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It becomes dogmatic through vanity and morality, as with "men vehemently in love with their own new opinions…and obstinately bent to maintain them, [who give] their opinions also that reverenced name of conscience" Leviathan , vii. When we use words which lack any real objects of reference, or are unclear about the meaning of the words we use, the danger is not only that our thoughts will be meaningless, but also that we will fall into violent dispute. Hobbes has scholastic philosophy in mind, but he also makes related points about the dangerous effects of faulty political ideas and ideologies.
We form beliefs about supernatural entities, fairies and spirits and so on, and fear follows where belief has gone, further distorting our judgment. Judgment can be swayed this way and that by rhetoric, that is, by the persuasive and "colored" speech of others, who can deliberately deceive us and may well have purposes that go against the common good or indeed our own good.
For Hobbes, it is only science, "the knowledge of consequences" Leviathan , v. Unfortunately, his picture of science, based on crudely mechanistic premises and developed through deductive demonstrations, is not even plausible in the physical sciences. When it comes to the complexities of human behavior, Hobbes's model of science is even less satisfactory. He is certainly an acute and wise commentator of political affairs; we can praise him for his hard-headedness about the realities of human conduct, and for his determination to create solid chains of logical reasoning.
Nonetheless, this does not mean that Hobbes was able to reach a level of "scientific" certainty in his judgments that had been lacking in all previous reflection on morals and politics. The most consequential aspect of Hobbes's account of human nature centers on his ideas about human motivation, and this topic is therefore at the heart of many debates about how to understand Hobbes's philosophy.
Many interpreters have presented the Hobbesian agent as a self-interested, rationally calculating actor those ideas have been important in modern political philosophy and economic thought, especially in terms of rational choice theories. It is true that some of the problems that face people like this - rational egoists, as philosophers call them - are similar to the problems Hobbes wants to solve in his political philosophy.
And it is also very common for first-time readers of Hobbes to get the impression that he believes we're all basically selfish. There are good reasons why earlier interpreters and new readers tend to think the Hobbesian agent is ultimately self-interested. Hobbes likes to make bold and even shocking claims to get his point across.
What could be clearer? There are two problems with thinking that this is Hobbes's considered view, however. First, quite simply, it represents a false view of human nature. People do all sorts of altruistic things that go against their interests. They also do all sorts of needlessly cruel things that go against self-interest think of the self-defeating lengths that revenge can run to.
So it would be uncharitable to interpret Hobbes this way, if we can find a more plausible account in his work.
Second, in any case Hobbes often relies on a more sophisticated view of human nature. He describes or even relies on motives that go beyond or against self-interest, such as pity, a sense of honor or courage, and so on. And he frequently emphasizes that we find it difficult to judge or appreciate just what our interests are anyhow. The upshot is that Hobbes does not think that we are basically or reliably selfish; and he does not think we are fundamentally or reliably rational in our ideas about what is in our interests. He is rarely surprised to find human beings doing things that go against self-interest: Too often, he thinks, we are too much concerned with what others think of us, or inflamed by religious doctrine, or carried away by others' inflammatory words.
But we shall see that this would over-simplify the conclusions that Hobbes draws from his account of human nature. This is Hobbes's picture of human nature. We are needy and vulnerable. We are easily led astray in our attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity to reason is as fragile as our capacity to know; it relies upon language and is prone to error and undue influence. When we act, we may do so selfishly or impulsively or in ignorance, on the basis of faulty reasoning or bad theology or others' emotive speech.
Unsurprisingly, Hobbes thinks little happiness can be expected of our lives together. The best we can hope for is peaceful life under an authoritarian-sounding sovereign. The worst, on Hobbes's account, is what he calls the "natural condition of mankind," a state of violence, insecurity and constant threat. In outline, Hobbes's argument is that the alternative to government is a situation no one could reasonably wish for, and that any attempt to make government accountable to the people must undermine it, so threatening the situation of non-government that we must all wish to avoid.
