Do humans have the right to “uplift” animals?
In his “All Together Now: Developmental and ethical considerations for biologically uplifting nonhuman animals,” George Dvorsky makes the case for raising the intelligence of animals and including them in human society as equal to humans.
The most important question regarding animal uplifting is whether it is ethically appropriate. Dvorsky feels that it is not only appropriate but also morally imperative. In making his case, he appeals to the theories of John Rawls as set down in A Theory of Justice, a justification of the welfare state.
Rawls bases his political philosophy on a concept borrowed from game theory. His own particular game he calls the “original proposition.” In this game, players must invent an ideal, just society without knowing what status they would have in it. Dvorsky explains that according to Rawls, players “would adopt a risk-minimizing strategy that would maximize the position of the least well off.”
Dvorsky introduces one new variant into Rawls’ game: not only do players not know their status in the imaginary society, they don’t know to what species they belong to either. And so Dvorsky reasons that “it is fair and reasonable to assert that [players] would make contingencies for the uplift of nonhumans...To do otherwise would be the unfair distribution of primary goods that are requisites for political participation, liberty and justice.”
In other words (and I hope I am reading Dvorsky correctly here), humans playing the game would favor animal uplift in the imaginary society because they might come into such a society as non-humans, in which case they would desire to be uplifted. Dvorsky is asking us: “Let’s say you were an animal. Wouldn’t you want to be uplifted?”
Dvorsky has worked out to his satisfaction that humans have a duty to uplift animals. But do animals want to be uplifted? Dvorsky admits that “no matter how hard we try we would never be able to convey the complexities of the issue to nonhumans, and thus, cannot depend on getting informed consent from the agents themselves.... Consent (or non-consent), therefore, has to be deduced and inferred by proxy.”
Lacking this informed consent of animals, Dvorsky appeals again to Rawls and his original position game: “Assuming that a nonhuman would participate in the original position experiment as a free and rational decision-making agent, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that they would, like humans, come to the same set of principles designed to protect the interests of the entire reference class.... Therefore, humanity can assume that it has the consent of sapient nonhumans to biologically uplift.”
In other words (and again I hope I am reading Dvorsky correctly): “If non-humans were human, they would make the same decisions in the game as would humans; ergo, animals want to be uplifted.”
To ward off accusations of anthropocentricism, Dvorsky writes: “The idea that nonhumans should be uplifted so that they more closely resemble Homo sapiens has been interpreted as a rather anthropocentric perspective. As already stated, the goal is not to transmutate animals in humans, but to improve their quality of life by endowing them with improved modes of functioning and increased health.”
But this reasoning misses the point. It doesn’t matter whether the goal of uplifters is to make animals into humans, a la Doctor Moreau, or to effect what uplifters regard as an improvement in animals’ quality of life. The uplifter is anthropocentric in that he is applying his ideas of human political egalitarianism to the animal kingdom. He is “considering human beings as the most significant entity of the universe,” inasmuch as he is attempting to replace the natural order with an order based on a school of contemporary political philosophy, and he is “interpreting or regarding the world in terms of human values and experiences,” in this case the values of the welfare state as articulated by John Rawls. (Quotes from Mirriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition)
Dvorsky also states that “uplift is primarily advocated by transhumanists who also make the case for Homo sapiens to move beyond human limitations – a rather non-anthropocentric position.”
Again, that transhumanists want humans to move beyond human limitations is not evidence that transhumanists are non-anthropocentric—quite the contrary. Their belief that human reason and political theories should replace natural selection as the engine of evolution shows quite clearly that they feel that the world can only be interpreted in terms of human values—in this case the political values of egalitarianism and progressivism.
The Transhumanist’s Burden
Uplift may be new idea when applied to animals, but applied to humans it has been around for some time.
The idea of an “ethical imperative to uplift” has its counterpart in history with the mission civilisatrice of France towards the non-white, under-developed world. The civilizing mission of the French was inspired by the Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity.
In David H. Groff’s review of Alice L. Conklin’s A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Ideaof Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930, we have a good description of the mission civilisatrice: “Conklin portrays the French colonial administration in West Africa...as an expression of social forces originating in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and coming to full flower in the Third Republic....To develop and support this thesis, Conklin examines...the governing ideas of the mission civilisatrice.
