By Hans Plauborg
hhp@adm.au.dk
“He must be crazy! I can’t believe my ears.”
Academic conferences rarely generate the kind of emotional outbursts that followed a presentation by Julian Savulescu, a Romanian-Australian bio-ethics scientist and professor at Oxford University, at the Matchpoint conference entitled ‘Our posthuman condition’ at Aarhus University on 6-7 May.
But after all, the extremely well-dressed professor of philosophy with the distinctive features had spent an hour and a half arguing calmly in support of an idea that put the finer moral feelings of his audience to an extremely severe test.
Improve or die
To put it briefly, Savulescu’s point was that mankind should not be proud of the standard model man that evolution has produced so far. For instance, we are full of irrational thoughts and negative emotions like hate and anger – leading to all kinds of disasters all over planet Earth. The standard model man does not fully exploit his physical or intellectual potentials, either. We could be stronger, wiser and morally better people if we were willing to exploit the opportunities offered by medicine and biotechnology. According to Julian Savulescu, the results would be amazing: we would be happier individuals living a better life. Crime would be eradicated, and the world’s economic productivity would increase enormously. The world would be a richer place – in all possible ways.
‘Evolutionary mistakes’ are not mistakes
The world-famous philosopher and politologist Francis Fukuyama disagreed entirely. Laying aside the academic kid gloves in his keynote speech, he spoke out against what he called Sandberg and Savulescu’s ‘techno-libertarian message’.
According to Fukuyama, the problem is that these evolutionary mistakes are quite simply the core of human nature.
"Human nature and characteristic human dignity, derived from our ability to make moral choices, have always been meaningful concepts lending stability to our common experiences as a species. In a few years biotechnology could fundamentally change what it means to be a human being, so we have every reason to handle it with extreme caution, he said.