Our only reasonable option, therefore, is a "sovereign" authority that is totally unaccountable to its subjects. Let us deal with the "natural condition" of non-government, also called the "state of nature," first of all. The state of nature is "natural" in one specific sense only. What is Hobbes's reasoning here?
He claims that the only authority that naturally exists among human beings is that of a mother over her child, because the child is so very much weaker than the mother and indebted to her for its survival. Among adult human beings this is invariably not the case. Hobbes concedes an obvious objection, admitting that some of us are much stronger than others. And although he's very sarcastic about the idea that some are wiser than others, he doesn't have much difficulty with the idea that some are fools and others are dangerously cunning.
Even the strongest must sleep; even the weakest might persuade others to help him kill another. He is strongly opposing arguments that established monarchs have a natural or God-given right to rule over us. Thus, as long as human beings have not successfully arranged some form of government, they live in Hobbes's state of nature.
But the real point for Hobbes is that a state of nature could just as well occur in seventeenth century England, should the King's authority be successfully undermined. It could occur tomorrow in every modern society, for example, if the police and army suddenly refused to do their jobs on behalf of government. Unless some effective authority stepped into the King's place or the place of army and police and government , Hobbes argues the result is doomed to be deeply awful, nothing less than a state of war. Why should peaceful cooperation be impossible without an overarching authority?
Hobbes provides a series of powerful arguments that suggest it is extremely unlikely that human beings will live in security and peaceful cooperation without government. Anarchism , the thesis that we should live without government, of course disputes these arguments.
His most basic argument is threefold. This is a more difficult argument than it might seem. Moreover, many of these people will be prepared to use violence to attain their ends - especially if there's no government or police to stop them. In this Hobbes is surely correct. If our lives seem to be at stake, after all, we're unlikely to have many scruples about stealing a loaf of bread; if we perceive someone as a deadly threat, we may well want to attack first, while his guard is down; if we think that there are lots of potential attackers out there, it's going to make perfect sense to get a reputation as someone who shouldn't be messed with.
Underlying this most basic argument is an important consideration about insecurity. As we shall see Hobbes places great weight on contracts thus some interpreters see Hobbes as heralding a market society dominated by contractual exchanges. In particular, he often speaks of "covenants," by which he means a contract where one party performs his part of the bargain later than the other. In the state of nature such agreements aren't going to work. Only the weakest will have good reason to perform the second part of a covenant, and then only if the stronger party is standing over them.
Yet a huge amount of human cooperation relies on trust, that others will return their part of the bargain over time. A similar point can be made about property, most of which we can't carry about with us and watch over. This means we must rely on others respecting our possessions over extended periods of time.
If we can't do this, then many of the achievements of human society that involve putting hard work into land farming, building or material objects the crafts, or modern industrial production, still unknown in Hobbes's time will be near impossible. One can reasonably object to such points: Surely there are basic duties to reciprocate fairly and to behave in a trustworthy manner?
Even if there's no government providing a framework of law, judgment and punishment, don't most people have a reasonable sense of what is right and wrong, which will prevent the sort of contract-breaking and generalized insecurity that Hobbes is concerned with? Indeed, shouldn't our basic sense of morality prevent much of the greed, pre-emptive attack and reputation-seeking that Hobbes stressed in the first place?
This is the crunch point of Hobbes's argument, and it is here if anywhere that one can accuse Hobbes of "pessimism. The first concerns our duties in the state of nature that is, the so-called "right of nature". The second follows from this, and is less often noticed: On Hobbes's view the right of nature is quite simple to define. Naturally speaking - that is, outside of civil society — we have a right to do whatever we think will ensure our self-preservation.
The worst that can happen to us is violent death at the hands of others.
If we have any rights at all, if as we might put it nature has given us any rights whatsoever, then the first is surely this: But Hobbes says more than this, and it is this point that makes his argument so powerful. We do not just have a right to ensure our self-preservation: And this is where Hobbes's picture of humankind becomes important.
