Abstract
The key question addressed in Stephen Goundrey-Smith's book, Transhumanism, Ethics, and the Therapeutic Revolution: Agents of Change (Routledge, 2023), is ‘what can be learned from theological and ethical engagement with past medical developments, and how does this learning inform an evaluation of proposed future transhumanist biomedical technologies within Christian theological ethics?’ (p. 1). Such transhumanist biomedical technologies include nanotechnology, genetic enhancements, cybernetics, cryonics, and mind-uploading (pp. 2–3). The two past medical developments that inform Goundrey-Smith's analysis are the contraceptive pill and SSRI antidepressants (chs. 3–4). Although these two examples are not typically thought of in the same light as transhumanist biomedical technologies, Goundrey-Smith views all of them as sharing the features of being a technology autonomously applied to a human person to improve human function, increase longevity, or promote human flourishing (p. 8).
Goundrey-Smith builds his theological analysis around the question of whether a biomedical technology a) is good news for the poor; b) conforms to the image of God; c) embodies a particular attitude toward the material world, including our own bodies; d) projects a particular attitude toward past failures; e) enables unbridled autonomy in a negative manner; or f) focuses too much on the users’ subjective experience (p. 8). The book proceeds by first providing the historical context of the ‘therapeutic revolution’ in the latter half of the twentieth century (ch. 1) before moving on to illuminate the objectives, history, and claims of transhumanism (ch. 2). The following two chapters elucidate the two case studies in order to draw theological lessons that will inform the ethical reconsideration of current transhumanist proposals (ch. 5). The concluding chapter offers a set of general conclusions to the effect that ‘the church should neither accept new biomedical enhancement technologies uncritically nor respond with a knee-jerk rejection of such technologies. Instead, a nuanced Christian ethical critique of such technologies is required, based on [considerations of] autonomy, nature, embodiment and the imago Dei’ (pp. 11–12).
Overall, Goundrey-Smith provides a well-researched and insightful analysis that will be informative for any theological ethicist engaging with transhumanism. Yet, I have two points of contention I would like to raise in this brief review. The first concerns Goundrey-Smith's treatment of Thomistic natural law theory that informs the Roman Catholic perspective. The second regards his virtue-theoretic analysis of moral enhancement using biotechnological means.
In discussing Thomistic natural law theory, Goundrey-Smith mistakenly attributes to Aquinas the view that natural law principles ‘are equally known by all people’ when Aquinas's point in the cited article (Summa theologiae Ia-IIae, q. 94, a. 4 [Goundrey-Smith cites it as a. 3]) is that, while natural law principles are knowable by all people, they are not actually equally known by all people—otherwise, how could we have substantive moral disagreement? Such a seemingly minor misreading leads to more significant exegetical errors. For example, Goundrey-Smith concludes that ‘the concept of a cyborg destabilises established ways of understanding human ontology [and] so might prompt some objections from Christians and other religious commentators on the grounds of natural law’ (p. 91). This conclusion appears to espouse a biologistic interpretation of natural law in which human nature and flourishing can be understood only with respect to what is biologically natural for us; however, various natural law theorists resist such a reductionistic view even if they might share Goundrey-Smith's overall conclusion regarding biotechnological enhancements (see, e.g., Ryan T. Anderson and Christopher Tollefsen, ‘Biotech Enhancement and Natural Law’, The New Atlantis, Spring 2008).
This misunderstanding of Aquinas's natural law ethic and theological anthropology is also evident when Goundrey-Smith contrasts what he takes to be Aquinas's ‘dualism’ with alternative views such as Nancey Murphy's ‘non-reductive physicalism’ (p. 140). Here, Goundrey-Smith does not appreciate the nuances of Aquinas's anthropology that would place him in the same broad camp as Murphy (see Eleonore Stump, ‘Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and Materialism without Reductionism’, Faith and Philosophy 14.4 (1995), pp. 505–531).
