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The essays in this symposium were first delivered at the second
conference in the series “Stuck with
Virtue.” Sponsored by the University of Chicago’s New Science
of Virtues project, this conference
examined the various Cartesian, Lockean, and Darwinian
premises that help shape and inform the
ethics and ethos of modern technological democracy. Held in
April 2011 at Berry College in Rome,
Georgia, the conference featured four main speakers: Ronald
Bailey (below), Charles T. Rubin, Patrick
J. Deneen, and Robert P. Kraynak, with responses to Mr. Bailey
by Benjamin Storey and to Professor
Rubin by Adam Keiper (here joined by Ari N. Schulman).
See also the response to this essay, “Liberation Biology, Lost in
the Cosmos,” by Benjamin Storey.
Ronald Bailey
oes the enhancement of human physical and intellectual
capacities undermine virtue?

In answering this question, we must first make a distinction
between therapy and
enhancement. Therapeutic technologies are meant to restore
impaired or degraded human capacities to
some more normal level. By contrast, any enhancements would
alter human functioning beyond the
normal.
We must also keep in mind that, whatever we think about them,
enhancements are going to happen.
Age-retardation or even age-reversal are prime targets for
research, but other techniques aimed at
preventing disease and boosting memory, intelligence, and
physical strength will also be developed.
Much worried attention is focused particularly on the possibility
of achieving these and other
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enhancements through genetic engineering; that will indeed one
day happen. But the fastest advances
in enhancement will occur using pharmaceutical and biomedical
interventions to modulate and direct
the activity of existing genes in the bodies of people who are
already alive. These will happen alongside
the development of human-machine interfaces that will extend

and boost human capacities.
Contrary to oft-expressed concerns, we will find, first, that
enhancements will better enable people to
flourish; second, that enhancements will not dissolve whatever
existential worries people have; third,
that enhancements will enable people to become more virtuous;
fourth, that people who don’t want
enhancement for themselves should allow those of us who do to
go forward without hindrance; fifth,
that concerns over an “enhancement divide” are largely illusory;
and sixth, that we already have at
hand the social “technology,” in the form of protective social
and political institutions, that will enable
the enhanced and the unenhanced to dwell together in peace.
Strengthening Virtue
What is an enhancement? A good definition is offered by Sarah
Chan and John Harris in a 2007 article
in the journal Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology: an
enhancement is “a procedure that improves
our functioning: any intervention which increases our general
capabilities for human flourishing.”
People will choose enhancements that they believe are likely to
help them or their children to flourish.
Of course, their knowledge of a benefit will be likely rather
than certain because people choosing

enhancements will recognize that there is always the risk that
they are wrong about the benefit, or that
the attempt at enhancement will go awry, such as with a
treatment failure. After all, most medical and
technological advances are riskier in their early stages.
Just as Dante found it easier to conjure the pains of Hell than to
evoke the joys of Heaven, so too do
bioethicists find it easier to concoct the possible perils of a
biotech-nanotech-infotech future than to
appreciate how enhancements will contribute to flourishing
lives. One of the chief goals of this
symposium is to think about the indispensable role that virtue
plays in human life. The chief motivating
concern seems to be the fear that biotechnologies and other
human enhancement technologies will
somehow undermine human virtue. As we will see, far from
undermining virtue, biotech, nanotech, and
infotech enhancements will tend to support virtue; that is, they
will help enable people to be actually
good.
Peter Lawler, in Stuck With Virtue (2005), agrees that “the
unprecedented health, longevity, and other
indispensable means for human flourishing will deserve our

gratitude.” So far, so good. Then he goes on
to claim, “But the victories that will be won [over nature] —
like most of the victories won on behalf of
the modern individual — will also probably be, in part, at the
expense of the distinctively human goods:
love, family, friends, country, virtue, art, spiritual life, and,
most generally, living responsibly in light of
what we really know about what we have been given.” In fact,
according to Lawler, we don’t have to
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wait for future enhancements; modern technology is already
making people less virtuous: as he has
argued in the pages of this journal, “one of the downsides of
living in an increasingly high-tech society
is that both virtue and opportunities to act virtuously seem to be
in short supply” [“Restless Souls,”
Winter 2004].

Really? Thanks to modern technology, sanitation, better
nutrition, and medical care, Americans are
living much longer and healthier lives than people did just a
century ago. Do longer lives mean that
people today are less virtuous? Or, inversely, does this mean
that when people lived shorter lives they
were more virtuous? Harvard political philosopher Michael
Sandel offered a tart and persuasive response
to suggestions that enhancing life spans might result in a less
virtuous world:
Are the background conditions in human self-understandings for
the virtues just about
right now at 78 years of the average life span, or such that they
would be eroded and
diminished if we extend it to 120 or 150, or 180? ... Is it the
suggestion that back when
it was 48, rather than 78, a century ago ... that the virtues we
prize were on greater
display or more available to us? And if so, would that be reason
to aim for, or at least to
wish for or long for, a shorter life span, rather than a longer
one?
Sandel also wondered if people were more heroic when they
could expect to live only to 48. If so,

should we cut life expectancy from 78 in order to nurture the
heroic virtues? For that matter, if an
average life span of 48 produced people who were more
committed and engaged than does an average
life span of 78, is even that change in virtue desirable? After
all, heightened engagement and
commitment can easily become fanaticism and dogmatism.
Further, on what grounds do Lawler and others suggest that
smarter, stronger, healthier, longer-lived
people will care less about human goods like friendship, art,
and the pursuit of virtue? As Elizabeth
Fenton argued in a 2008 article in the journal Bioethics, “none
of these capabilities (bodily health,
imagination, emotion, practical reason, friendship, etc.) are in
fact threatened by, for example,
enhanced intelligence or athleticism.” Being stronger, healthier,
and smarter would more likely aid a
person in his pursuit of virtue and moral excellence. And the
unspoken implication that the state should
somehow aim at inculcating collective virtue is incoherent: the
pursuit of virtue is what individuals do.
The Dangers of Immortality?
Age-retardation technologies are the “killer app” (so to speak)
of enhancements — so deeply and self-
evidently appealing that they would seem to sell the whole

project of enhancement on their own.
Nonetheless, there are those who oppose them. For example,
Leon Kass, the former chairman of the
President’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE) under President Bush,
has asserted, “the finitude of human life
is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not.”
And Daniel Callahan, co-founder of the
Hastings Center, has declared, “There is no known social good
coming from the conquest of death.”
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Callahan added, “The worst possible way to resolve [the
question of life extension] is to leave it up to
individual choice.” When asked if the government has a right to
tell its citizens that they have to die,

Johns Hopkins University political scientist Francis Fukuyama
answered, “Absolutely.”
The PCBE’s 2003 report Beyond Therapy raised concerns that a
society of people with “ageless bodies”
might have significant downsides. Much longer lives would
weaken our “commitment and engagement,”
the Council fretted: Today, we live with the knowledge that we
will soon die, and thus “aspire to spend
our lives in the ways we deem most important and vital”; but
this “aspiration and urgency” might flag
because we would ask, “Why not leave for tomorrow what you
might do today, if there are endless
tomorrows before you?” Further, our “attitudes toward death
and mortality” might shift dramatically
because “an individual committed to the technological struggle
against aging and decline would be less
prepared for ... death, and the least willing to acknowledge its
inevitability.” Finally, age-retardation
might undermine “the meaning of the life cycle” so that we
would not be able “to make sense of what
time, age, and change should mean to us.” The Council does
admit that as “powerful as some of these
concerns are, however, from the point of view of the individual
considered in isolation, the advantages

of age-retardation may well be deemed to outweigh the
dangers.” Indeed.
But what about the consequences of longer human life spans to
society as a whole? Beyond Therapy
highlights three areas of societal concern. Significant age-
retardation would disrupt the succession of
“generations and families.” This succession “could be
obstructed by a glut of the able,” the report
suggests, since cohorts of healthy geezers would have no
intention of shuffling off this mortal coil to be
replaced by younger people. Longer lives could also slow down
“innovation, change, and renewal” since
“innovation ... is ... often the function of a new generation of
leaders.” Finally, even if we are not
aging individually, we will need to worry about “the aging of
society” that would then result. Societies
composed of people whose bodies do not age significantly
might “experience their own sort of
senescence — a hardening of the vital social pathways.”
Let us address each of these concerns in turn. First, we must
deal with the notion of a nursing-home
world. The point of anti-aging research is not to make people
older longer, but to make them younger
longer. So what about the concerns raised by the PCBE?

