Nicholas Agar
@vuw.ac.nz
Adjunct Professor
Victoria University of Wellington
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Nicholas Agar
Routledge
Nicholas Agar
Routledge
Walter Veit, Jonathan Anomaly, Nicholas Agar, Peter Singer, Diana S. Fleischman, and Francesca Minerva
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractIn recent years, bioethical discourse around the topic of ‘genetic enhancement’ has become increasingly politicized. We fear there is too much focus on the semantic question of whether we should call particular practices and emerging bio-technologies such as CRISPR ‘eugenics’, rather than the more important question of how we should view them from the perspective of ethics and policy. Here, we address the question of whether ‘eugenics’ can be defended and how proponents and critics of enhancement should engage with each other.
Nicholas Agar
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
This paper offers practical advice about how to interact with machines that we have reason to believe could have minds. I argue that we should approach these interactions by assigning credences to judgements about whether the machines in question can think. We should treat the premises of philosophical arguments about whether these machines can think as offering evidence that may increase or reduce these credences. I describe two cases in which you should refrain from doing as your favored philosophical view about thinking machines suggests. Even if you believe that machines are mindless, you should acknowledge that treating them as if they are mindless risks wronging them. Suppose your considered philosophical view that a machine has a mind leads you to consider dating it. You may have reason to regret that decision should these dates lead on to a life-long relationship with a mindless machine. In the paper’s final section, I suggest that building a machine that is capable of performing all intelligent human behavior should produce a general increase in confidence that machines can think. Any reasonable judge should count this feat as evidence in favor of machines having minds. This rational nudge could lead to broad acceptance of the idea that machines can think.
Nicholas Agar
BMJ
Russell Powell and Eric Scarffe1 are pluralists about disease. They offer their thickly normative account to meet the needs of doctors, but they allow that a different concept of disease might work better for zoologists.
In this commentary, I grant that Powell and Scarffe’s thickly normative evaluation of biological dysfunction works well in many medicinal contexts. Powell and Scarffe respond effectively to eliminativists—we should retain the concept of disease. But the paper’s pluralism and focus on the specific needs of institutions should permit us to eliminate the notion of disease from domains for which the historical grounding of their selected effects account of function are contrary to therapeutic goals. One such domain is mental health. I found Powell and Scarffe’s rejection of Boorse’s dispositional account of biological function persuasive—the selected effects account of function is a superior fit for biologists’ use of the term. But the historical nature of this concept is, at best, a distraction from the task of morally evaluating the many ways in which …
NICHOLAS AGAR
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Abstract:This paper considers the relevance of the concept of “eugenics,”—a term associated with some of the most egregious crimes of the twentieth century—to the possibility of editing human genomes. The author identifies some uses of gene editing as eugenics but proposes that this identification does not suffice to condemn them. He proposes that we should distinguish between “morally wrong” practices, which should be condemned, and “morally problematic” practices that call for solutions, and he suggests that eugenic uses of gene editing fall into this latter category. Although when we choose the characteristics of future people we are engaging in morally dangerous acts, some interventions in human heredity should nevertheless be acknowledged as morally good. These morally good eugenic interventions include some uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis. The author argues that we should think about eugenic interventions in the same way that we think about morally problematic interventions in public health. When we recognize some uses of gene editing as eugenics, we make the dangers of selecting or modifying human genetic material explicit.
NICHOLAS AGAR
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Nicholas Agar
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Transformation is a memorable feature of some of the most iconic works of science fiction. These works feature characters who begin as humans and change into radically different kinds of being. This paper examines transformative change in the context of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies. I discuss how humans should approach the prospect of being body snatched. I argue that we shouldn’t welcome the transformation even if we are convinced that we will have very positive experiences as pod aliens. When considering a transformative change, it is appropriate to give priority to your pre-transformation attitudes to potential future experiences and achievements over your predicted post-transformation attitudes.
NICHOLAS AGAR and JOHNNY MCDONALD
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Abstract:This article explores some implications of the concept of transformative change for the debate about human enhancement. A transformative change is understood to be one that significantly alters the value an individual places on his or her experiences or achievements. The clearest examples of transformative change come from science fiction, but the concept can be illuminatingly applied to the enhancement debate. We argue that it helps to expose a threat from too much enhancement to many of the things that make human lives valuable. Among the things threated by enhancement are our relationships with other human beings. The potential to lose these relationships provides a compelling reason for almost all humans to reject too much enhancement.
Nicholas Agar
BMJ
Unfit for the Future packs a powerful punch for a short book. In this commentary I respond to the book's case for moral bioenhancement (MB). Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu understand MB as using ‘pharmacological and genetic methods, like genetic selection and engineering’ (p. 2)1 to improve moral motivation. They say “Modern scientific technology provides us with many means that could cause our downfall. If we are to avoid causing catastrophe by misguided employment of these means, we need to be morally motivated to a higher degree” (p. 8).1 They present MB as necessary to avoid Ultimate Harm, an event that would make ‘worthwhile life forever impossible on this planet’ (p. 46).1 The instrument of Ultimate Harm that features most prominently in their discussion of MB is the climate crisis. Persson and Savulescu believe that normal human capacities for sympathy and justice may not suffice to properly address climate change.