Hobbes has given us good reasons to think that human beings rarely judge wisely. Yet in the state of nature no one is in a position to successfully define what is good judgment. Others might judge the matter differently, of course. Almost certainly you'll have quite a different view of things perhaps you were just stretching your arms, not raising a musket to shoot me.
Because we're all insecure, because trust is more-or-less absent, there's little chance of our sorting out misunderstandings peacefully, nor can we rely on some trusted third party to decide whose judgment is right. We all have to be judges in our own causes, and the stakes are very high indeed: For this reason Hobbes makes very bold claims that sound totally amoral. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place [in the state of nature].
Hobbes is dramatizing his point, but the core is defensible. New readers of Hobbes often suppose that the state of nature would be a much nicer place, if only he were to picture human beings with some basic moral ideas. There are different ways of interpreting Hobbes's view of the absence of moral constraints in the state of nature. Some think that Hobbes is imagining human beings who have no idea of social interaction and therefore no ideas about right and wrong.
Others suppose that Hobbes has a much more complex picture of human motivation, so that there is no reason to think moral ideas are absent in the state of nature. In particular, it's historically reasonable to think that Hobbes invariably has civil war in mind, when he describes our "natural condition.
The problem here isn't a lack of moral ideas - far from it — rather that moral ideas and judgments differ enormously. This means for example that two people who are fighting tooth and nail over a cow or a gun can both think they're perfectly entitled to the object and both think they're perfectly right to kill the other - a point Hobbes makes explicitly and often. But what sort of "ought" is this? There are two basic ways of interpreting Hobbes here. It might be a counsel of prudence: In this case Hobbes's advice only applies to us i if we agree that violent death is what we should fear most and should therefore avoid; and ii if we agree with Hobbes that only an unaccountable sovereign stands between human beings and the state of nature.
This line of thought fits well with an egoistic reading of Hobbes, but we'll see that it faces serious problems. The other way of interpreting Hobbes is not without problems either. This takes Hobbes to be saying that we ought, morally speaking, to avoid the state of nature. We have a duty to do what we can to avoid this situation arising, and a duty to end it, if at all possible.
Hobbes often makes his view clear, that we have such moral obligations. But then two difficult questions arise: Like them, he thinks that human reason can discern some eternal principles to govern our conduct. These principles are independent of though also complementary to whatever moral instruction we might get from God or religion. In other words, they are laws given by nature rather than revealed by God. But Hobbes makes radical changes to the content of these so-called laws of nature. He thus disagrees with those Protestants who thought that religious conscience might sanction disobedience of "immoral" laws, and with Catholics who thought that the commandments of the Pope have primacy over those of national political authorities.
Although he sets out nineteen laws of nature, it is the first two that are politically crucial. A third, that stresses the important of keeping to contracts we have entered into, is important in Hobbes's moral justifications of obedience to the sovereign. The remaining sixteen can be quite simply encapsulated in the formula, "do as you would be done by.
What could be clearer? His view is that human nature is specific and definite and that there is some essence apparent in each and every person and object. Not least, the horrific crimes of twentieth century dictatorships show beyond doubt that judgment about right and wrong cannot be a question only for our political leaders. For a psychologically egoist agent, such behavior will be irresistible; for an ethically egoist agent, it will be morally obligatory. Trying to ban technological innovation on these grounds, however, would be misguided. Like them, he thinks that human reason can discern some eternal principles to govern our conduct. Keyt, David and Miller, Fred, eds.
Every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it, and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. This repeats the points we have already seen about our "right of nature," so long as peace does not appear to be a realistic prospect. The second law of nature is more complicated:. That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.
