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Nanoethics (2011) 5:295–307

DOI 10.1007/s11569-011-0133-z

ORIGINAL PAPER

The Social and Ethical Acceptability of NBICs for Purposes

of Human Enhancement: Why Does the Debate Remain

Mired in Impasse?

Jean-Pierre Béland

Johane Patenaude

Georges A. Legault

Patrick Boissy

Monelle Parent

Received: 4 August 2011 / Accepted: 16 October 2011 / Published online: 11 November 2011

The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

Abstract

The emergence and development of con-

vergent technologies for the purpose of improving

human performance, including nanotechnology, bio-

technology, information sciences, and cognitive sci-

ence (NBICs), open up new horizons in the debates

and moral arguments that must be engaged by

philosophers who hope to take seriously the question

of the ethical and social acceptability of these

technologies. This article advances an analysis of the

factors that contribute to confusion and discord on the

topic, in order to help in understanding why argu-

ments that form a part of the debate between trans-

humanism and humanism result in a philosophical

and ethical impasse: 1. The lack of clarity that

emerges from the fact that any given argument

deployed (arguments based on nature and human

nature, dignity, the good life) can serve as the basis

for both the positive and the negative evaluation of

NBICs. 2. The impossibility of providing these

arguments with foundations that will enable others

to deem them acceptable. 3. The difficulty of applying

these same arguments to a specific situation. 4. The

J.-P. Béland (*)

Département des sciences humaines, Université du Québec

à Chicoutimi,

Chicoutimi, Québec, Canada G7H 2B1

e-mail: jpbeland@uqac.ca

J. Patenaude

G. A. Legault

P. Boissy

M. Parent

Université de Sherbrooke,

Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada

ineffectiveness of moral argument in a democratic

society. The present effort at communication about

the difficulties of the argumentation process is

intended as a necessary first step towards developing

an interdisciplinary response to those difficulties.

Keywords

Debate about transhumanism and

humanism . Human enhancement . Philosophical-

ethical impasse . Social-ethical acceptance

The emergence and development of convergent

technologies for the purpose of improving human

performance [33], including nanotechnology, biotech-

nology, information technology, and cognitive science

(NBICs), open up new horizons in the debates and

moral arguments that must be engaged by philoso-

phers who hope to take seriously the question of the

ethical and social acceptability of these technologies.

Debates over the convergence of NBICs for the

purpose of human enhancement often entail the

following polarization:

–

On one side are those who are

‘unconditionally

for’,

the people known as transhumanists, such as Naam

[27], Bostrom [5] and Kurzweil [22]. These

authors invoke moral arguments related to freedom

and autonomy, nature and human nature, to legiti-

mize the position that the only way for human beings

to escape human incompleteness is to implement

the convergence of technologies on the nano

296

Nanoethics (2011) 5:295–307

–

scale, thus making it possible to surmount

biological limitations (the fragility of being;

disease and death) until the coming of the

human-machine hybrid or immortal cyborg—the

posthuman [19].

On the other side are those who are

‘uncondi-

tionally against’, commonly known as the

humanists, like Fukuyama [15,

16]

and

Habermas [18]. These authors reply by wielding

the semantic incompatibility of moral arguments

based on the nature, dignity, and good life of

fragile mortal human beings as evidence of

limitations that it is appropriate to impose in

order to restrain, indeed altogether prohibit, the

development of these new nanotechnological

powers in order to alter human beings and thus

dominate first human nature and then nature as a

whole.

arguments, our analysis will show how four factors help

us understand why the debate between transhumanism

and humanism has been incapable of a productive

outcome.

1. The ambiguity that results from the fact that a

single deployed argument (nature and human

nature; dignity; the good life) can serve as the

basis for both a positive and negative evaluation

of the development of NBICs, because the core

meaning of the argument’s moral utterance is not

specified.

2. The impossibility of providing these arguments

with foundations that will enable others to deem

them acceptable.

3. The difficulty of applying these arguments to a

specific situation.

4. The ineffectiveness of moral argument in a

democratic society.

To undertake this philosophical process of clarifi-

cation, it was necessary to examine all the texts

published in the journal

NanoEthics

since it was

founded in 2007. From among these texts, we

retained 14, based on two criteria: articles that discuss

moral arguments in favor of or against nanotechnol-

ogies; and articles on meta-ethics. We also analyzed

reports (including the National Science Foundation

Report, [1]) and recent books that met the same

criteria.