Finally, Goundrey-Smith understands a natural law approach to be ‘based on the idea that human nature is fixed, unchanging and immutable’ (p. 147). Yet, a Thomistic understanding of human nature conceptualizes human nature as dynamic in all sorts of ways with respect to the actualization of our intrinsic potentialities and has long been reconciled with evolutionary theory and other well-substantiated scientific views of human nature (see, e.g., Mariusz Tabaczek, ‘Thomistic Response to the Theory of Evolution: Aquinas on Natural Selection and the Perfection of the Universe’, Theology and Science 13.3 (2015), pp. 325–44). As such, a Thomistic natural law approach is far from ‘a naive way of assessing therapeutics’ (p. 196). I concur wholeheartedly with Goundrey-Smith, however, that a natural law approach must be augmented with more expansive ethical considerations such as ‘the virtuous use of medicine’—a theme developed by Catholic thinkers including Edmund Pellegrino (see Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma, The Virtues in Medical Practice, Oxford University Press, 1993). It is worth noting, moreover, that Aquinas wrote much more expansively on virtue than he did on natural law—as well as ‘the problems of just distribution of the medicine’—which is a primary concern of Catholic social thought (see M. Therese Lysaught and Michael McCarthy, eds., Catholic Bioethics and Social Justice, Liturgical Press, 2019).
These issues with regard to Goundrey-Smith's exegesis of Thomistic natural law theory do not detract from the value of his more general Christian theological analysis of the ethics of transhumanist biomedical technologies, which merit careful critical engagement. I now turn to Goundrey-Smith's virtue-theoretic analysis of moral enhancement through biomedical technology. Since the publication of Ingmar Perrson and Julian Savulescu's provocative text, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement (Oxford University Press, 2012), both transhumanist advocates and critics have debated whether moral enhancement of human beings is possible, and and, if so, which biotechnological means might be considered licit. A primary theoretical lens through which such debate has occurred is virtue ethics. Concurring with Adam Willows's analysis, Goundrey-Smith concludes that ‘moral enhancement cannot ensure that a person is virtuous, because it cannot create prudence (practical wisdom), which is needed to act virtuously in the context of a specific situation’ (p. 64). Goundrey-Smith further contends that ‘moral enhancement technology would actually be detrimental for autonomy’ (p. 163) by, for instance, changing one's desires.
Elsewhere, I have argued that, while it is certainly true that moral enhancement using biotechnological means cannot ‘create’ prudence, such means may assist the cultivation of prudence as well as promote autonomy by helping a moral agent to overcome the weakness-of-will problem (Jason T. Eberl, ‘Can Prudence Be Enhanced?’ Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 43.5 (2018), pp. 506–526). I argue that, insofar as both Aristotle and Aquinas recognize that various external goods are required for a moral agent to cultivate and exercise specific virtues, there may be goods internal to an agent—though external to their intellect and will—that assist their cultivation and exercise of virtue. Furthermore, utilizing Harry Frankfurt's higher-order account of desire and volution (Harry Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, Journal of Philosophy 68.1 (1971), pp. 5–20), I contend that biotechnological means may help align one's first- and second-order desires. It is not the case that one's desires are changed, but rather that one's more authentic second-order desires are more assuredly determinative of one's will in a given circumstance.
For example, Aquinas understands prudential reasoning as involving certain key steps that one ought to follow in an orderly fashion: memory of the past, understanding of the present, shrewdness in considering the future outcome, reasoning which compares one thing with another, and docility in accepting the opinions of others. He also considers foresight, circumspection, and caution to be key elements of prudential reasoning (Summa theologiae IIa-IIae, q. 49). To the extent that each of these cognitive capacities may be correlated with or affected by neurobiological functioning, and may also be influenced by certain emotive dispositions that are also neurobiologically-based, the potential to enhance one's ability to reason prudentially, and thereby to effectuate one's rationally formulated second-order desires as determinative of one's volitions, could result in a morally enhanced person whose autonomy has thereby itself been enhanced.
Although I consider Goundrey-Smith to have been too cursory in his explication and assessment of Thomistic natural law theory, and too dismissive of the potential value of moral enhancement from a virtue-theoretic perspective, I found his book tremendously valuable for its otherwise careful and thorough theological and moral analysis of transhumanism's aims and the means by which transhumanists seek to attain them. Eschewing the extremes of unrestrained biotechnological enhancement or reliance on a problematic therapy/enhancement distinction that considers only the former as morally permissible, Goundrey-Smith soundly affirms ‘that there is a moral imperative for the use of biomedical technology by a society to benefit human health and well-being, irrespective of whether the technology is considered a therapy or an enhancement’ (p. 45). This via media moral viewpoint and its supporting theological arguments demand attention from Christian theological bioethicists.