What Hobbes tries to tackle here is the transition from the state of nature to civil society. But how he does this is misleading and has generated much confusion and disagreement. The way that Hobbes describes this second law of nature makes it look as if we should all put down our weapons, give up much of our "right of nature," and jointly authorize a sovereign who will tell us what is permitted and punish us if we don't obey. But the problem is obvious. If the state of nature is anything like as bad as Hobbes has argued, then there's just no way people could ever make an agreement like this or put it into practice.
But Hobbes means to defend every existing government that is powerful enough to secure peace among its subjects - not just a mythical government that's been created by a peaceful contract out of a state of nature. His basic claim is that we should behave as if we had voluntarily entered into such a contract with everyone else in our society - everyone else, that is, except the sovereign authority.
In Hobbes's myth of the social contract, everyone except the person or group who will wield sovereign power lays down their "right to all things. How limited this right of nature becomes in civil society has caused much dispute, because deciding what is an immediate threat is a question of judgment. It certainly permits us to fight back if the sovereign tries to kill us. But what if the sovereign conscripts us as soldiers? What if the sovereign looks weak and we doubt whether he can continue to secure peace…?
The sovereign, however, retains his or her, or their right of nature, which we have seen is effectively a right to all things - to decide what everyone else should do, to decide the rules of property, to judge disputes and so on. Hobbes concedes that there are moral limits on what sovereigns should do God might call a sovereign to account. However, since in any case of dispute the sovereign is the only rightful judge - on this earth, that is — those moral limits make no practical difference. In every moral and political matter, the decisive question for Hobbes is always: As we have seen, in the state of nature, each of us is judge in our own cause, part of the reason why Hobbes thinks it is inevitably a state of war.
Once civil society exists, the only rightful judge is the sovereign. If we had all made a voluntary contract, a mutual promise, then it might seem half-way plausible to think we have an obligation to obey the sovereign although even this requires the claim that promising is a moral value that overrides all others.
If we have been conquered or, more fortunately, have simply been born into a society with an established political authority, this seems quite improbable. Hobbes has to make three steps here, all of which have seemed weak to many of his readers. First of all, he insists that promises made under threat of violence are nonetheless freely made, and just as binding as any others.
Second, he has to put great weight on the moral value of promise keeping, which hardly fits with the absence of duties in the state of nature. Third, he has to give a story of how those of us born and raised in a political society have made some sort of implied promise to each other to obey, or at least, he has to show that we are bound either morally or out of self-interest to behave as if we had made such a promise. In the first place, Hobbes draws on his mechanistic picture of the world, to suggest that threats of force do not deprive us of liberty.
Liberty, he says, is freedom of motion, and I am free to move whichever way I wish, unless I am literally enchained. If I yield to threats of violence, that is my choice, for physically I could have done otherwise. If I obey the sovereign for fear of punishment or in fear of the state of nature, then that is equally my choice. Such obedience then comes, for Hobbes, to constitute a promise that I will continue to obey. Why should my coerced promise oblige me, given the wrong you committed in threatening me and demanding my valuables?
Hobbes has no good answer to this question but see below, on egoistic interpretations of Hobbes's thinking here. His theory suggests that in the state of nature you could do me no wrong, as the right of nature dictates that we all have a right to all things. Likewise, promises do not oblige in the state of nature, inasmuch as they go against our right of nature. In civil society, the sovereign's laws dictate what is right and wrong; if your threat was wrongful, then my promise will not bind me.
But as the sovereign is outside of the original contract, he sets the terms for everyone else: As this suggests, Hobbesian promises are strangely fragile. Implausibly binding so long as a sovereign exists to adjudicate and enforce them, they lose all power should things revert to a state of nature. Relatedly, they seem to contain not one jot of loyalty. To be logically consistent, Hobbes needs to be politically implausible.
Now there are passages where Hobbes sacrifices consistency for plausibility, arguing we have a duty to fight for our former sovereign even in the midst of civil war. Nonetheless the logic of his theory suggests that, as soon as government starts to weaken and disorder sets in, our duty of obedience lapses.