As has been pointed out by Jean-Pierre Dupuy

[14], philosophical debates on the ethical foundations

of nanotechnologies have become so routine that one

could number the arguments constantly deployed and

observe that when one person invokes Argument

Number Ten, someone else invariably replies with a

corresponding counterargument:

‘The

same argu-

ments are always served up, and they are always

answered with the same counter-arguments’. Why is

the philosophical debate reduced to this clash of

incompatible arguments and counterarguments? In

other words, why has the debate so far been destined

to remain mired in impasse? This is the preliminary

question to which we want to formulate some replies.

If we wish to grasp the relevance of philosophy to

the sphere of the social and ethical acceptability of the

development of new technologies, we must become

familiar with and understand those sources of the

conflict that account for the way the discussion ends

in impasse.

In the present article, we will advance the analysis

presented by Patenaude et al. [30], which identified the

threefold nature of a moral argument, the seven core

meanings of the moral arguments usually deployed in

debate about nanoethics, and the five moral stances that

underlie those seven moral arguments. In the polarized

climate of discussion between transhumanists and

humanists, the main arguments that clash are those based

on: nature and human nature; dignity; the good life;

autonomy; and rights. Focusing exclusively on these

The Arguments’ Ambiguity

The ambiguity of the arguments used (arguments

based on nature and human nature, dignity, and the

good life) in these discussions between humanism and

transhumanism represents one factor contributing to

confusion and philosophical impasse. How are we to

account for this? We can do so using an analytic

model that relies on a definition of the notion of

ambiguity in philosophy.

‘We

are dealing with an

ambiguity when

the word or phrase has more than

one meaning within a given context

and we are

uncertain which one to choose’ ([29]: 107). A model

of this definition appears in Fig.

below:

Based on this analytic model, we will see in what

follows that the arguments based on nature and

human nature, dignity, and the good life, as found in

the context of the moral utterances of the moral

Nanoethics (2011) 5:295–307

Argument in the context of debate

297

to protect the values’ associated with human nature

([15]: 218).

Sense B: Critical

Transhumanists like Kurzweil [22]

reply that the essence of the human being resides not in

our limitations, but in our capacity to overcome them:

Then perhaps our basic disagreement is over the

nature of being human. To me, the essence of

being human is not our limitations—although we

do have many—it’s our ability to reach beyond

our limitations. We didn’t stay on the ground. We

didn’t even stay on the planet. And we are already

not settling for the limitations of our biology.

Kurzweil [22] thus prefers openness to human

enhancement by NBICs over a static utopia of human

nature. The biological nature of the human being can

vary without limitations at the whim of the develop-

ment of these convergent technologies (NBICs) of

which it is itself the matrix:

‘[T]here

are no essential

barriers to our emulating these ways in our technol-

ogies, and we are already well down this path.’

Human enhancement by means of the development of

these technologies, carried out in order to transcend

the biological nature of the human being, would thus

have nothing sinister about it. It would be a part of the

tradition of human effort to continue that process of

self-appropriation that is constitutive of humanity. It is

for this reason that prohibiting the development of

NBICs is illegitimate. Thus for the philosopher

Dominique Lecourt [26], as expressed in his book

Humain post humain,

ethics cannot remain limited by

the formulation of prohibitions in the name of human

nature, because the singularity process (the process of

hybridizing the human with the technological) is

constitutive of human nature:

And if we place the human being within the

‘flux

of the living’, as is appropriate, technological

reality cannot be thought about without viewing it

as an essential dimension of human beings, whose

very nature it is to manifest themselves in

perpetual becoming, propelled by an ongoing

constructive and destructive dynamic.

Affirmative, humanist sense

Critical, transhumanist sense

Fig. 1

Model for the analysis of ambiguity in an argument in

the context of debate. A. Affirmative, humanist sense vs B.

Critical, transhumanist sense

arguments advanced in the debate, constitute factors

contributing to ambiguity and discord and lead to

philosophical and ethical impasses.

