If you could choose the colour of your child's eyes, what colour would you choose? If you could rebuild damaged leg cartilage and, in doing so, make it stronger and more flexible than any natural biological substance, would you? What if you could take a pill that would allow you to concentrate intensely over a short and crucial period in your life, when distraction could mean the loss of something very important, like somebody's life?
These decisions and many others like them are now upon us and they have reached the attention of the European Parliament. Over the next few months, MEPs will establish an advisory committee on all aspects of human enhancement, the first committee of its kind.
Meanwhile the US has gradually been transforming health care into enhancement care and, perhaps by implication, losing sight of basic healthcare needs. In a world that is increasingly concerned about technological domination and dependence, we are becoming enhancement junkies. We nip here, tuck there, whiten our teeth, reduce the width of our waists, and even go on game shows for the chance of winning expensive, invasive cosmetic surgery. What is it that people seek by undergoing such transformations?
I think it has something to do with what I call the accumulation of biocultural capital. The expectation is that such alterations will make us wealthier in some sense. This might take the form of actual monetary gain. For instance, if we have better eyesight, we might be in a stronger position to access certain professions where this is important, such as being a pilot or an astronaut. We might even become a better golfer, which might explain why Tiger Woods had LASIK eye surgery.
In other cases, the capital we acquire is cultural when we buy into the idea that by sculpting our bodies in a particular way we enhance our attractiveness to others. Of course, we have always dabbled in this area. We make ourselves presentable before important meetings, or when going on dates, altering our body odour with cologne, removing blemishes with make-up and so on. However, today's technology takes this desire to a completely new level. Nowadays we can lengthen our legs, chemically enhance our mental ability and perhaps even genetically modify ourselves to become stronger, faster or more resilient to wear and tear.
Critics of such practices point to their irreversible or invasive character. They note that the fashions we covet when altering our appearance are ephemeral and we might find ourselves worse off rather than wealthier by pursuing them. Others are concerned that we will modify ourselves to such an extent that we will lose all sense of our fragile humanity. Becoming a DIY superhero could rob us of some essential quality that has to do with being vulnerable.
Should we continue to embrace this dramatic move towards the posthuman, or outlaw radical technological transformations? One of the difficulties is that there is no clear distinction between the way we use technology to make ourselves well and how we might use it to become better than well, or superhuman. So, when it comes to imagining how the technology might progress, our relentless pursuit of health might already commit us to enhancement. We might even be enhanced already.
We are a remarkably modified species, from the sophisticated clothing we wear to the laser eye surgery we utilise. We have always been beings in transition. We also bring a large amount of aesthetic content to our new technological culture. Whether it is the size of our breasts, the length of our legs or the colour of our makeup, we adopt new ways of altering ourselves to make them our own, to give them personal integrity and meaning.
One of the difficulties is that we cannot know in advance what precise aesthetic content will emerge from any given body modification or how such an alteration will be interpreted over time or, indeed, over our lifetimes. This is part of the risk we take when buying into any lifestyle enhancement. Consider tattooing, for instance, which has become a remarkably personalised practice over the years. What does the tattoo of a 20-year-old mean to that same person when they are 80 years old? Like other body modifications, tattoos have gone through numerous social and cultural shifts and today they are practically a mainstream body modification. Some would say they still signify deviant behaviour, though in a much more modest sense than they did when we used tattooing to brand criminals. Tattoos are also a great example of our willingness and desire to experiment with our bodies.
Should this uncertainty about what we will gain – or lose – from enhancements make us more reluctant to use them? Far from it. Instead, we should find more ways to support their responsible use. Technology is not value-laden. The practice of cosmetic surgery per se is not a good reason to be concerned about the particular culture of use we see among us. If we want to foster a more enlightened use of the technology, we have to begin with culture, not with the technology itself.
Here we get to the crux of the issue: the ways in which we utilise technologies of body or mind modification will always be informed by our broader cultural values, but, more significantly, cultural trends. This is why we need to take hold of such innovations and, through our use of them, question what we consider to be beautiful, or what would count as an enhancement to humanity.
Sometimes, our use of them simply signals that we are part of some tribe, such as the tribe that can afford botox. For this reason we must also critically engage with how tribes are often created by commercial structures, through advertisements and long-standing relationships between pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies and the medical industries.
The kinds of enhancements we must seek for humanity should not lead us towards a world where we all aspire to look the same as each other, which is a criticism often levelled at the cosmetic surgery industry. Rather, we should encourage human enhancements that amplify human variation. That's what I expect from human enhancement technologies and this is what humanity excels in, as the history of fashion reveals.
So, as the European Parliament proceeds with its discussions about how best to govern this brave new world, we would do well to remember that the problem is not the proliferation of enhancement technologies, but this peculiar period where there are only a few options available to us. Once we have access to the fullest range of human modifications, we will find less cause to mimic our favourite celebrity or, at least, our favourite celebrities will be much more varied in their appearance and their talents. Instead of converging around a single notion of beauty, we will invent new forms of human beauty.
New functional possibilities will also transform our aspirations. If we were all able to run a 100m sprint in 8 seconds, we might value some other Olympic event more highly or we might find more cause to value an activity that isn't an Olympic event. Alternatively, if we all had perfect pitch (a trait for which there is a rather simple genetic cause), we might invent some radical new forms of making music or, at least, destablise the dominance of certain musical genres, as the value of a perfect voice will be diminished.
These rich possibilities are likely to be enabled by a culture of enhancement and governing them will keep the European Parliament busy for quite some time. Of course, the MEPs unique problem will be how to develop policies that accommodate the entire spectrum of European values, so as to avoid the chaotic consequences of "enhancement tourism". Once we have expanded the options as far as possible, we will be able to observe how the choices of technological enhancement are as rich and complex as the choices we make about other aspects of our identity.