of strong opposition for and dire predictions concerning IVF (in vitro fertilization) procedures. It's probably not too presumptuous to christen him the cherriest of the cherry-picked. Dr. Kass is lauded by the right for his level-headed caution, and his pithy litmus test for biotechnological propriety “The Wisdom of Repugnance” is quoted often. Louise Brown, the first test tube baby seems to be a particular sticking point for this kind of wisdom. (Dr. Fukuyama himself gives this pearl more than lip service.)

In spite of the foregoing, Our Posthuman Future —as was said of Wilson's Sociobiology when it enflamed similar controversies nearly three decades ago—is for the most part a surprisingly well-reasoned, balanced and a useful guide to the debate, provided the polemical elements of the first and last chapters are recognized.

Fukuyama takes some pain to point out the dilemmas forced on both the right and the left by biotechnological advances. The status of homosexuality, for example, requires new strange bedfellows. In general, the Left has traditionally been keen to dismiss any genetic causes for human behavior. Fukuyama points out that the Left finds itself in the awkward position of championing homosexuality's root in genetics, as it would put it forever out of the reach of the moralizing of the religious right. Taken to its logical conclusion, the Left is left toeing the slippery slope that could admit into their canon such pariahs as intelligence testing, gene-based job inequities, and even (gasp!) unlearned aesthetics. What good is social planning if its promise is proscribed by the proteins coded in the genome? The Right fares no better. Their traditional resistance to quotas might have a natural ally in nature, but it comes at the cost of exposing their cherished beliefs to scientific scrutiny. After all, if Don really can't help liking Don and Donna Donna, it does not bode well for the Don-dates-only-Donna edict. It takes some courage for right-wing think tanker Fukuyama to chart these waters with a significantly more balanced instrument than the reforming gambler William Bennett's Moral Compass. Through the Scylla of genetic determinism and the Charybdis of environmental determinism, starboard and port go down together.

Chapter 7, titled Human Rights begins with a quote from James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA:

......I'd like to give up saying rights or sanctity. Instead, say that humans have needs, and we should try, as a social species, to respond to human needs like food or education or health-and that's the way we should work. To try and give it more meaning than it deserves in some quasi-mystical way is for Steven Spielberg or somebody like that. It's just plain aura, up in the sky-I mean, it's crap.

Fukuyama also quotes Jeremy Bentham's summation of the Rights emitted by the French Revolution: “Nonsense upon stilts”.  He then notes:

......The more science tells us about human nature, the more implications there are for human rights, and hence for the design of institutions and public policies that protect them.

It is hard to be more succinct about what is at stake. We're dealing with the kind of thing that shakes up governments and religions, and if that's not troubling enough, there's the whole specter of the Posthuman waiting in the wings. Governments and religions take rather a long time to assimilate revolutionary ideas, but now both will have to grapple in succession with the new and profound knowledge of what it actually means to be human followed by genetic advances that will transform humans themselves. How does a religion adapt to average life spans that might well exceed the entire time over which all of their holy books were penned? What uses are healing rituals when no one gets sick? Might those who won't need Medicare legitimately refuse to pay into the system? What becomes of the promise of immortality, that staple of religious attraction, when its instantiation comes as a gift from mom and pop?  As we'll see, Fukuyama chooses to shrink from these issues, hoping to legislate them from possibility.  Ironically, this could only work if there were a united world government -- something more believably, at least politically, to be an End to History in Fukuyama's sense.

Fukuyama sets the table with a thumbnail sketch of the history of the rights business. Rights (and ethics) over the centuries have been grounded in theological fiat, natural law or, after Hume's time so-called positivistic or “deontological” bases. Positivistic rights— those we are most accustomed to in the modern era—are, Fukuyama quotes William Schultz, director of Amnesty International, as saying, “something that humans can possess or can claim, but not necessarily something derived from the nature of the claimant.” Fukuyama takes issue with this and spends a good portion of the rest of the chapter building a case for why rights theory should return to the bedrock of natural law. This is remarkable for a scholar who made his name on the ambitiously titled The End Of History and the Last Man, where he advanced, following his intellectual prior Hegel, the thesis that liberal democracy represented the last possible form of government. This represents a return to the ideas predating David Hume, going against the magnificent deontological efforts nearly every philosopher since. Fukuyama denies this in a peculiar monument to yoking opposites as if by violence together:

......It is thus impossible to talk about human rights-and therefore justice, politics, and morality more generally-without having some concept of what human beings actually are like as a species. To assert this is not to deny that History in the Hegelian-Marxist sense exists. Human beings are free to shape their own behavior because they are cultural animals capable of self-modification.

The reason for such a contortion unfolds later in the book. Fukuyama gets a glimpse of the comprehensive destruction of deontological systems forced to contend with not only what humans can claim, but what posthumans will claim. Rather than face that, he prefers to take up the heretofore ungainly fig leaves of human nature and natural law to make the case that we'd best stop short of changing human nature. It's the sort of stuff that making ises out of oughts is made of. I find it profoundly unsatisfying. I can't get past the impression that although he stops his retrograde motion at natural law, he'd prefer to keep going back to the theological basis. Indeed, when he states the book's aim in the first chapter, he nearly does just this:

...... The aim of this book is to argue that Huxley was right, that the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a "posthuman" stage of history. This is important, I will argue, because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species. It is, conjointly with religion, what defines our most basic values.

The preventative mechanisms he envisions and what the President's council is rushing to adopt include the usual array: freezing federal research funds, research bans (backed up by prison terms) and restriction of research publication in some cases. The net effect of this in the case of stem cell research has been the flight of top researchers to offshore labs. This trend looks to accelerate, and, in the long term, this head-in-the-sand policy will leave the United States at a profound disadvantage.