Political scientist Diana Schaub, who also served
on the Council, has made similar points. For instance, in an
article in Cato Unbound, she asked, if
people lived for a thousand years, “how would human relations
be affected? How would monogamy
fare? ... Would there be enough psychic energy for ever-
renewed love?”
As we age today, our declining psychic energy correlates pretty
well with our declining physical energy.
Who is to say, then, that with renewed physical energy we
would not have more psychic energy as well?
Actually, a pressing current question is: why has monogamy
already begun to fall apart in developed
societies? The rise in life expectancy over the last century may
have had a bit to do with it; but surely
the advent of truly effective contraception and the entrance of
women fully into the paid workforce are
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far more significant factors. Marriage based on romantic love is
a relatively modern notion, after all. As
some commentators have noted, marriage before the twentieth
century was not often based on
romantic love, but could well be described as an alliance in
which a man and woman stood together
back to back fending off attacks on their family. As the modern
world became less economically and
socially threatening, marriage partners began to turn toward
each other seeking more emotional
support and often found it lacking.
Schaub next asks, “What would the tally of disappointments,
betrayals, and losses be over a
millennium?” Try turning that question around: what would the
tally of satisfactions, affections, and
triumphs be over a millennium? Modern material and
intellectual abundance has already offered many
of us a way out of the lives of quiet desperation suffered by our
impoverished ancestors. The twenty-
first century will provide an ever-increasing menu of life plans
and choices. Surely, exhausting the

coming possibilities for intellectual, artistic, and even spiritual
growth will take more time than a
typical life span today.
Schaub also queries, “Would we love other people more or less
than at present? Would we be better
partners, parents, friends, and neighbors?” She does not offer
any evidence that shorter-lived people in
past centuries and societies loved more deeply or were better
neighbors, friends, and parents. But as
Steven Pinker has argued in The New Republic, it is very
suggestive that as life expectancies increased
over the past century, levels of domestic and international
violence also declined: “When pain and early
death are everyday features of one’s own life, one feels fewer
compunctions about inflicting them on
others. As technology and economic efficiency lengthen and
improve our lives, we place a higher value
on life in general.” More simply, perhaps empathy has more of
an opportunity to flourish when we are
not constantly in danger of our lives.
“What would it be like to experience the continued vitality of
the body in conjunction with the aging of
the spirit?” continues Schaub. She initially suggests that longer,

healthier lives might happily unite the
vitality of youth with the wisdom of maturity. But she then
worries that, instead, longer lives would
combine the “characteristic vices of age with the strength of
will to impose them on others.” What is
meant by the phrase “aging of the spirit,” and just what are the
“characteristic vices of age” that
trouble her? Which of the traditional vices — gluttony, anger,
greed, envy, pride, lust, indifference,
melancholy — does she expect will increase among hale near-
immortals? As Georges Minois notes in his
History of Old Age, avarice is among the vices of old age most
commonly depicted in classical
literature. Roman playwright Terence wrote, “A vice common to
all mankind is that of being too keen
after money when we are old.” In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan
Swift warned, “avarice is the necessary
consequence of old age.” Swift was describing the immortal, but
not ageless, people known as the
Struldbrugs. There is little reason to doubt that material comfort
and security grow in importance as
physical vitality ebbs and mental acuity withers. But perpetually
vital oldsters would have no need for
such security, because they could count on having the mental

and physical powers necessary to pursue
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new goals and possibilities. No failures would be permanent;
they would instead become learning
experiences.
In addition to these concerns, Schaub suggests that “a nation of
ageless individuals could well produce a
sclerotic society, petrified in its ways and views.” Daniel
Callahan makes a similar argument in a debate
with life-extension advocate Gregory Stock, in which he claims,
“I doubt that if you give most people
longer lives, even in better health, they are going to find new
opportunities and make new initiatives.”
Stock goes so far as to help his interlocutor with the hoary
example of brain-dead old professors
blocking the progress of vibrant young researchers by holding
onto tenure. But that seems more of a

problem for medieval institutional holdovers like universities
than for modern social institutions like
corporations. Assuming it turns out that even with healthy long-
lived oldsters there is still an advantage
in turnover in top management, then institutions that adopt that
model will thrive and those that do
not will be out-competed. Besides, even today youngsters don’t
simply wait around for their elders to
die. They go out and found their own companies and other
institutions. Bill Gates didn’t wait to take
over IBM; he launched Microsoft at age 19. Scott Harrison
started a nonprofit to supply clean drinking
water to poor people in developing countries at age 31. Larry
Page and Sergey Brin were both 25 when
they founded Google. Nor did human genome sequencer Craig
Venter loiter about until the top slot at
the National Institutes of Health opened up. In politics, we
already solve the problem of entrenched
oldsters by term-limiting the presidency, as well as many state
and local offices.
In fact, the available evidence cuts against concerns about “a
hardening of the vital social pathways.”
Social and technological innovation has been most rapid in
those societies with the highest average life

expectancies. Yale economist William D. Nordhaus estimates
that increases in longevity in the West
account for 40 percent of the growth in gross national product
for the period 1975-1995. Why? Not only
do people work longer, but they work smarter — long lives
allow for the accumulation of human capital.
Economists Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel have
analyzed how much human capital was gained by
overcoming the vagaries of nature, to the tune of $1.2 million in
value per person over the course of the
twentieth century, during which time life expectancy at birth for
a representative American increased
by roughly thirty years. In 1900, they note, “nearly 18 percent
of males born in the United States died
before their first birthday: today, cumulative mortality does not
reach 18 percent until age 62.” The
economic and social dynamism of societies that already enjoy
longer average life expectancies (such as
ours) also cuts against fears that “urgency” and “engagement”
might flag with increased life spans.
Schaub further conjures the possibility of near-immortal
dictators — Stalin and Hitler, alive forever. The
implied argument that everyone must continue to die before age
100 to avoid the possibility of

thousand-year tyrants is not persuasive. Must we really
surrender to the tyranny of aging and death in
order to prevent human despotism? Wouldn’t a better strategy
be to focus on preventing the emergence
of tyrants, either of the short- or long-lived variety?
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Like the PCBE, Schaub also worries about decreased fertility —
that healthy oldsters would be less
interested in reproducing. The facts seem to support this view:
already, countries with the highest life
expectancies have the lowest levels of fertility. In a recent
study published in the journal Human
Nature, University of Connecticut anthropologists Nicola L.
Bulled and Richard Sosis reported that total
fertility rates (the number of children a woman will have over
the course of her lifetime) drop by half in
reaching a life expectancy threshold of 60. For example, they

found that women who live in countries
where life expectancy is below 50 years bear an average of 5.5
children. When life expectancy is
between 50 and 60, they bear an average of 4.8 children. The
big drop occurs when they can expect to
live between 60 and 70 years, in which case women have about
2.5 children on average.
But so what? A lack of interest in progeny could have the happy
side effect of addressing the possibility
that radically increased human life spans might lead to
overpopulation. On the other hand, it might turn
out that bearing and rearing children would eventually interest
long-lived oldsters who would come to
feel that they had the time and the resources to do it right. Since
assisted reproductive techniques will
extend procreation over many decades, perhaps centuries,
people who can look forward to living and
working for hundreds of years will be able to delay and stretch
out the period in which they can choose
to become parents.
And again, what about love? Do people today love their
children, their spouses, and their friends less
than shorter-lived people did a century ago? Were our forebears
who lived thirty fewer years on average

more committed to their children than are twenty-first-century
American parents? Do people today love
their children less than nineteenth-century Americans did
because, as Michael Haines of Colgate
University reports, instead of having a one-in-five chance of
dying in their first year of life, most
American kids now face a roughly one-in-200 chance?
Then there is the allegedly special case of “manufactured
children.” Along with many other opponents
of enhancement technologies, Peter Lawler darkly speculates in
Stuck With Virtue that enhanced
children will be less loved than those produced the old-
fashioned way: “A world in which children are
manufactured and sex and procreation are totally disconnected
would surely be one without much love,
one where one manufactured being would have little natural or
real connection to other manufactured
beings.”
But Lawler and his confrères need not speculate on what
happens to parental love in such cases, for we
have actual data. As physician Sally Satel notes in the journal
Policy Review, “For all the deference that
conservative bioethics pays to the implicit wisdom of the ages,

it rarely mines the recent past for
lessons. Instead of concentrating on the ancients, why not also
study the history of in vitro fertilization,
paid egg donation, and surrogate motherhood to learn about
cultural resistance and adaptation to such
practices?” Indeed. Fears about waning parental love and
loosening generational ties were expressed by
many bioethicists when in vitro fertilization began to be used in
the 1970s and 1980s. Forty years later,
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the evidence is that their worries were overblown. A recent
study in the journal Human Reproduction
finds that IVF children and their parents are as well-adjusted as
those born in the conventional way.
There are no good reasons to doubt that this will not be the case
for enhanced children in the future as
well. As Harvard philosopher Frances Kamm argues in an essay
in the 2009 collection Human