The Ambiguity of the Argument Based on Nature

and Human Nature

In the argument based on nature and human nature

that makes it possible to evaluate using convergent

NBICs for human enhancement, the core meaning of

the moral utterance is a prescription. This moral

utterance specifies what we must do or not do, taking

into account the knowledge we have of the laws that

govern nature and our own human nature. But the

argument is ambiguous, because it refers to at least

two contradictory justifications for the moral utter-

ance in the context of the debate between humanism

and transhumanism:

Sense A: Humanist

“Nature”

in its religious sense

implies everything God has created, laws that have

been handed down, and the order or plan that serves

as the criterion for judgment. For humanists like

Fukuyama, the human being who has been enhanced

with NBICs, the cyborg that the transhumanist Stock

[35] identifies with the

‘fusion

of technology and

biology’, contradicts this divine and immutable order

of nature. However, it also threatens the Western

secular belief in a

human nature

as provisionally

fixed at the present day, in the sense that it is not

‘infinitely

plastic’ in its biological complexity and can

only vary within a certain range determined by life:

‘Fukuyama

maintains that human nature must be

considered fixed even if it isn’t, because the con-

sequences of extreme human plasticity would be the

disappearance of democratic values’ such as equality

and autonomy ([3]: 263). Democracies can and must

restrict these consequences for human nature:

‘True

freedom means the freedom of political communities

The Impasse

From the ambiguous potential for both sense

and

sense

to be implied in the argument based on nature

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Nanoethics (2011) 5:295–307

and human nature flows the fact that this argument

can be used to evaluate the development of NBICs

both positively and negatively. The fullest philosoph-

ical critique of the equivocal interplay between senses

and

in interpreting the concept of nature,

especially from a moral perspective, is that advanced

by John Stuart Mill ([23]: 672) in his critical essay

entitled

‘Nature’

(published in the posthumous work

Three Essays on Religion,

1874):

The word

‘nature’,

says Mill, has two main senses:

it denotes either the total system of things [both

artificial and natural] and all their properties, or

things the way they would be, absent all human

intervention. The doctrine that recommends that

human beings follow nature is absurd, because a

human being cannot do otherwise. Under the

second sense, the doctrine that recommends that

human beings follow nature, that is, the sponta-

neous [natural] course of things, as a model for

their own actions is irrational and immoral:

irrational because every human action consists of

changing the course of nature thus defined and

every useful action consists of improving it;

immoral because the course of things is full of

events that are unanimously deemed to be odious

when they result from the human will.

The ambiguity of the terms

‘nature’

and

‘human

nature’ creates a dialogical impasse in

the debate between humanism and transhumanism

because it reflects the existence of at least two

contradictory justifications for maintaining that

the moral utterance follows the laws of nature.

So long as there is no philosophical discussion of

the grounds for adopting one conception of nature

over the other, the impasse will persist.

The Ambiguity of the Argument Based on Dignity

In moral utterances of the Kantian kind, we find the

moral prescription that expresses the condition for

possibility of our moral action:

‘Act

in such a manner

that you treat humanity, both in your own person, and

in the person of any other, always at the same time as

an end and never simply as a means’ ([21]: 36).

Robert Theis [37] argues that this formulation of the

categorical imperative, which affirms the status of

humanness as an end in itself, forms the center of

gravity of Kant’s various statements of principle and

duty. On this view, the core meaning of the moral

argument based on dignity is that it is the nature of

humanity, in one’s own person and the person of

others, to be an end. In the debate between humanism

and transhumanism, this type of argument is ambig-

uous, because it can imply at least two contradictory

and incompatible senses:

Sense A: Humanist

Fukuyama [15] invokes the return

of human dignity as a constraint on autonomy in the

Kantian sense:

‘It

is the existence of free will that

leads to Kant’s well-known conclusion that human

beings are always to be treated as ends and not as

means.’ For some humanists, the cyborg (the human-

machine hybrid) manifests as a transgression of the

principle of human beings themselves constituting

ends. Thus dignity consists of making technological

choices founded on morally acceptable goals, in order

not to treat human beings as objects or means but to

treat them, rather, as ends in themselves, in this way

limiting the consequences of those technological

developments that affect our physical, psychological

or cultural identity.

Sense B: Critical

For transhumanists, however, the

natural end of the human being flows from the free

choice to evolve towards conceptions of the cyborg in

order to allow for the fulfillment of the human desire

to be liberated from finiteness (biological limitations,

diseases, death):

‘The

convergence of humanity and

technology seems to be the natural end of moving this

reasoning into the realm of speculation. The concepts

“cyborgs”

as technically enhanced humans or as

humanly enhanced technology can be raised’ ([17]:

80). This natural end is associated with the concept of

dignity-autonomy without constraints, which consti-

tutes the condition of a person who is self-

determining by virtue of her or his own nature. On

this view, humans obey only the law they invent. This

law promotes the freedom of human beings in

‘their

capacity for endless reinvention of their way of being

human according to the fulfillments of their specific

genius’ ([26]: 48).