That is, when the sovereign power needs our support, because it is no longer able to coerce us, there is no effective judge or enforcer of covenants, so that such promises no longer override our right of nature. This turns common sense on its head. Surely a powerful government can afford to be challenged, for instance by civil disobedience or conscientious objection? But when civil conflict and the state of nature threaten, in other words when government is failing, then we might reasonably think that political unity is as morally important as Hobbes always suggests.
A similar question of loyalty also comes up when the sovereign power has been usurped - when Cromwell has supplanted the King, when a foreign invader has ousted our government. Right from the start, Hobbes's critics saw that his theory makes turncoats into moral heroes: Perversely, the only crime the makers of a coup can commit is to fail. Why does this problem come about? To overcome the fact that his contract is a fiction, Hobbes is driven to construct a "sort of" promise out of the fact of our subjugation to whatever political authority exists.
He stays wedded to the idea that obedience can only find a moral basis in a "voluntary" promise, because only this seems to justify the almost unlimited obedience and renunciation of individual judgment he's determined to prove. It is no surprise that Hobbes's arguments creak at every point: All the difficulties in finding a reliable moral obligation to obey might tempt us back to the idea that Hobbes is some sort of egoist.
However, the difficulties with this tack are even greater. There are two sorts of egoism commentators have attributed to Hobbes: Either view might support this simple idea: But the basic problem with such egoistic interpretations, from the point of view of Hobbes's system of politics, is shown when we think about cases where selfishness seems to conflict with the commands of the sovereign - for example, where illegal conduct will benefit us or keep us from danger. For a psychologically egoist agent, such behavior will be irresistible; for an ethically egoist agent, it will be morally obligatory.
Now, providing the sovereign is sufficiently powerful and well-informed, he can prevent many such cases arising by threatening and enforcing punishments of those who disobey. Effective threats of punishment mean that obedience is in our self-interest. But such threats will not be effective when we think our disobedience can go undetected. But for Hobbes, such a powerful sovereign was not even conceivable: On the other hand, the theoretical sciences were not, and could not be, a source of knowledge about action.
The sort of inquiry used by the theoretical sciences was a tool ill-suited for discerning answers sought by the practical sciences. In addressing particularly human affairs, practitioners of the practical sciences had to settle for inexact applications of inexact knowledge, in full awareness of the unpredictability arising from human freedom and the variation of circumstances. Further, there was an accompanying awareness that efforts to enforce political solutions drawn from theoretical sciences were likely to end badly — as Aristotle intimates in his criticisms of various utopian political schemes in Book II of the Politics , whether the communistic family arrangements described by Plato in the Republic , or the equalization of property defended by Phaleas of Chalcedon, or the strict and mathematical division of social roles recommended by Hippodamus of Miletus.
Thus, for Aristotle, a science such as politics must rest in broad measure on observation and human experience, but cannot be addressed through the approach employed by the theoretical sciences. In turn, the theoretical sciences are thought to be the highest and most godlike form of knowing, but do not offer a guide to action. Ultimately, perhaps the most important kind of knowledge arising from the practical sciences is the ability to maintain knowledge of the difference between the two sciences.
Maintaining this knowledge requires cultivating the habits of mind and behavior necessary to avoid the temptation of applying one science in a manner inappropriate to another, especially that temptation to apply a theoretical solution to a problem arising from the phenomena examined by the practical sciences. Part of exercising the judgment that arises especially from the practical sciences, it was understood, was the ability to avoid applying the theoretical approach to the human domain.
P olitical science — reflecting a certain approach to the knowledge of political matters — was thus an appropriate undertaking so long as it employed the ancient understanding of the word science. However, in such an approach, a distinction was maintained between the two sciences as forms of comprehensive inquiry. But the advent of modernity was marked by the belief that political science could be approached by the same method as the theoretical sciences.