Enhancement:
not accepting whatever characteristics nature will bring but
altering them ex-ante does
not show lack of love.... This is because no conscious being yet
exists who has to work
hard to achieve new traits or suffer fears of rejection at the idea
that they should be
changed. Importantly, it is rational and acceptable to seek good
characteristics in a new
person, even though we know that when the child comes to be
and we love him or her,
many of these characteristics may come and go and we will
continue to love the
particular person.
In fact, so many infertile people have wanted to have children
to love that more than 4 million have
been brought into the world using various reproductive
technologies since the birth of the first test-tube
baby back in 1978.
What about the PCBE’s fears that age-retardation technologies
would undermine “the meaning of the
life cycle” so that we would not be able “to make sense of what
time, age, and change should mean to

us”? Left-leaning environmental writer Bill McKibben has also
expressed this concern. “Without
mortality, no time,” he writes in Enough: Staying Human in an
Engineered Age (2003). “All moments
would be equal; the deep, sad, human wisdom of Ecclesiastes
would vanish. If for everything there is an
endless season, then there is also no right season.... The future
stretches before you, endlessly flat.”
But that deep, sad wisdom of Ecclesiastes is a powerful human
response of existential dread to the
oblivion that stretches endlessly before the dead: “For the living
know that they shall die: but the dead
know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for
the memory of them is forgotten. Also
their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished;
neither have they any more a portion for
ever in any thing that is done under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 9:5-
6). Is there not in this an argument
against death? If wisdom is lost in death, does it not follow that
longer lives could lead to greater
wisdom? And this is not to mention love and all the other good
things that are snuffed out in that
oblivion.

On the other hand, if the endless future turns out to be as
horrible as McKibben imagines it to be, then
people can still simply choose to give up their empty,
meaningless lives. So if people did opt to live yet
longer, would that not mean they had found sufficient pleasure,
joy, love, and even meaning to keep
them going? McKibben is right: We do not know what
immortality would be like. But should that happy
choice become available, we can still decide whether or not we
want to enjoy it. Besides, even if the
ultimate goal of this technological quest is immortality, what
will be immediately available is only
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longevity. The experience of longer lives will give the human
race an opportunity to see how it works
out. If immortality is a problem, it is a correctable one. Death
always remains an option. Let us turn on
its head the notorious argument by Leon Kass that our initial

repugnance to biotechnological advances
should make us wary of them. Put the other way around, the
near-universal human yearning for longer,
healthier lives should serve as a preliminary warrant for
pursuing age-retardation as a moral good.
Inviolable Characteristics?
What other features of human life might ethically be altered by
enhancements? Almost any, according
to the argument of George Washington University philosophy
professor David DeGrazia. Writing in the
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, he systematically examines
several core human traits — internal
psychological style, personality, general intelligence and
memory, sleep, normal aging, gender, and
being a member of the species Homo sapiens — that might be
considered so fundamental that they
cannot be ethically altered, but concludes that “characteristics
likely to be targeted or otherwise
affected by enhancement technologies are not plausibly
regarded as [ethically] inviolable.”
Regarding psychological style, there is no ethical reason to
require that a particular person remain
worried, suspicious, or downbeat if he wants to change. As
DeGrazia points out, psychotherapy already
aims at such self-transformation. And what about the impact of

education? Many people who come back
from college or the military seem unrecognizable to their old
friends. If a pill will make a person more
confident and upbeat, then there is no reason for him not to use
it if he so wishes. Personality is
perhaps the external manifestation of one’s internal
psychological style, and here, too, it’s hard to
think of any ethical basis for requiring someone to remain, for
example, cynical or excessively shy.
But what about boosting intelligence and memory? Of course,
from childhood on, we are constantly
exhorted to improve ourselves by taking more classes,
participating in more job training, and reading
good books. Opponents of biotech enhancements might counter
that all of these methods of
improvement manipulate our environments and do not reach to
the genetic cores of our beings. But
DeGrazia points out that the wiring of our brains is the result of
the interaction between our genes and
our environment. For example, our intellectual capacities
depend on proper nutrition as well as on our
genetic endowments. One’s genome is not fundamentally more
important than environmental factors,
he concludes; rather, “they are equally important, so we should

bear in mind that no one objects to
deliberately introducing environmental factors [such as schools
or diet] that promote intelligence.” It
does not matter ethically whether one’s intellectual capacities
are boosted by schooling, a pill, or a set
of genes.
As for sleep: all vertebrates sleep. Sleep, unlike cynicism, does
seem biologically fundamental — but
again, so what? Nature is not a reliable source for ethical
norms. If a person could safely reduce his
need for sleep and enjoy more waking life, that wouldn’t be at
all ethically problematic. Our ancestors
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who lacked artificial light probably got a lot more sleep than we
moderns do, yet history doesn’t
suggest that they were morally superior to us.
Then, again, there is the argument about normal aging. As

everyone knows, the only inevitabilities are
death and taxes. Death, however, used to come far more
frequently at younger ages, but global average
life expectancy has doubled in the past century. DeGrazia asks
whether “normal aging” is “an essential
part of any recognizable human life,” and falters here,
admitting, “frankly, I do not know how to
determine whether aging is an inviolable characteristic.” The
question, then, is whether someone who
does try to “violate” this characteristic by biotechnological
means is acting unethically. It is hard to see
why the answer would be yes. Such would-be immortals are not
forcing other people to live or die, nor
are they infringing on the rights or dignities of others. DeGrazia
finally recognizes that biotech methods
aimed at slowing or delaying aging significantly are not morally
different from technologies that would
boost intelligence or reduce the need for sleep. He concludes,
“even if aging is an inviolable core trait
of human beings, living no more than some specified number of
years is not.”
Another potentially inviolable trait that DeGrazia considers is
gender. But in the age of transgendered
people and sex-change surgery, it seems a bit outmoded to ask

if one’s biological sex is an inviolable
core characteristic. Plenty of people have already eagerly
violated it. Yet Beyond Therapy declared,
“Every cell of the body ... mark[s] us as either male or female,
and it is hard to imagine any more
fundamental or essential characteristic of a person.” Clearly,
thousands of people’s fundamental sexual
identities depend on more than the presence of an X or Y
chromosome in their bodies’ cells.
Finally, DeGrazia wonders if even being a member of the
species Homo sapiens constitutes an inviolable
core trait. He specifically thinks of a plausible future in which
parents add an extra pair of artificial
chromosomes carrying various beneficial genetic modifications
to the genomes of the embryos that will
become their children. Such people would have 48
chromosomes, which means that they could not
reproduce fertile offspring with anyone who carries the normal
46 chromosomes. “It seems to me,
however, that these individuals would still be ‘human’ in any
sense that might be normatively
important,” concludes DeGrazia. This certainly seems correct.
After all, infertile people today are still
fully human. Oddly, however, DeGrazia thinks that this “risk to

reproductive capacities” might warrant
restricting the installation of extra chromosomes to consenting
adults only. But couldn’t a person with
48 chromosomes who falls in love with a person with only 46
chromosomes simply use advanced genetic
engineering techniques to overcome that problem?
DeGrazia convincingly argues that whatever it is that makes us
fundamentally us is not captured by the
set of characteristics he considers. The inviolable core of our
identities is the narrative of our lives —
the sum of our experiences, enhanced or not. If we lose that
core (say, through dementia), we truly do
lose ourselves. But whoever we are persists and perhaps even
flourishes if we choose to use biotech to
brighten our moods, improve our personalities, boost our
intelligence, sleep less, live longer and
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healthier lives, change our gender, or even change species.
The Politics of Toleration

