Abstract
The central question that this chapter addresses is the following: Is transhumanism a threat, or a benefit, to the good human life? One can imagine any answer landing somewhere between two poles: a utopian view, which generally sees transhuman proposals as enhancements to human living that would lead to better lives and a better world; and a dystopian view, which sees these changes as fundamentally destructive of the good life. I show that one cannot view a transhuman future as simply either good or bad. One’s view must, instead, fall not between, but outside, these two poles.
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- 1.
Kurzweil , Ray, Transcendent Man.
- 2.
Bostrom, Nick. “Transhumanist Values.”
- 3.
These include “homo faber” (Arendt , The Human Condition); “homo ludens” (Huizinga , Homo Ludens ); “homo sentimentalis” (Halton, Bereft of Reason ); “homo socius” (Berger and Luckmann , The Social Construction of Reality); “homo domesticus” (Jensen, Endgame); “homo animalis” (Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger , Basic Writings ); “homo religiosus” (Alister Hardy, as quoted by Rüdiger Vaas, “God, Gains, and Genes,” in Voland and Wulf Schiefenhövel, The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior); “homo poetica” (Becker , The Structure of Evil).
- 4.
Genesis 1:28 (New Revised Standard Version).
- 5.
Winner , Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in The Whale and the Reactor.
- 6.
I am adapting a term coined first by architectural theorist Ian McHarg , and later popularized by the ocean ecologist Daniel Pauly. McHarg , Design with Nature; Pauly, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries.”
- 7.
By “nontrivial” I mean a notion of fairness that makes contact with the specifics of how any of the games are actually played. One could, of course, point out that all these sports share a common understanding of fairness as “sticking to the rules,” but this trivial sort of definition only serves to illustrate the point I am making: that the rules and procedures of gameplay are so distinct that no definition of “fairness” that applies to all these games will provide any useful knowledge about how to actually play any of the games fairly.
- 8.
For a representative case of this argument, see Conrad Gessner, Mithridate. Mithridates.
- 9.
Gramophone.
- 10.
Ellen A. Wartella and Nancy Jennings, “Children and Computers: New Technology. Old Concerns.”
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
I use the term “generation” here in something less than the strict, literal sense .
- 13.
It is worth noting that, for reasons to do with organizational structure, the Catholic Church has often fared better in maintaining a coherent conservative stance than the Protestant Churches have. This is, however, not to say that the conservative stance is a good one.
- 14.
We can also acknowledge that there are some “core” values that are intentionally upheld across many generations and are therefore somewhat more resistant to long-term change. These do not seem to include technology-oriented values.
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Glawson, G.M. (2018). Will the Transhuman Future Be Good or Bad for Humanity?. In: Donaldson, S., Cole-Turner, R. (eds) Christian Perspectives on Transhumanism and the Church. Palgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity and its Successors. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90323-1_10
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