Many people will know James from his superhuman promotion of democratic transhumanism. Besides being the driving force behind the WTA and the IEET, James is the author of Citizen Cyborg, the producer and host of Changesurfer Radio, and a Betterhumans columnist.

It’s always great to chat with James in person, especially when he, George and I have an opportunity to bat around ideas that aren’t common dinner-table conversation. This meeting was no exception, spanning everything from uplifting animals to James’s desire to eliminate human racism in UN human rights documents.

We devoted much of the evening to debating the ethics of uplifting animals—raising them to the level of human intelligence, and beyond. This was the topic of George’s talk at the recent IEET conference. According to James, the talk has been mentioned in pretty much every article written on the conference (including, notably, William Saletan’s piece in Slate). George is considering turning the talk into a book, and he has already drafted an essay for publication. (If you’d like to read it, I’m sure he’d oblige in exchange for feedback. Just drop him a note.)

I found myself playing devil’s advocate, as I’m not convinced that (1) uplifting animals is ethical and (2) we have the right criteria for deciding which animals get uplifted, should we pursue such a project.

My first objection stems from the fact that upgrading the intelligence of certain animals may cause them more harm than good. For example, if I beefed up my dog’s IQ to 140, without making any other psychological modifications, it’s not clear how he would be happier than he is right now. His current pleasures include peeing on all stationary vertical objects, chewing on dried cow penis and, sometimes, eating his own poo. And if I did make other psychological modifications, I wouldn’t have a dog anymore, let alone my dog.

George and James had two responses to this objection. First, they argue that we only uplift animals that pass certain personhood tests, such as the mirror test. This would include most great apes and some other creatures, including dolphins. Once again, however, it’s not clear to me that great apes and dolphins would be happier with greater intelligence. Their psychologies have evolved to receive pleasure from certain pursuits, and jacking up their intelligence without changing this pleasure wiring might cause more misery than happiness. But changing this pleasure wiring would change the creatures themselves. So we might not be uplifting apes and dolphins so much as destroying what made them apes and dolphins in the first place.

James’s objection to this line of argumentation centers on the example of a mentally disabled human. Are we not ethically obligated, he asks, to raise such a person’s mental functioning to the greatest degree possible? After all, he notes, we could argue that a mentally disabled human is happy in that capacity, and that adding intelligence would only make him or her less happy through the introduction of existential angst and other issues that come with higher cognitive abilities.

But while I agree that we are ethically obligated to uplift mentally disabled humans, I don’t believe that the same argument holds for animals. The key reason is that we know what it’s like to be an uplifted mentally disabled person. People with IQs in the normal range of distribution are, essentially, uplifted mentally disabled people. With animals, however, we have no precedent. We don’t know how an uplifted chimp would experience the world.

My counterproposals to uplifting projects are to increase respect for animals, and give them more opportunities to have less suffering. For example, let’s stop eating animals, and let’s spend resources developing vat-generated meat and dairy products. Let’s also start preserving more space for animals to live. And if we really want to improve animal happiness, let’s intervene in ways that reduce disease and reduce predatory and starvation pressures. (This last point, however, might also be contentious; by reducing selection pressures, we doom animals to stagnation and ultimate extinction unless we intervene through genetic engineering.) At the very least, let this be where we start. If uplifting does prove to be the right thing to do, at least we won’t be faced with animals that strongly question our ethics by pointing out that we treated them terribly until they were more like us.

And to address the risk that uplifting animals might cause them more harm than good, I also propos an experiment whereby animals could choose whether or not to get uplifted. Imagine, for example, that we developed agents for uplifting that could be embedded in food. We could then run an experiment whereby apes and other animals could select which food they preferred, the uplifting food or the regular food. Once they learned which food had the uplifting effect, they could continue eating the food as long as they were happy with the results.

James considers this proposal unethical, as he feels that—as with raising children—we’re obligated to do what’s right for uplift-eligible animals whether they like it or not. This, to me, is an unsatisfactory comparison, because with raising children (1) we know the endpoint, because we live it, and feel that our children would enjoy it and (2) children are headed towards greater intelligence regardless of what we do, so our job is to shape their experience to make their future as positive as possible for them and society. Apes are not headed for this degree of sophistication without our intervention; we’re not shaping their future, we’re dramatically altering it.

If all of this sounds off-the-wall, welcome to my evening. But besides debating the ethics of animal uplift, we also discussed the future of the WTA, the IEET and Betterhumans. Needless to say, James has big plans for the WTA and IEET, and will likely be unveiling a fresh agenda for both groups shortly. As for Betterhumans, we talked about its role in spreading transhumanist ideas, and its future role in centralizing transhumanist-themed discussion.

All in all, my evening with James and George didn’t disappoint, and I’m looking forward to seeing James again soon. In the meantime, I can work on polishing my uplift counterarguments. Perhaps I’ll confer with my dog—when, of course, his mouth isn’t full of poo.