The Enlightenment project that spawned modern liberal
democracies sought to keep certain questions
about the transcendent out of the public sphere. To keep the
social peace and allow varying visions of
the human to flourish alongside one another, questions about
the ultimate meaning and destiny of
humanity were deemed to be private concerns. In our own time,
hostility to the prospect of
technological enhancement must not be used as an excuse to
breach the Enlightenment understanding
of what belongs in the private sphere and what belongs in the
public. Technologies dealing with birth,
death, and the meaning of life need protection from meddling —
even democratic meddling — by those
who want to control them as a way to force their visions of right
and wrong on the rest of us.
The ideal of political equality arose from the Enlightenment’s
insistence that since no one has access to
absolute truth, no one has a moral right to impose his values and
beliefs on others. (Or, to put it
another way, I may or may not have access to some absolute
transcendent truth, but I’m good and sure
that you don’t.) Consequently, under constitutional liberalism,
there are questions that should not and
cannot be decided by a majority vote. As James Madison

eloquently explained in Federalist 51,
It is of great importance in a republic, not only to guard the
society against the
oppression of its rulers; but to guard one part of the society
against the injustice of the
other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different
classes of citizens. If a
majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the
minority will be insecure.
Alexis de Tocqueville made the same point when he asked, “If
you accept that one man vested with
omnipotence can abuse it against his adversaries, why not
accept the same thing for a majority?”
Philosopher John Rawls updated and extended the arguments
supporting these Enlightenment ideals in
Political Liberalism (1993), in which he made the case for a
limited conception of politics that could
reconcile and tolerate diverse “reasonable comprehensive
doctrines.” According to Rawls, a reasonable
comprehensive doctrine has three features: it deals with the
major religious, philosophical, and moral
aspects of human life in a coherent and consistent fashion; it
recognizes certain values as significant,
and by granting primacy of some values over others expresses

an intelligible view of the world; and it is
not unchanging, but generally evolves slowly over time in light
of what its adherents see as good and
sufficient reasons. The result is that
many of our most important judgments are made under
conditions where it is not to be
expected that conscientious persons with full powers of reason,
even after free
discussion, will all arrive at the same conclusion. Some
conflicting reasonable judgments
... may be true, others false; conceivably, all may be false.
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are of first significance for a democratic idea of toleration.
Because there is no objective way to determine the truth or
falsity of diverse beliefs, moral strangers

can only get along by tolerating what each would regard as the
other’s errors.
Consequently, Rawls argues, “reasonable persons will think it
unreasonable to use political power,
should they possess it, to repress comprehensive views that are
not unreasonable, though different from
their own.” If, however, we insist that all members of a polity
should adopt our beliefs because they are
“true,” then “when we make such claims others, who are
themselves reasonable, must count us
unreasonable.” In such a case, members of the polity have the
right to resist the imposition of views
that they do not hold. Rawls concludes, “Once we accept the
fact that reasonable pluralism is a
permanent condition of public culture under free institutions,
the idea of the reasonable is more
suitable as part of the basis of public justification for a
constitutional regime than the idea of moral
truth.”
The kind of constitutional regime that is compatible with
reasonable pluralism is one in which the
powers that government can exercise over the choices of its
citizens are limited. The German political

philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in his essay “Popular Sovereignty
as Procedure,” describes (without
endorsing) the point of view of liberalism pretty well when he
explains that the dispute between
liberalism and egalitarianism
has to do with how one can reconcile equality with liberty,
unity with diversity, or the
right of the majority with the right of the minority. Liberals
begin with the legal
institutionalization of equal liberties, conceiving these as rights
held by individual
subjects. In their view, human rights enjoy normative priority
over democracy, and the
constitutional separation of powers has priority over the will of
the democratic
legislature.
Advocating the option to use biotech, nanotech, and infotech
enhancements to increase healthy human
life spans and to enhance human physical and intellectual
capacities certainly counts as a “reasonable
comprehensive doctrine.” Thus it should be accommodated
within the constitutional consensus of
liberal democratic societies, and protected from the will even of
a democratic majority.

What about genetically engineered children? Genetic
engineering is still years away, but it will one day
be available. An oft-cited objection to it is that genetic
engineering will be imposed on children-to-be
without their consent. First, let it be recalled that no one ever
gives his consent to be born, much less
to be born with the specific complement of genes that he bears.
Nor does anyone give prenatal consent
to being born into a specific family or community. Thus, the
children born by means of assisted
reproductive therapies and those produced more conventionally
stand in exactly the same ethical
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relationship to their parents.
Habermas, in The Future of Human Nature (2003), disagrees,
claiming, “Eugenic interventions aiming at
enhancement reduce ethical freedom insofar as they tie down

the person concerned to rejected, but
irreversible intentions of third parties, barring him from the
spontaneous self-perception of being the
undivided author of his own life.” However, Allen Buchanan, in
the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal,
correctly points out that Habermas does not actually make clear
why a person who develops from a
genetically enhanced embryo should feel that he is not the
“author” of his life or be regarded as being
somehow less free by others. Habermas, Buchanan explains, “is
assuming that how one’s genome was
selected is relevant to one’s moral status as a person. This error
is no less fundamental than thinking
that a person’s pedigree — whether she is of noble blood or
‘base-born’ — determines her moral status.”
The absurdity of a requirement for prenatal consent for
enhancement becomes transparent when one
asks whether proponents of such a requirement would forbid
fetal surgery to correct spina bifida or
congenital heart defects. Fetuses operated upon to correct
medical problems can’t give their consent to
those procedures, yet it is certainly the moral thing to do. For
that matter, taking this strong position on
consent to its logical extreme would mean that children couldn’t

be treated with drugs or receive
vaccinations. Someday, using biotechnological means to correct
genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis or
sickle cell anemia at the embryonic stage will be considered as
morally laudatory as the early
interventions that are available today. And surely one can
assume that the beneficiary — the not-yet-
born, possibly even the not-yet-conceived, child — would
happily have chosen to have those diseases
corrected.
But what about genetic interventions that are not just
therapeutic but genuine enhancements? Suppose
parents could choose genes that would guarantee their child a
twenty-point IQ boost. It is reasonable to
presume that the child would be happy to consent to this
enhancement of his capacities. And how about
plugging in genes that would boost the child’s immune system,
guaranteeing that he would never get
colon cancer, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, or the common cold? Again,
it seems reasonable to assume consent.
These enhancements are general capacities that any human
being would reasonably want to have. In
fact, for many genetic endowments that we could give the
unborn, lots of children already do have

them naturally — so it’s hard to see that there is any moral
justification for outlawing them for others.
Fritz Allhoff, a philosophy professor at Western Michigan
University, grapples with the issue of consent
in the online Journal of Evolution and Technology. Allhoff
offers a principle derived from the second
formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative to “treat
individuals as ends and never merely as means or,
more simply, to treat them in ways to which they would
rationally consent.” Allhoff links this to Rawls’s
notion of primary goods. In A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls
defines primary goods as those goods that
every rational person should value, regardless of his conception
of the good. These goods include rights,
liberties, opportunities, health, intelligence, and imagination.
As Allhoff argues,
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These are the things that, ex hypothesi, everyone should want; it
would be irrational to
turn them down when offered. Nobody could be better off with
less health or with
fewer talents, for example, regardless of her life goals.... Since
primary goods are those
that, by definition, any rational agent would want regardless of
his conception of the
good, all rational agents would consent to augmentation of their
primary goods.
Such enhancements would be permissible if every future
generation would consent to them, Allhoff
then contends. But the requirement that all future generations
must consent adds nothing to the moral
force of his argument, since it has already been stipulated that
all rational agents would consent to
such enhancements. So again, safe genetic interventions that
improve a prospective child’s health,
cognition, and so forth would be morally permissible because
we can presume consent from the
individuals who benefit from the enhancements.
Many opponents of human genetic engineering are either

conscious or unconscious genetic determinists.
They fear that biotechnological knowledge and practice will
undermine human freedom. In a sense,
they claim that somehow human freedom resides in the gaps of
our knowledge of our genetic makeup.
According to Bill McKibben, “The person left without any
choice at all is the one you’ve engineered.
You’ve decided, for once and for all, certain things about him:
he’ll have genes expressing proteins that
send extra dopamine to his brain to alter his mood; he’ll have
genes expressing proteins to boost his
memory, to shape his stature.”
Even if people like McKibben were right (and they are not) that
our freedom and autonomy somehow
depend on the unknown and random combinations of genes that
a person inherits, genetic ignorance of
this type will not last. Advances in human whole-genome
testing make it likely that every person’s
entire complement of genes can be scanned and known at his or
her physician’s office for as little as
$1,000 by 2014. Once whole-genome testing is perfected, we
will all learn what even our randomly
conferred genes may predispose us to do, and from what future
ills we are likely to suffer. Already, my