The Impasse

The ambiguity created by the twofold interpretation of

the concept of dignity (senses

and

lies at the

Nanoethics (2011) 5:295–307

299

heart of debates between transhumanism and human-

ism and flows thence to be encountered more or less

everywhere. Thus it can be used as a way of

evaluating the NBIC process positively or negatively.

It represents a real problem for the philosopher

Brownsword [6], who wonders whether the normative

invention of nanomedicine is the least of our worries:

The problem is showcased by modern debates

concerning the ethics and regulation of biotech-

nology. Here, the idea of human dignity has

appeared in two very different roles, in the one

case acting in support of individual autonomy

(human dignity as empowerment) and, in the

other case, acting as a constraint on autonomy

(human dignity as constraint).

The impasse can be partly resolved by clarifying

the core meaning of the moral utterance that makes

the appeal to dignity. In the present case, three

different core meanings are referred to: the Kantian

one, the one based on autonomy, and the one based

on rights. Once the core meaning has been clarified,

we can deal with that aspect of the impasse that

relates to the justification for adopting one moral

argument or the other.

The Ambiguity of the Argument Based on the Good

Life

In this same context of debates between humanism

and transhumanism, arguments made on the basis of

the good life seek to evaluate human choices accord-

ing to their consequences for the conditions of human

life. Thus one finds in Paul Ricoeur’s celebrated

definition of the ethical purpose of the good life the

component of individual choice focused on happiness

while taking others and institutions into account:

‘aiming

at the

“good

life” with and for others, in just

institutions’ ([31]: 172). On this view, a moral

evaluation of the good life rests on this question:

What are the consequences of human enhancement by

means of NBICs for the very conditions of life, both

individual and social? For example, what risks to our

current human conditions of life are entailed by

thinking and acting with the idea of creating an

immortal cyborg? Is this notion of transforming

ourselves in order to achieve infinity, with no

biological, cultural, or affective limitations (‘infinite

knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty,

infinite creativity, and infinite love’) ([22]: 476) in

continuity with our current experience of a happy

human life in the awareness of finiteness and death, or

does it represent a break with it? In the debate

between humanists and transhumanists, the argument

based on the good life is ambiguous because it

invokes at least two contradictory senses:

Sense A: Humanist

What conception of the good life

do humans have? Humanists like Ricoeur generally

adopt a conception of happiness as an ultimate state to

which humanity aspires. Most humanists are in the

habit of opposing the acceptance of finiteness to the

immoderate desire for infiniteness, a boundless desire

that the Greeks denounced as hubris and that causes

humanity to descend into self-destruction and the

failure represented by despair. For the true happiness

of the human being as found in historical and concrete

existence consists not in acting out the immoderate

desire to conquer human finiteness (limitations, aging,

fear of death) in order to achieve infiniteness (the joy

of being infinite and immortal), but in the act of

accepting suffering and finiteness:

‘Man

is the Joy of

Yes in the sadness of the finite’ ([32]: 140).

Humanists in general oppose this argument to

technological rationality, which strikes them as con-

sisting of that ideological degeneration that leads to

existentialist failure (humanity’s self-destruction). For

example,

‘[H]umanist

wisdom requires coming to

terms with the natural finiteness that affects every

human being’ ([4]: 64), because the paradoxical self-

suppression of both the self and the world flows from

our scientific world, which attends to human beings’

imaginary needs and limitless desires to transcend

finiteness in order to carry out our transformation into

an immortal cyborg.

‘Posthuman

utopias derive from

a similar ambition. What is strange is that some

people don’t hesitate to defend the paradox that

consists of associating the future good life with the

disappearance of humans as they are now’ ([4]: 23).

As Comte-Sponville ([10]: 37; [9]: 251) puts it,

‘What

then can we hope for? Nothing beyond death, so

nothing absolute: any contentment of mortals is

mortal, and life, if it is worth anything, is only worth

something in its finiteness.’

Sense B: Critical

In the transhumanist perspective of

Stock [36], however, the unhappiness of life consists

of continuing to resemble cavemen.

‘But

this lack of

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