This transition rested on two fundamental transformations — or, put another way, a kind of inversion of the classical understanding of the role of the two sciences. In the first transformation, human beings came to be viewed as predictable material entities , governed by laws determining their behavior. In particular, the philosophic efforts of Hobbes and later Locke redefined human beings, understanding them to be subject to laws similar in form to the Galilean laws of matter and motion, which determined human activities and behaviors.
Taking human beings to be motivated by fear, desire, and, above all, self-interest, modern theorists dismissed the idea that virtues could or ought to be the aim of politics. Rather, useful harnessing and redirection of these motivations became the aim of the new science.
By understanding the universality and predictability of the laws of human behavior, human beings could fashion structures of government that would no longer be subject to the vagaries tolerated by and resulting from pre-modern political science. The human sciences were to become forms of theoretical science. In the second transformation, natural phenomena were to be understood not as a subject of theoretical study — that is, the object of contemplation — but rather, were to be understood as material to be worked on, as a domain that could be altered and transformed through human knowledge and activity.
Action upon nature was to become the main object of modern science, particularly as inaugurated by Francis Bacon. While modern political science was now understood to be subject to the same kinds of laws that the ancients thought governed natural phenomena, the natural sciences were now to be pursued in order to transform the subject of study, nature. The idea that political principles operated according to ironclad laws lent itself to a theory that was thought to be universally valid in all times and all places. At the same time, nature was to be increasingly the subject of human dominion.
Human freedom was no longer seen as limited by nature, but was to be extended, potentially infinitely, by the advance of modern science. To secure human liberty, political science must become a theoretical science, while natural science must be treated as a practical science, in the specific sense that it would be a realm of human action and freedom.
Within the horizon of a determined political setting — the liberal state — human beings would achieve a form of security and a new kind of liberty — the absence of constraint — through the conquest of nature. O n the basis of a belief in the fundamental predictability of human behavior, liberal theory laid claim to universal legitimacy. But liberal theory, now only a few centuries old, may yet prove historically short-lived, as we seem poised to enter into a new period of scientific revolution. These efforts began, infamously, as the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century versions of Social Darwinism, with corresponding efforts to apply what were thought to be Darwinian approaches to the improvement of the species — particularly in the form of eugenics: Indeed, as the author Tom Wolfe pointed out in his Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities , as soon as humans developed the ability of speech, they were effectively able to put an end to most forms of accidental evolution.
In developing the ability to dominate every other species on the planet, humanity has taken charge of the evolutionary process. It is not that evolution has ended: The logic of Darwinism suggests that once humans grasp the concept of evolution, humanity is now in a position to assume responsibility for its own evolutionary development and improvement. Thus enter the transhumanists. Author Simon Young, in Designer Evolution: The revolution in scientific thinking in the early modern period, in which the conquest of nature became a central aim, underlay the deepest presuppositions of the liberal political project — just as a different scientific conception had underlain the pre-modern understanding of politics, as aimed at realizing the human telos.
Scientific assumptions unavoidably inform political theory. And so we can surmise that the expansion of the ideal of conquering nature to include humanity itself is likely to have political consequences as far-reaching as the scientific revolution that informed the now-nearly-universal modern regime of liberalism. We can and must expect that a similar transformation of our political ideas will come with what many hope to be the expansion of the evolutionary imperative as knowingly and intentionally guided by scientific advances and human design.
Despite the historical parallel, experience offers us little guidance in the current circumstance. For this newest scientific revolution begins with the rejection of the idea of any immutable nature, whether the natural world or human nature itself. We find ourselves in uncharted waters — an unknown topography that encourages speculation about the future, pointing alternatively to nirvana and dystopia.
tentful by just analysing ideas about human nature and politics and subjecting them codifying a number of nucleotides - a landmark achievement towards the. The pope's diatribe expresses a revulsion against human nature and argues for the of pleasures, and the ultimate worthlessness of human achievements. the business of cybercrime at the Council on Foreign Relations blog Net Politics.