relatively inexpensive genotype scan from the company
23andMe tells me that I have alleles that give
me a somewhat greater risk of developing celiac disease, a
lower risk of rheumatoid arthritis, and a
gene variant that some studies suggest can increase my risk of
substance abuse (both alcohol and
“street” drugs) fourfold. With more genetic understanding,
human freedom will properly be seen as the
ability to act against these predispositions, much like a former
alcoholic can overcome his thirst for
booze. Fortunately, biotech will help here as well, with the
development of neuropharmaceuticals to
enhance our cognitive abilities and change our moods.
Opponents of biotech enhancement often cite C.S. Lewis’s
worry in The Abolition of Man: “If any one
age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the
power to make its descendants what it
pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.
They are weaker, not stronger: for
though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we
have pre-ordained how they are to use
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them.” In other words, Lewis asserts that the one decisive
generation that first masters genetic
technologies will control the fate of all future generations. But
when has it not been true that past
generations control the genetic fate of future generations? Our
ancestors, too, through their mating and
breeding choices, determined for us the complement of genes
that we all bear today. They just didn’t
know which specific genes they were selecting. Again, the
implication is that human freedom rests on
ignorance of the more or less random combination of genes one
inherits.
Fortunately, our descendants will have at their disposal ever
more powerful technologies and the
benefit of our own experiences to guide them in their future
reproductive and enhancement decisions.
In no sense are they prisoners of our decisions now. The future
will not be populated by what would in

effect be robots who look human but are unable to choose for
themselves their own destinies, genetic
or otherwise. Of course, there is one scenario in which future
generations would be prisoners of our
decisions now — namely, if we fearfully elect to deny them
access to the benefits of biotechnology and
safe genetic engineering.
Other opponents of human genetic enhancement argue that it is
not ethically possible to make the
transition from the human present to the transhuman future.
Again, consent and the risks inherent in
deploying novel biogenetic treatments are cited as reasons. The
claim is that genetic enhancement
necessarily implies experimentation without consent, and this
violates bedrock bioethical principles
requiring the protection of human subjects. Consequently, there
is an unbridgeable gap over which
would-be enhancers cannot ethically cross.
But this argument relies on a rather static view of what will be
possible for future genetic enhancers to
know and test beforehand. Any genetic enhancement techniques
will first be extensively tested and
perfected in animal models. One possible threshold for morally

acceptable genetic enhancement
treatments, for example, is the level of risk currently involved
with in vitro fertilization techniques.
Further, a vastly expanded bioinformatics enterprise will
become crucial to understanding the
ramifications of proposed genetic interventions. As scientific
understanding improves, the risk-benefit
calculations of various prospective genetic enhancements of
embryos will shift in favor of proceeding.
The arc of scientific discovery and technological progress
strongly suggests that this will happen in the
next few decades.
Enhancement Wars?
Those who favor restricting human enhancements often argue
that human equality will fall victim to
differential access to enhancement technologies, resulting in
conflicts between the enhanced and the
unenhanced. For example, at a 2006 meeting called by the
American Association for the Advancement
of Science, Richard Hayes, the executive director of the left-
leaning Center for Genetics and Society,
testified that “enhancement technologies would quickly be
adopted by the most privileged, with the
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clear intent of widening the divisions that separate them and
their progeny from the rest of the human
species.” Deploying such enhancement technologies would
“deepen genetic and biological inequality
among individuals,” exacerbating “tendencies towards
xenophobia, racism and warfare.” Hayes
concluded that allowing people to use genetic engineering for
enhancement “could be a mistake of
world-historical proportions.”
Meanwhile, some right-leaning intellectuals, such as Nigel
Cameron, president of the Center for Policy
on Emerging Technologies, worry that “one of the greatest
ethical concerns about the potential uses of
germline interventions to enhance normal human functions is
that their availability will widen the
existing inequalities between the rich and the poor.” In sum,
egalitarian opponents of enhancement
want the rich and the poor to remain equally diseased, disabled,
and dead.

Even proponents of genetic enhancement, such as Princeton
University biologist Lee M. Silver, have
argued that genetic engineering will lead to a class of people
that he calls the “GenRich,” who will
occupy the heights of the economy while unenhanced “Naturals”
provide whatever grunt labor the
future economy needs. In Remaking Eden (1997), Silver
suggests that eventually “the GenRich class and
the Natural class will become ... entirely separate species with
no ability to cross-breed, and with as
much romantic interest in each other as a current human would
have for a chimpanzee.”
In the same vein, George J. Annas, Lori B. Andrews, and
Rosario M. Isasi have laid out a rather
apocalyptic scenario in the American Journal of Law and
Medicine:
The new species, or “posthuman,” will likely view the old
“normal” humans as inferior,
even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter. The normals, on
the other hand, may see
the posthumans as a threat and if they can, may engage in a
preemptive strike by killing
the posthumans before they themselves are killed or enslaved by
them. It is ultimately

this predictable potential for genocide that makes species-
altering experiments
potential weapons of mass destruction, and makes the
unaccountable genetic engineer
a potential bioterrorist.
Let’s take their over-the-top scenario down a notch or two. The
enhancements that are likely to be
available in the relatively near term to people now living will be
pharmacological — pills and shots to
increase strength, lighten moods, and improve memory.
Consequently, such interventions could be
distributed to nearly everyone who wanted them. Later in this
century, when safe genetic engineering
becomes possible, it will likely be deployed gradually and will
enable parents to give their children
beneficial genes for improved health and intelligence that other
children already get naturally. Thus,
safe genetic engineering in the long run is more likely to
ameliorate than to exacerbate human
inequality.
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In any case, political and moral equality have never rested on
the facts of human biology. In prior
centuries, when humans were all “naturals,” tyranny,
aristocracy, slavery, and legally stipulated racial
and sexual inequality were common social and political
arrangements. Our biology did not change in the
past two centuries — our political ideals did. In fact, political
liberalism is already the answer to
questions about human and posthuman rights. In liberal
societies the law is meant to apply equally to
all, no matter how rich or poor, powerful or powerless, brilliant
or stupid, enhanced or unenhanced.
One crowning achievement of the Enlightenment is the principle
of tolerance, of putting up with people
who look different, talk differently, worship differently, and
live differently than we do (in Rawlsian
terms, tolerating those who pursue differing reasonable
comprehensive doctrines). In the future, our

descendants may not all be natural Homo sapiens, but they will
still be moral beings who can be held
accountable for their actions. There is no a priori reason to
think that the same liberal political and
moral principles that apply to diverse human beings today
would not apply to relations among future
humans and transhumans.
But what if enhanced posthumans were to take the Nietzschean
superman option? What if they really
were to see unenhanced people “as inferior, even savages, and
fit for slavery or slaughter”? It is an
unfortunate historical fact that plenty of unenhanced humans
have been quite capable of believing that
millions of their fellow unenhanced humans were inferiors who
needed to be eradicated. However, as
liberal political institutions, with their limits on the power of
the state, have spread and strengthened,
they have increasingly restrained technologically superior
groups from automatically wiping out less
advanced peoples (which was common throughout most of
history). Again, there is no a priori reason to
believe that this dynamic will not continue in the future as
biotechnology, nanotechnology, and

computational technologies progressively increase people’s
capabilities and widen their choices.
Opponents of human enhancement focus on the alleged social
harms that might result, while
overlooking the huge social costs that forgoing the benefits of
enhancement technologies would entail.
Allen Buchanan posits that
some enhancements will increase human productivity very
broadly conceived and
thereby create the potential for large-scale increases in human
well-being, and ... the
enhancements that are most likely to attract sufficient resources
to become widespread
will be those that promise increased productivity and will often
exhibit what economists
call network effects: the benefit to an individual of being
enhanced will depend upon,
or at least be greatly augmented by, others having the
enhancement as well.
Buchanan points out that much of the ethical debate about
enhancements focuses on them as positional
goods that primarily help an individual to outcompete his rivals.
This characterization of enhancements
leads ineluctably to zero-sum thinking in which for every

winner there is assumed to be a loser. But, on
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the contrary, enhancements could produce positive results for
the common good: as Buchanan writes,
“large numbers of individuals with increased cognitive
capabilities will be able to accomplish what a
single individual could not, just as one can do much more with a
personal computer in a world of many
computer users.” While competition certainly plays a role in
underwriting success in society and the
economy, most success is achieved through cooperation.
In the future, people in the pursuit of non-zero-sum social and
economic relations are likely to choose
the sorts of intellectual and emotional enhancements that boost
their ability to cooperate more
effectively with others, such as increased empathy or greater
practical reason. In fact, it is just these
sorts of enhancements that will help people to behave more
virtuously. Of course, people in the future