“What were these governing ideas? Primarily they had to do with mastery--mastery of physical nature, including the human body, and mastery of human behavior. To be ‘civilized’ in the French colonial understanding of the term was to rise above the various tyrannies that had shackled the human race from time immemorial. The tyrannies of most concern to the colonial administrators included those imposed on humans by climate, by disease, by ignorance, and by despotic government. In the face of such tyrannies, considered rampant in sub-Saharan Africa, the governors-general and their underlings saw themselves as liberators. Their task, as they saw it, was to diffuse the benefits of Western science and education while actively attacking and eradicating African institutions they deemed retrograde. Thus in the name of civilization the French did battle against African languages, slavery, ‘feudal’ chieftaincies, and certain aspects of customary law, all of which they regarded as barbaric....
“Conklin suggests that what the French colonizers were trying to do overseas was similar to what French republican administrators and teachers were trying to accomplish in the rural areas of metropolitan France. A zeal to modernize and cast out perceived demons of ignorance and superstition was as characteristic of domestic republicans as it was of their colonial counterparts.” 1
Just as the French colonial administrators felt duty-bound “to diffuse the benefits of Western science and education while actively attacking and eradicating African institutions they deemed retrograde,” so Dvorsky feels that “it would be unethical, negligent and even hypocritical of humans to enhance only themselves and ignore the larger community of sapient nonhuman animals. The idea of humanity entering into an advanced state of biological and/or postbiological existence while the rest of nature is left behind to fend for itself is distasteful.” Because “[u]ltimately,” as Dvorsky explains, “the goal of uplift is to foster better lives. By increasing the rational faculties of animals, and by giving them the tools to better manage themselves and their environment, they stand to gain everything that we have come to value as a species.”
Dvorsky addresses the issue of colonialism in his “Uplift Imperialism?” “[A]s history has shown,” he writes, “it is arguable that ‘imperialism,’ aside from its frequent use as a pejorative, can be a good thing and a driver for progressive change.” He commends the “synergistic effects of cross-cultural transmission” which he sees as occurring in colonial settings, and he affirms that “cross-pollination of ideas is often a good thing.” 2
Dvorsky’s defense of colonialism seems to be a tad at odds with the principals of democratic transhumanism, at least as they are articulated by James Hughes:
“Democratic transhumanism stems from the assertion that human beings will generally be happier when they take rational control of the natural and social forces that control their lives.” Hughes places particular emphasis on “the democratic tradition with its values of liberty, equality, solidarity and collective self-governance...” 3
It is of course true that philosophically at least, colonialism has usually been justified as a humanitarian, civilizing mission, as articulated by Rudyard Kipling in his famous poem The White Man’s Burden:
“Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease...
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
‘Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?’”
Not to be overlooked, however, is that whatever the benefits the non-white peoples of the world have enjoyed as a result of colonialism, the contradiction between the liberal democratic values of liberty and democracy and the inherently unequal and unfree condition of the colonized has not gone unnoticed and is often decried—above all by liberal democratic intellectuals!
Uplift and H .G. Wells
The idea of animal uplift was examined by H. G. Wells in his Island of Doctor Moreau, in which Moreau describes his attempts “to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape” thus:
“I took a gorilla I had; and upon that, working with infinite care and mastering difficulty after difficulty, I made my first man. All the week, night and day, I moulded him. With him it was chiefly the brain that needed moulding; much had to be added, much changed. I thought him a fair specimen of the negroid type when I had finished him, and he lay bandaged, bound, and motionless before me....I spent many days educating the brute....I taught him the rudiments of English; gave him ideas of counting; even made the thing read the alphabet. But at that he was slow, though I’ve met with idiots slower.....
“The human shape I can get now.... But it is in the subtle grafting and reshaping one must needs do to the brain that my trouble lies. The intelligence is often oddly low, with unaccountable blank ends, unexpected gaps. And least satisfactory of all is something that I cannot touch, somewhere—I cannot determine where—in the seat of the emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst forth suddenly and inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate, or fear....First one animal trait, then another, creeps to the surface and stares out at me. But I will conquer yet! Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say, ‘This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!’”
Of course, Dvorsky is against causing physical pain to animals during uplift experimentation. He states specifically that “regulatory legislation will need to be established so that uplift can transpire under safe, monitored and humane conditions.” He would surely regard Moreau’s “bath of burning pain” with repugnance.
However, the question remains as to whether the avoidance of the infliction of physical pain on a subject during experimentation renders such experimentation licit. Can an experimenter say, “My experiments on animals (or humans, for that matter) are licit because during experimentation, my subjects suffer no physical pain”?
Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University and theorist of “animal rights,” has made the avoidance of pain one of the cornerstones of his ethical system.
In a recent BBC interview, Singer was interviewed by William Crawley:
Singer: I don’t object to killing animals as such, but I do object to inflicting suffering on them.
Crawley: If we could humanely, painlessly kill an animal and use—slaughter that animal and use its meat within the food industry, would that be morally legitimate?
Singer: Well, I would have far fewer objections to that than I do to current practices. If animals really had good lives, what they need in terms of their biological and physical needs, also their social needs and emotional needs—because if we’re talking about birds and mammals, they certainly have social and emotional lives; and if all that happened was that they were then painlessly killed prematurely, I would be less troubled by that....That’s something I’m certainly prepared to debate.” 4
In Singer’s utilitarian system, suffering is to avoided at all costs; and its opposite, a lack of suffering, is considered a positive value. He feels no particular empathy with animals; quite the contrary, as he explained in the introduction to the 1975 edition of Animal Liberation, when his hostess, an animal lover, asked him and his wife, “But you are interested in animals, aren’t you, Mr. Singer?”:
“We tried to explain that we were interested in the prevention of suffering and misery; that we were opposed to arbitrary discrimination; that we thought it wrong to inflict needless suffering on another being, even if that being was not a member of our own species...Otherwise, we said, we were not especially ‘interested in’ animals. Neither of us had ever been inordinately fond of dogs, cats, or horses in the way that many people are. We didn’t ‘love’ animals. We simply wanted them treated as the independent sentient beings that they are, and not as a means to human ends—as the pig whose flesh was now in our hostess’s sandwiches had been treated.”
Would Singer have eaten the ham sandwich had he known that the pig from which the sandwich had been made had died without suffering? A question he would perhaps be “prepared to debate.” It is not difficult to imagine how the use of a utilitarian calculation in which the elimination or avoidance of suffering (be it animal or human suffering) is considered the premier primary good could result in the creation of a dystopia.
Nature as a Liberal Democracy?
In his study of liberalism, Suicide of the West, political philosopher James Burnham points out that liberals “do not reflect unduly on the fact that no social innovation takes place in a vacuum. When we alter item A, especially if it is changed deliberately and abruptly instead of by the slow molding of time, we will find items B and C also changed, and to some degree the entire social situation, sometimes in most unexpected ways. We may be successful in achieving our sought-for reform; but there will be other, unintended and perhaps undesired changes arriving along with it...[T]his possibility does not greatly worry the liberal in advance because he will have reached his decision about the desirability of the reform by derivation from his ideology--which compromises a ready-made set of desirable goals--and not from slow, painstaking and rather pedestrian attention to the actual way in which assemblies, or whatever it may be, function.”
As a political philosopher, Burnham was of course reflecting on the effect of liberal ideology on social policy; but his observations on the liberal penchant for social innovation may be applied as well to the democratic transhumanist urge for biological innovation.
For the liberal, Burnham writes, “[t]here is...no reason to favor ideas, institutions or modes of conduct merely because they have been long established, because our ancestors accepted them; their ancient lineage is, if anything, a ground for suspicion. We should, rather, be ready to undertake prompt, and even drastic and extensive, innovations, if these recommend themselves from a rational and utilitarian standpoint.”
Again, Burnham’s remarks may be applied to the democratic transhumanist. That natural selection has produced, over a long period of evolutionary time, certain animal species with certain characteristics is no reason to grant the integrity of these species any respect.
The problem with uplifting is the same as that with democratic transhumanism and post-genderism: the political theory of egalitarianism, i.e. equality before the law, has been applied to the natural order. Any student of the natural sciences—whether the discipline be astronomy, chemistry, biology, or physics—will find disingenuous at best the attempt to manipulate the natural world on the basis of a political philosophy.
Rawls, lacking any background in evolutionary theory, was able to let his imagination run riot when he envisaged his social utopia; though I doubt very much that he intended his attempted justification of the welfare state to be used to justify intelligence-enhancement experiments on animals.
In any case, the attempt to impose egalitarian political views (or any political views, for that matter) on the natural world seems destined to validate the ancient Roman saying: Quod natura negat, nemo feliciter audet (That which nature denies, no one can successfully attempt).
1 http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_world_history/v010/10.2groff.html
2 http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/dvorsky20061114/
3 http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm
4 http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2007/05/william-crawley-interviews-peter-singer.html