I argue that MB is considerably more dangerous than Persson and Savulescu suppose. Moral worsenings are the almost inevitable result of attempts to significantly improve moral motivation by biomedical means.
There is nothing philosophically incoherent in bioenhancements that enable a morally superior response to the climate crisis. We can imagine biomedical interventions that remodel our moral psychologies to exactly resemble that of a committed environmental activist such as Rachel Carson or David Suzuki. Perhaps these would give us the largeness of vision both to properly appreciate dangers posed by climate change and to remove obstacles to effective collective action.
MB is perilous not because of the end that is sought, but instead because of the way that moral bioenhancers will almost certainly work. There are unlikely to be any pills or injections that directly produce in us morally superior judgments or motivations. Moral bioenhancers will achieve that …
NICHOLAS AGAR
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Abstract:This article challenges recent calls for moral bioenhancement—the use of biomedical means, including pharmacological and genetic methods, to increase the moral value of our actions or characters. It responds to those who take a practical interest in moral bioenhancement. I argue that moral bioenhancement is unlikely to be a good response to the extinction threats of climate change and weapons of mass destruction. Rather than alleviating those problems, it is likely to aggravate them. We should expect biomedical means to generate piecemeal enhancements of human morality. These predictably strengthen some contributors to moral judgment while leaving others comparatively unaffected. This unbalanced enhancement differs from the manner of improvement that typically results from sustained reflection. It is likely to make its subjects worse rather than better at moral reasoning.
Nicholas Agar
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
This paper addresses two examples of overconfident presentations of utilitarian moral conclusions. First, there is Peter Singer’s widely discussed claim that if the consequences of a medical experiment are sufficiently good to justify the use of animals, then we should be prepared to perform the experiment on human beings with equivalent mental capacities. Second, I consider defences of infanticide or after-birth abortion. I do not challenge the soundness of these arguments. Rather, I accuse those who seek to translate these conclusions into moral advice of a dangerous overconfidence. This paper offers an insurance policy that protects against some of the costs of mistaken moral reasoning. An interest in moral insurance is motivated by the recognition that, in the event that overconfident ethicists have reasoned incorrectly, some actions recommended by their conclusions are not just bad, but very bad. We should reject suggestions that we conduct medical experiments on humans or kill newborns
Nicholas Agar
John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Nicholas Agar
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
In the original version of article, the title was published incorrectly. The correct title should read as ''On the irra-tionality of mind-uploading: a reply to Neil Levy''.
Nicholas Agar
BMJ
David DeGrazia1 offers, to my mind, a decisive response to the bioconservative suggestion that moral bioenhancement (MB) threatens human freedom or undermines its value. In this brief commentary, I take issue with DeGrazia's way of defining MB. A different concept of MB exposes a danger missed by his analysis.
DeGrazia presents MB as a form of enhancement directed at moral capacities. There are, in the philosophical literature, two broad approaches to defining human enhancement. Simplifying somewhat, one account identifies enhancement with improvement. DeGrazia joins other advocates of MB in preferring this type of account, defining a human enhancement as ‘any deliberate intervention that aims to improve an existing capacity, select for a desired capacity, or create a new capacity in a human being.’1
An alternative approach relativises enhancement to human norms.2 ,3 In this view, improvements up to levels of functioning properly considered normal for humans are therapy, not enhancement. Improvements beyond those levels are enhancements. The injection of synthetic erythropoietin (EPO) by someone suffering from anaemia is therapy. When healthy Tour de France competitors inject EPO, it is enhancement.
We can minimise philosophical disputes about word meanings by endorsing a conceptual pluralism that acknowledges the need for more than one concept of human enhancement to address the hugely varied ways in which technology may alter humans. In the debate about biomedical moral improvements there would be enhancement as improvement and enhancement beyond human norms .
DeGrazia effectively deploys the concept of enhancement as improvement to …
Nicholas Agar
BMJ
Ingmar Persson challenges1 an argument in my book Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement 2 that harms predictably suffered by unenhanced humans justify banning radical enhancement. Here I understand radical enhancement as producing beings with mental and physical capacities that greatly exceed those of the most capable current human. I called these results of radical enhancement posthumans, though I think that Persson may be right that this is not the most felicitous name for them.
The focus of my argument was the possible improvement of moral standing brought by the radical enhancement of human cognitive and affective capacities. This would give stronger moral entitlements to benefits and stronger moral protections against harms. My opposition to varieties of enhancement that have this effect is grounded in significant harms for unenhanced humans that predictably result from a loss in relative moral standing. Significant benefits for the radically enhanced won't morally compensate for the victimisation of the unenhanced worst off.