will have to be on guard against any still-deluded folks who
think that free-riding might work; but there
may well be an app for that, so to speak: the increasingly
transparent society. People will be able to
check the reputations of others for honest dealing and fair
cooperation with just a few clicks of a mouse
(or by accessing directly whatever follows Google using a brain
implant). Such social monitoring will be
nearly as omnipresent as what would be found in a hunter-
gatherer band. Everyone will want to have a
good reputation. One might try to fake being virtuous, but the
best and easiest way to have a good
reputation will be the same as it is today — by actually being
virtuous.
Buchanan argues that modern people have already adopted a
wide array of enhancements that display
these beneficial network effects, including literacy, numeracy,
and social institutions that “extend our
capacities beyond what is natural for human beings.” Some
future enhancements that would
significantly increase both individual and social productivity
include those that increase healthy life
spans, boost our immune systems, and raise our cognitive
capabilities (memory, attention, processing

speed, and so forth).
There are grounds for concern, however, in Buchanan’s claim
that, if biotech enhancements do in fact
dramatically increase social productivity, then the state and its
citizens might be far less interested in
imposing limits on enhancements and instead shift to promoting
them for everyone: “If a particular
enhancement had very strong productivity-enhancing effects,
the failure of the state to ensure that no
one lacks access to it might be seen as being as culpable as its
failure to ensure that all citizens are
literate or have access to immunization.” The temptation to
democratically impose enhancements
would be hard to resist, and would result in imposing a
particular vision of human flourishing on those
who do not want it.
A more optimistic view is that the ability to install whatever
genes one might want will become so
cheap and routine that everybody would have access to the
technology, dissipating the fears of growing
inequality, even speciation, between groups of people. As noted
above, implicit in the moral hand-
wringing over genetic engineering is the concern that genes
really matter — that one’s life chances are

largely determined by the genes one carries. Good genes equal a
bright future; bad genes entail a
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blighted future. But recent genetic research is showing that this
view is wrong.
How can we get around genetic determinism? By using outside
interventions that regulate and enhance
the performance of the genes that people already have. Research
across several disciplines promises to
bring us pharmacological interventions that can change the
activity of various genes and gene
combinations so as to enhance cognition, reverse aging, and
have other desired effects. And still other
kinds of interventions — like those that may be found in the
burgeoning field of neuroelectronics —
promise to sidestep the limitations of our biological bodies and
brains.
In short, genetically engineered inequality is a bioethical
phantom. The more researchers learn more

about the effects of our genes, the more we will be liberated
from whatever tyranny they do exercise.
Biotech and infotech enhancements will increase human
freedom, not limit it.
Can We Afford Enhancement?
Another frequently-cited problem with longevity treatments that
must be addressed is that they might
bankrupt the economy. In a 2005 article in The Atlantic on “The
Coming Death Shortage,” Charles C.
Mann discusses the possibility that new longevity treatments
might be as expensive as HIV drug
treatments are today, at about $15,000 per person annually. Of
course, one must keep in mind that one
day HIV drugs will go off patent and likely cost less than $300
per year; but for the sake of argument,
let us take Mann’s assumption at face value. He calculates that
80 million oldsters receiving $15,000
worth of longevity treatments would cost $1.2 trillion per year,
and quotes James Lubitz, then a chief
analyst for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as
saying that that is “the kind of number ...
that gets people’s attention.” Mann suggests that in order to
avoid class warfare over extended life
spans, such huge new costs would have to be borne by the
government, since every citizen, rich and

poor, would demand access to longevity treatments. Assuming
he’s right, how worried should we be?
Perhaps $1.2 trillion may get the attention of someone who is
living in today’s $14 trillion economy.
However, in 2003 the Employment Policy Foundation issued a
study that estimated that the United
States economy would grow to $128 trillion by 2077. If this
estimate is correct, longevity treatments for
80 million healthy oldsters would cost less than 1 percent of
GDP in 70 years. Or, let’s posit an
unrealistic scenario in which every one of an estimated 480
million Americans alive in 2077 would
require $15,000 worth of longevity treatments annually, for a
total bill of $7.2 trillion. That would still
be less than 7 percent of projected GDP in 2077. In the long
run, the affordability of longevity
treatments doesn’t seem like a big issue.
The Necessity of Moral Toleration
People should not be forced to use medicines and technologies
that they find morally objectionable.
Take the case of the Amish. Amish individuals live in an open
society — ours — and can opt out of our
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society or theirs whenever they want. As followers of a
reasonable comprehensive doctrine, they have a
system for voluntarily deciding among themselves what new
technologies they will embrace. (For
instance, despite their generally anti-technology stance, Amish
practicality has caused them to embrace
modern medicine when it comes to treating genetic maladies
that plague their community.) The
situation of the Amish demonstrates that technological choices
don’t have to involve everyone in a
given society.
One can imagine that, eventually, different treatment and
enhancement regimens will be available to
accommodate the different values and beliefs held by citizens.
Christian Scientists would perhaps reject
most of modern biotechnology outright; Jehovah’s Witnesses
might remain leery of treatments that they
consider akin to using blood products or blood transfusions;
Catholics might refuse to use regenerative
treatments derived from destroyed human embryos; and still

others may wish to take the fullest
advantage of all biomedical enhancements and treatments. In
this way, members of a pluralistic society
respect the reasonable comprehensive doctrines of their fellow
citizens, thus enabling social peace
among moral strangers.
Daniel Callahan, in an essay in Cato Unbound, writes: “I really
wish we would be told, when the great
day arrives and we have dozens, maybe hundreds of years ahead
of us, exactly how it would all work.”
Well, I wish I knew too, but the fact of the matter is that
humanity advances by trial and error. Even the
smartest people cannot figure out how scientific and
technological advances will play out over the next
few decades, much less centuries. In 1960, the optical laser was
reputedly described as an invention
looking for a job. In 2011, ubiquitous lasers routinely cut metal,
play CDs, reshape corneas, carry
billions of Internet messages, remove tattoos, and guide bombs.
As age-retardation and other
enhancement technologies are likely to develop incrementally,
humanity will have lots of opportunities
for course corrections as we go along.

The very good news is that the history of the last two centuries
has shown that technological advance
has been far more beneficial than harmful for humanity. The
development of age-retardation and other
enhancement technologies will be further steps along that
encouraging progressive path. We should all
have the right to choose to use or not use new technologies to
help us and our families flourish. Is
humanity ready for enhancements like radically longer life
spans? We’re about as ready as we’ll ever
be. In other words: yes.
Ronald Bailey, the science correspondent for Reason magazine,
is the author of Liberation Biology:
The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution
(Prometheus, 2005).
Ronald Bailey, "The Case for Enhancing People," The New
Atlantis, Number 32, Summer 2011, pp. 16-38.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/20/us/research-clinic-opens-
in-ohio-for-genetic-maladies-that-haunt-amish-families.html
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/12/10/daniel-
callahan/nature-knew-what-it-was-doing/
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/authors/ronald-bailey
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From The Sunday Times
May 16, 2010
Cheer up: life only gets better
Humans’ capacity for solving problems has been improving our
lot for 10,000 years. Don’t think it will stop now
Matt Ridley
By the middle of this century the human race will have
expanded in 10,000 years from less than 10m people to nearly
10 billion. Some live in misery and dearth even worse than the
worst experienced in the Stone Age. But the vast majority are
much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained,
much better protected against disease and much more likely to
live to old age than their ancestors have ever been.
The availability of almost everything a person could want or
need has been going rapidly upwards for 200 years and
erratically upwards for 10,000 years before that: years of
lifespan, mouthfuls of clean water, lungfuls of clean air, hours
of privacy, means of travelling faster than you can run, ways of
communicating farther than you can shout. This generation of
human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours,
square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light years, nanometres,
bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles and, of
course, cash than any that went before.
It can buy anything from vitamins and mango slicers to tennis
rackets and guided missiles. By one estimate, the number of
different products on sale just in London now tops 10 billion.
Furthermore it is possible, indeed probable, that by 2110
humanity will be much much better off than it is today and so