And the problem with either the dream or nightmare scenario, or anything in between, is that our projections about the future are based upon contemporary, which is to say steady, assumptions about human nature. But if the science proves to be correct — if the transhumanist project really does succeed in remaking our nature — then we are talking about a subject post -human nature with which we as yet do not have any knowledge or experience.
Speculations of any kind about such a future must then be suspect. In the cases of the two broad political-scientific philosophies we can roughly call Aristotelian and Lockean, we can see with some clarity the relationship between the scientific assumptions and the political assumptions. In the pre-modern view, human beings organized society around the ideal of attaining the virtues, in light of the need to attain a proper condition of human freedom. Human freedom was considered to be a condition of self-governance within self-imposed limits, consistent with the idea of a given human nature and a fundamentally unalterable natural order.
While regime types varied in the pre-modern world, a basic set of anthropological assumptions informed a broad consensus that political society should be organized around the ideal of the attainment of human virtues in accordance with a given human telos. Ancient limits upon acquisitiveness were lifted, in the belief that the expansion of human mastery could provide for the fulfillment of limitless human desires. Restlessness — described so well by Tocqueville, though also anticipated by such thinkers as Locke, Pascal, Rousseau, and Montesquieu — was predicted to become a basic condition of modern life for every citizen.
The aspect of these political ideas crucial for us moderns to note is that both were premised upon the belief in some fixed human nature, and the respective political beliefs and arrangements flowed from those assumptions. That is, each political theory flowed in a sensible fashion from basic aspects of human nature.
Based upon observable facts of human behavior, each respective political philosophy was able to articulate its essential features by means of appeal to a certain fund of knowledge about humanity. A fundamental debate between ancients and moderns revolves around the question of which conception of human nature is more correct — one oriented toward the attainment of virtue within a fixed natural order, or one based upon the expansion of satisfactions of human self-interest through the conquest of nature.
In both cases, experience is brought to bear: On the side of the ancients, contemporary authors such as Alasdair MacIntyre argue that modern liberal philosophy and practice is not only morally incoherent, but that it is destructive of the human soul, while authors such as Wendell Berry additionally argue that the practical consequences of the modern project make our world increasingly uninhabitable. On the other side, defenders of liberalism point to its evident success on the modern stage, especially the successes of science in pushing back an indifferent and often cruel nature — thus, along with increasingly humane state policies, increasing human health, wealth, and welfare.
I f we are at the advent of a new scientific order, then we must ask what political implications flow from a scientific revolution that urges the transformation of humanity itself. If the human race is to be altered in a unpredictable and perhaps fundamental manner, can any political arrangements or assumptions reliably flow from such a moving and unpredictable target? In response to these concerns, libertarian-minded transhumanists seek to assure critics that political solutions to such grim possibilities are sure to forestall any fearful outcome.
For example, if some form of intelligence amplification becomes available, it may at first be so expensive that only the wealthiest can afford it. The same could happen when we learn how to genetically enhance our children. Those who are already well off would become smarter and make even more money.
Trying to ban technological innovation on these grounds, however, would be misguided. If a society judges existing inequalities to be unacceptable, a wiser remedy would be progressive taxation and the provision of community-funded services such as education, IT access in public libraries, genetic enhancements covered by social security, and so forth. Technological progress does not solve the hard old political problem of what degree of income redistribution is desirable, but it can greatly increase the size of the pie that is to be divided. In short, the WTA documents establish a broad political tent, with an explicit embrace of political engagement, the need to defend and extend liberal democracy, and the inclusion of social democratic policy alternatives as legitimate points of discussion.
Addressing another set of concerns, namely, the fear that — as in the past — a eugenics policy may become the result of political fiat, enforced by a tyrant with the goal of liquidating sub-par humans, Simon Young assures his readers: Superbiology will and must be controlled by individual consumers, not the state. We should protect ourselves from totalitarianism by voting out of office any government which shows the first signs of a drift toward authoritarianism.