Persson criticises a more moderate presentation of my conclusion than the one that I favour. He presents me as arguing that …
Nicholas Agar
BMJ
I want to thank all of those who have commented on my article in the Journal of Medical Ethics .1 The commentaries address a wide cross-section of the issues raised in my article. I have organised my responses thematically.
Allen Buchanan's scepticism2 about moral statuses higher than personhood derives, in part, from our apparent inability to describe them. We seem to have little difficulty in imagining what it might be to have scientific understanding far beyond that of any human scientist. By contrast, it is exceedingly difficult to describe moral statuses superior to that of any person. Boosting cognitive capacities seems to result in cognitively superior persons—not post-persons (putative beings with a moral status superior to personhood). I offer an explanation of our moral myopia.2 We are necessarily clueless in respect of moral statuses superior to our own. If mice understood practical reasons sufficiently well to truly understand why persons have a moral status superior to their own then they would be capable of the feats of practical reason constitutive of personhood—they would be persons. Our cluelessness about post-persons is compatible both with their possible existence and with their necessary non-existence. I propose an inductive argument for the existence of statuses superior to personhood. The observed existence of many moral statuses up to and including persons provides moderately strong inductive support for the possibility of post-persons.
What precisely does the inductive argument predict? If my diagnosis of our moral myopia about post-personhood is correct, then mere persons cannot really understand what properties of post-persons give them a superior status. They will be able to infer their existence indirectly by an appeal to the predicted judgments of beings who lack our cognitive limitations. Wasserman3 questions my suggestion that we should defer to the sincere moral judgments of …
Nicholas Agar
BMJ
This paper presents arguments for two claims. First, post-persons, beings with a moral status superior to that of mere persons, are possible. Second, it would be bad to create such beings. Actions that risk bringing them into existence should be avoided. According to Allen Buchanan, it is possible to enhance moral status up to the level of personhood. But attempts to improve status beyond that fail for want of a target - there is no category of moral status superior to that of personhood. Buchanan presents personhood as a threshold. He allows that persons may succeed in enhancing their cognitive and physical powers but insists that they cannot enhance their moral status. I argue that it is an implication of accounts that make a cognitive capacity, or collection of such capacities, constitutive of moral status, that those who do not satisfy the criteria for a given status find these criteria impossible to adequately describe. This obstacle notwithstanding, I offer an inductive argument for the existence of moral statuses superior to personhood, moral statuses that are necessarily beyond human expressive powers. The second part of this paper presents an argument that it is wrong to risk producing beings with moral status higher than persons. We should look upon moral status enhancement as creating especially morally needy beings. We are subject to no obligation to create them in the first place. We avoid creating their needs by avoiding creating them.
Nicholas Agar
BMJ
David DeGrazia offers what I will call a constructive account of moral enhancement.1 By constructive I mean that he seeks to describe moral enhancement so as to make clear why it produces beings with a superior entitlement to benefits and a reduced eligibility for harms.
Much of DeGrazia's discussion of moral enhancement is in terms of moral status: moral enhancement is understood as producing beings with superior moral status. In the course of his discussion, he proposes an alternative analysis of moral enhancement that avoids talk of different statuses. According to this interests model, moral enhancement does not alter status, rather it results in a (systematically) stronger interest in avoiding harms and receiving benefits. The interests model is not without philosophical value. However, for simplicity's sake, I conduct my discussion in terms of moral status enhancement. My criticisms apply also to the enhancement of moral interests.
I argue that constructive accounts of moral status enhancement predictably fail to show why enhancements of human capacities would enhance moral status. The fault is not in the accounts themselves. Rather it is in their audiences. We mere persons cannot understand criteria for a moral status higher than personhood.
DeGrazia imagines a world of 2145 populated by unenhanced humans and beings who have evolved from humans ‘through carefully planned genetic modifications’ (p10).1 The members of this subpopulation are superior to …
Nicholas Agar
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
In a paper in this journal, Neil Levy challenges Nicholas Agar’s argument for the irrationality of mind-uploading. Mind-uploading is a futuristic process that involves scanning brains and recording relevant information which is then transferred into a computer. Its advocates suppose that mind-uploading transfers both human minds and identities from biological brains into computers. According to Agar’s original argument, mind-uploading is prudentially irrational. Success relies on the soundness of the program of Strong AI—the view that it may someday be possible to build a computer that is capable of thought. Strong AI may in fact be false, an eventuality with dire consequences for mind-uploading. Levy argues that Agar’s argument relies on mistakes about the probability of failed mind-uploading and underestimates what is to be gained from successfully mind-uploading. This paper clarifies Agar’s original claims about the likelihood of mind-uploading failure and offers further defense of a pessimistic evaluation of success.