will the ecology of our planet. This view — which I shall call
rational optimism — may not be fashionable but it is
compelling.
Rational optimism holds that the world will pull out of its
economic and ecological crises because of the way that markets
in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange
and specialise for the betterment of all. But a constant drumbeat
of pessimism usually drowns out this sort of talk. Indeed, if you
dare to say the world is going to go on getting better, you are
considered embarrassingly mad.
If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you can
expect a MacArthur Foundation genius award. In my own adult
life I have listened to solemn predictions of growing poverty,
coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues,
impending water wars, inevitable oil exhaustion, mineral
shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain,
nuclear winters, mad cow epidemics, Y2K computer bugs, killer
bees, sex-change fish, global warming, ocean acidification and
even asteroid impacts that would soon bring our happy interlude
to a terrible end. Let me make a square concession at the start:
the pessimists are right when they say that if the world
continues as it is it will end in disaster. If all transport depends
on oil, and the oil runs out, then transport will cease. If
agriculture continues to depend on irrigation and water stocks
are depleted, then starvation will ensue.
Notice the “if”. The world will not continue as it is. That is the
whole point of human progress, the pressing message of cultural
evolution.
It is my (rational, optimistic) proposition that the human race
has become a collective problem-solving machine which solves
problems by changing its ways. It does so through invention
driven often by the market: scarcity drives up price and that in
turn encourages the development of alternatives and
efficiencies.
History confirms this. When whales grew scarce, for example,
petroleum was used instead as a source of oil. The pessimists’

mistake is extrapolationism: in other words, assuming that the
future is just a bigger version of the past.
So, for example, the environmentalist Lester Brown, writing in
2008, was pessimistic about what would happen if the Chinese
were as rich by 2030 as the Americans are now. If, for example,
each person in China consumes paper at the current American
rate, then China’s 1.46 billion people will need twice as much
paper in 2030 as is produced worldwide today. There go the
world’s forests.
In fact, Brown is dead right with his extrapolations, but so was
the man who (probably apocryphally) predicted that the streets
of London would be buried under 10ft of horse manure by 1950.
So was IBM’s founder Thomas Watson when he said in 1943
that there was a world market for just five computers and Ken
Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, when he
said in 1977: “There is no reason anyone would want a
computer in their home.” Both remarks were true enough when
computers weighed a ton and cost a fortune.
However, these eminently sensible people were right only at
that precise moment in time. Even Lester Brown will not always
be right. Why? Because now that we know about the looming
paper shortage, we will ensure that by 2030 paper is used more
frugally or replaced by something else. What is the alternative
— halting the Chinese economy?
The question is not “Can we go on as we are?” — because the
answer is “No” — but how best can we encourage the changes
that will enable the Chinese, Indians and Africans to live as
prosperously as Americans and Britons do today?
Many of today’s extreme environmentalists insist the world has
reached a “turning point” — quite unaware that their
predecessors have been making the same claim for 200 years.
They also maintain that the only sustainable solution is to
retreat — to halt economic growth and enter progressive
economic recession.
This means not just that increasing your company’s sales would
be a crime, but that the failure to shrink them would be, too.

Not only would inventing a new gadget be illegal, but so would
failing to abandon existing technologies. Growing more food
per acre would become a felony, as would failing to grow less.
Here’s the rub: this future sounds awfully like the feudal past.
The Ming and Maoist emperors of China had rules that
restricted the growth of businesses, punished innovation and
limited the size of families. That, I fear, is the world the
pessimists conjure up when they speak of retreat.
As I write, it is nine in the morning. In the two hours since
getting up, I have showered in water heated by North Sea gas,
shaved using an American razor running on electricity made
from British coal, eaten bread made from French wheat and
spread with New Zealand butter, brewed tea using leaves grown
in Sri Lanka, dressed in clothes of Indian cotton and Australian
wool and read a newspaper made from Finnish wood pulp. I
have consumed goods and services from dozens of countries.
More to the point, I have also consumed minuscule fractions of
the productive labour of many dozens of people. They were all,
unknowingly, working for me. In exchange for some fraction of
my spending, each supplied me with some fraction of their
work. They gave me what I wanted when I wanted it — as if I
were the Roi Soleil, Louis XIV, at Versailles in 1700.
Each day I am not just consuming the labour and resources of
others: I am consuming their inventions, too. A thousand
entrepreneurs and scientists devised the dance of photons and
electrons by which my television works. Unlike Louis XIV, who
required 498 people to produce just one of his dinners, I number
among my servants John Logie Baird, Alexander Graham Bell,
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Thomas Crapper, Jonas Salk and myriad
other inventors.
Indeed, we all have far, far more than 498 servants at our beck
and call. That is the magic that exchange and specialisation
have wrought for the human species: not the work of any
specific individual but the creation of something I shall call
“the collective human brain”. It is here that rational optimism
— and human progress — begin.

Cast an eye over the development of human society and ask
yourself this: what makes us radically different from other
animals? Killer whales may teach each other how to snatch sea
lions off beaches, but only human beings have the cumulative
culture that goes into the design of a loaf of bread or a concerto.
Yes, but why? Why us and not killer whales? The answer, I
believe, is that at some point in the past 100,000 years, ideas
began to meet and mate. There was a time in human prehistory
when big-brained people for the first time began to exchange
things with each other, to become better off as a result and to
specialise. And once they started doing so, culture suddenly
became cumulative and the great headlong experiment of human
economic “progress” began.
Making and using tools saved time — and prosperity is, after
all, simply time saved. Forget dollars, cowrie shells or gold.
The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to
acquire it.
The more human beings diversified as consumers and
specialised as producers, and the more they exchanged goods
and services, the better off they became. And the good news is
there is no inevitable end to this process.
As more people are drawn into the global division of labour and
more people specialise and exchange, we will all become
wealthier. Along the way, moreover, there is no reason why we
cannot solve the problems that beset us — economic crashes,
population explosions, climate change, terrorism, poverty, Aids,
depression, obesity.
I am aware that an enormous bubble of debt has burst and
unemployment is rising sharply all around the world as output
falls. The immediate future looks bleak and some governments
are planning further enormous public debt expansions that could
hurt the next generation’s ability to prosper.
(To my intense regret, I played a part in one phase of this
disaster as non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, one of
many banks that ran short of liquidity during the crisis.) Is this
the end of growth? Hardly. So long as somebody allocates

sufficient capital to innovation, then the credit crunch will not,
in the long run, prevent the relentless upward march of human
living standards.
Even the Great Depression of the 1930s, although an appalling
hardship for many, was just a dip in the slope of economic
progress. By 1939 the worst-affected countries, America and
Germany, were richer than they had been in 1930. All sorts of
new products and industries were born during the depression: by
1937, 40% of DuPont’s sales came from products that had
barely existed before 1929, such as enamels and cellulose film.
So growth will resume — unless it is stifled by the wrong
policies. Somebody, somewhere, is still tweaking a piece of
software, testing a new material, or transferring a gene that will
make your life and mine easier in the future.
I don’t know who or where that person is now, but let me give
you a possible candidate. In the week that I wrote this
paragraph, a small company called Arcadia Biosciences in
northern California signed an agreement with a charity working
in Africa to license, royalty-free to smallholders, new varieties
of rice that can be grown with less nitrogen fertiliser for the
same yield.
Assuming the rice grows in Africa as well as it does in
California, some Africans will soon be growing and selling
more food — and creating less pollution. This means they will
have more money to spend.
Some of them may then perhaps buy mobile phones from a
western company. And as a consequence of higher sales, an
employee of that western company may get a pay rise, which
she will spend on a new pair of jeans, made from cotton woven
in an African factory. And so on.
The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that
allows us each to consume more and more different things is the
central story of humanity. Forget wars, religions, famines and
poems. This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of
exchange and specialisation.
As the rational optimist, I invite you to stand back and look at

your species differently, to see the grand enterprise of humanity
that has continued to progress — with frequent setbacks — for
100,000 years. And then to consider whether that enterprise is
indeed finished or if it still has centuries — and millenniums —
to run.
© Matt Ridley 2010 Extracted from The Rational Optimist: How
Prosperity Evolves, to be published by Fourth Estate on May 27
at £20. Copies can be ordered for £18, including postage, from
The Sunday Times Bookshop on 0845 271 2135
8/23/10 2:27 PMEvolution and Creativity: Why Humans
Triumphed - WSJ.com
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Humans: Why They Triumphed
How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet
dominator? The answer lies in an
epochal collision of creativity. By Matt Ridley
World U.S. New York Business Markets Tech Personal Finance

Life & Culture
Opinion Careers Real Estate Small Business
By MATT R ID L EY
Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain
the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000
years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a
planet dominator with rapidly
progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce
new tools, different ways of life and
burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world,
culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and
all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool
making, big brains, culture, fire, even
language—seem to have been in place half a million years
before and nothing happened. Tools were
made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands
of years and the ecological impact of
people was minimal. Then suddenly—bang!—culture exploded,
starting in Africa. Why then, why there?
The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics,
known as collective intelligence: the notion
that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural
change of a population is the amount of
interaction between individuals. Even as it explains very old
patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out
hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years
ahead—because ideas are having sex with
each other as never before.
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Triumphed - WSJ.com
Page 2 of
each other as never before.
The more scientists discover, the bigger the evolution puzzle
has become. Tool-making itself has now
been pushed back at least two million years, and modern tool
kits emerged very gradually over 300,000
years in Africa. Meanwhile, Neanderthals are now known to

have had brains that were bigger than ours
and to have inherited the same genetic mutations that facilitate
speech as us. Yet, despite surviving until
30,000 years ago, they hardly invented any new tools, let alone
farms, cities and toothpaste. The
Neanderthals prove that it is quite possible to be intelligent and
imaginative human beings (they buried
their dead) yet not experience cultural and economic progress.
Scientists have so far been looking for the answer to this riddle
in the wrong place: inside human heads.
Most have been expecting to find a sort of neural or genetic
breakthrough that sparked a "big bang of
human consciousness," an auspicious mutation so that people
could speak, think or plan better, setting
the human race on the path to continuous and exponential
innovation.
But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in
individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective
enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to
make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard
Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on
which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design,
mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture
and market these things is fragmented among
thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human
progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of
human brains. Intelligence became collective and
cumulative.
In the modern world, innovation is a collective
enterprise that relies on exchange. As Brian Arthur
argues in his book "The Nature of Technology," nearly
all technologies are combinations of other technologies
and new ideas come from swapping things and

thoughts. (My favorite example is the camera pill—
invented after a conversation between a
gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.) We
tend to forget that trade and urbanization are the grand
stimuli to invention, far more important than
governments, money or individual genius. It is no
coincidence that trade-obsessed cities—Tyre, Athens,
Alexandria, Baghdad, Pisa, Amsterdam, London, Hong Kong,
New York, Tokyo, San Francisco—are the
places where invention and discovery happened. Think of them
as well-endowed collective brains.
Trade also gave way to centralized institutions. Around 5,200
years ago, Uruk, in southern
Mesopotamia, was probably the first city the world had ever
seen, housing more than 50,000 people
within its six miles of wall. Uruk, its agriculture made
prosperous by sophisticated irrigation canals, was
home to the first class of middlemen, trade intermediaries.
As with traders ever since, increasingly it came to look like
tribute as Uruk merchants' dwellings were
plonked amid the rural settlements of the trading partners in the
hills. A cooperative trade network
Ray Bartkus
Trade was the most momentous innovation of the
human species; it led to the invention of invention.
Triumphed - WSJ.com

of
Primitive Progress
Click to enlarge.
plonked amid the rural settlements of the trading partners in the
hills. A cooperative trade network
seems to have turned into something more like colonialism. Tax
and even slavery began to rear their
ugly heads. Thus was set the pattern that would endure for the
next 6,000 years—merchants make
wealth; chiefs nationalize it.
Agriculture was invented where people were already
living in dense trading societies. The oldest farming
settlements of all in what is now Syria and Jordan are
situated at oases where trade routes crossed, as proved
by finds of obsidian (volcanic glass) tools from
Cappadocia. When farmers first colonized Greek islands
9,000 years ago they relied on imported tools and
exported produce from the very start. Trade came
before—and stimulated—farming.
Go even further back and you find the same thing. The
explosion of new technologies for hunting and
gathering in western Asia around 45,000 years ago,
often called the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, occurred
in an area with an especially dense population of
hunter-gatherers—with a bigger collective brain. Long before
the ancestors of modern people first set
foot outside Africa, there was cultural progress within Africa
itself, but it had a strangely intermittent,
ephemeral quality: There would be flowerings of new tool kits

and new ways of life, which then faded
again.
Recently at Pinnacle Point in South Africa, Curtis Marean of
Arizona State University found evidence of
seafood-eating people who made sophisticated "bladelet" stone
tools, with small blades less than 10
millimeters wide, and who used ochre pigments to decorate
themselves (implying symbolic behavior) as
long as 164,000 years ago. They disappeared, but a similar
complex culture re-emerged around 80,000
years ago at Blombos cave nearby. Adam Powell of University
College, London, and his colleagues have
recently modeled human populations and concluded that these
flowerings are caused by transiently
dense populations: "Variation in regional subpopulation density
and/or migratory activity results in
spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation."
The notion that exchange stimulated innovation by
bringing together different ideas has a close parallel in
biological evolution. The Darwinian process by which
creatures change depends crucially on sexual
reproduction, which brings together mutations from
different lineages. Without sex, the best mutations
defeat the second best, which then get lost to posterity.
With sex, they come together and join the same team.
So sex makes evolution a collective and cumulative
process in which any individual can draw on the gene
pool of the whole species. And when it comes to gene
pools, the species with gene lakes generally do better
than the ones with gene ponds—hence the vulnerability
of island species to competition with continental ones.
Joe Zeff Design

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Triumphed - WSJ.com
Page 4 of
It is precisely the same in cultural evolution. Trade is to
culture as sex is to biology. Exchange makes cultural change
collective and cumulative. It becomes
possible to draw upon inventions made throughout society, not
just in your neighborhood. The rate of
cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which
ideas are having sex.
Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species.
They only do so in human beings, because
only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different
items among unrelated, unmated
individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to
the puzzle of human takeoff. It was
caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made
possible by the invention of exchange.
Once human beings started swapping things and thoughts, they
stumbled upon divisions of labor, in
which specialization led to mutually beneficial collective
knowledge. Specialization is the means by

which exchange encourages innovation: In getting better at
making your product or delivering your
service, you come up with new tools. The story of the human
race has been a gradual spread of
specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of
getting more and more narrow in what
you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-
sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty.
This theory neatly explains why some parts of the world lagged
behind in their rate of cultural evolution
after the Upper Paleolithic takeoff. Australia, though it was
colonized by modern people 20,000 years
earlier than most of Europe, saw comparatively slow change in
technology and never experienced the
transition to farming. This might have been because its dry and
erratic climate never allowed hunter-
gatherers to reach high enough densities of interaction to
indulge in more than a little specialization.
Where population falls or is fragmented, cultural evolution may
actually regress. A telling example
comes from Tasmania, where people who had been making bone
tools, clothing and fishing equipment
for 25,000 years gradually gave these up after being isolated by
rising sea levels 10,000 years ago. Joe
Henrich of the University of British Columbia argues that the
population of 4,000 Tasmanians on the
island constituted too small a collective brain to sustain, let
alone improve, the existing technology.
Tierra del Fuego, in a similar climatic and demographic
position, experienced no such technological
regress because its people remained in trading contact with the
mainland of South America across a
much narrower strait throughout the prehistoric period. In

effect, they had access to a continental
collective brain.
Further proof that exchange and collective intelligence are the
key to human progress comes from
Neanderthal remains. Almost all Neanderthal tools are found
close to their likely site of origin: they did
not trade. In the southern Caucasus, argues Daniel Adler of the
University of Connecticut, it is the
"development and maintenance of larger social networks, rather
than technological innovations or
increased hunting prowess, that distinguish modern humans
from Neanderthals."
The oldest evidence for human trade comes from roughly 80,000
to 120,000 years ago, when shell
beads in Algeria and obsidian tools in Ethiopia began to move
more than 100 miles from the sea and
from a particular volcano respectively. (In recent centuries
stone tools moved such distances in Australia
by trade rather than by migration.) This first stirring of trade
was the most momentous innovation of
the human species, because it led to the invention of invention.
Why it happened in Africa remains a
puzzle, but Steve Kuhn and Mary Stiner of the University of
Arizona have argued that for some reason
only Africans had invented a sexual division of labor between
male hunters and female gatherers—the
most basic of all trades.
There's a cheery modern lesson in this theory about ancient
events. Given that progress is inexorable,
cumulative and collective if human beings exchange and
specialize, then globalization and the Internet
Joe Zeff Design

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