Why Do We Care About Doomsday?

In his book Death and the Afterlife (Oxford 2013), Samuel Scheffler speculates that the prospect of humanity’s imminent extinction shortly after our own death (“doomsday”) would affect us more than the knowledge of our own mortality currently does. If we knew that all human life would disappear from the face of the earth 30 days after we die, then this would render much of what we do today meaningless. We would react with ennui and despair, which, Scheffler believes, shows “the limits of egoism” or in other words that we not only care for things that do not directly affect us (we won’t, after all, be there to experience the end of humanity), but also that we actually care more for what happens to humanity than for what happens to ourselves as individuals (in the sense that we find the idea of all human life coming to an end in the foreseeable future more disturbing and more destructive of life’s meaning than the idea of our own certain death).

I don’t want to go into the details of the argument (which relies rather heavily on the plausibility of Scheffler’s prediction of certain reactions to hypothetical situations such as the doomsday scenario), nor the problems that it faces. John Danaher has already, as usual, done an excellent job at analysing the logical structure of the argument and also discussing some of the objections raised: http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/meaning-value-and-collective-afterlife.html Suffice it to say that what I take to be the core of Scheffler’s “afterlife conjecture”, namely that we do care about the ongoing existence of humanity (what Scheffler calls the “collective afterlife”), rather persuasive. It may of course be difficult to predict how exactly we would react if we knew that the human world would definitely come to an end very soon after our death. Some people might despair, some might rediscover the value of human solidarity, some might feel licensed to live even more ruthlessly (freed of any concern for the well-being of future generations), some might remain largely unaffected and continue to enjoy their life, ignoring what they cannot change and what doesn’t directly affect them, and some might even positively welcome the eradication of human life as an opportunity for Mother Earth to heal her wounds or something to that effect. But I think whatever our reactions may be, it is pretty clear that few of us are entirely indifferent to the fate of humanity. We do care about the collective afterlife. The question is why.

Now it may be the case that when contemplating the doomsday scenario and feeling disturbed by it, we are actually suffering from a delusion that is similar to the one that Epicurus thought was responsible for our fear of death. Just as we may fear death mostly because we imagine ourselves being dead and somehow experiencing our own state of being dead (lying in our coffins, in the dark and cold, for all eternity), which of course we won’t, we may also fear doomsday because we imagine ourselves still being there when it occurs, and either being destroyed in the process or, perhaps even more disturbingly, being the sole survivor, the one who witnesses it all and is left all alone in an empty world. However, even though such a confusion may play a role here, I don’t think that is all there is to it. It seems to me that by emphasising the “limits of egoism” in the context of his afterlife conjecture, Scheffler really is on to something. We not only care for ourselves, for our loved ones, and perhaps for particular people that we happen to know. We also care for people in general. To a certain degree we tend to identify with humanity as a whole, tend to see ourselves in others. We tend to perceive humanity as a project that we all take part in. 

At least that is how I feel, and since I have no reason to think that I’m unique in this respect, I am assuming that many others share those feelings. When I look at my seven-year old son, I see myself in him, as I was when I was a boy, and it gives me comfort to think that he still has his whole life ahead of him, with all its opportunities, its rich fabric of experience, its joys and wonders. And although I’m aware that there will also be suffering, that there will be real losses and frustrations and disappointments, I cannot help feeling that on balance life is well worth living, an adventure well worth having, and that it is imperative that it continue (as Hans Jonas has argued in his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility). And it seems to me, when I look at my son, that in him I’m getting another opportunity at life, that he will be living life for me, that in him I will have a part in the future of the world. Now this feeling is not restricted to my son or my children in general. I also have it, though perhaps less poignantly, when I see other children at play, or lovers embracing, people chatting and laughing, students engaging with new ideas, and old couple walking along the street hand in hand, my dog chasing a ball, fully immersed in the sheer joy of running, of being alive. I identify with all of them, in the sense that I feel my own life extended in and through them. I feel that, in some way that I cannot fully understand, they are me. Even my dog. Or any other dog. Or other animal. So perhaps it is not humanity alone that we feel connected with and in whose survival we take an interest. Perhaps the project of humanity is itself part of an even larger project, the project of life. And if we imagine another doomsday scenario, one in which not only humanity vanished from the face of the earth, but all living creatures, so that not only the history of humanity came to an end, but the history of life itself, then we may find this even more disconcerting, even more destructive of meaning than if it were only humanity that came to an end. 

So why do we care about doomsday? I think it may be because we realize that with the extinction of humanity (or even more so life itself), we would die all over again, and this time for good.

Rape, Drunkenness and Consent, or Is Sex Intrinsically Harmful?

About a month ago (14 February 2015, p. 4) the British newspaper The Guardian published an article in which it was reported that three men had just been jailed for “raping a woman who admitted to being so drunk she did not know whether she had consented to sex.” An initial decision by the Crown Court to dismiss the charges was successfully appealed by the Crown Prosecution Service. Now they have been sentenced to six years each in prison. The woman whom they are alleged to have raped - and who in the article is consistently referred to as “the victim” - declares herself pleased with the decision. A spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service praises her for the “tremendous courage” that she has shown after suffering such a “horrific ordeal”. But it is good to see, he says, that now finally “justice has been served”. The DI who led the police inquiry, agrees: “We hope this serves as a warning and reminder to everyone that before engaging in any kind of sexual activity you must be absolutely sure that the other person has the capacity to fully consent and does so.”

Now I don’t know anything about this case except what I have learned from this newspaper article. So perhaps there are aggravating circumstances that I am not aware of. But let us, for the sake of the argument, assume that the article relates all the facts of the case that were relevant to the verdict. In that case, what happened was this: the woman in question went to a bar, where she consumed “up to 12 shots of vodka”. She met the three men who were later convicted of raping her, and accompanied them (voluntarily) to a flat where she drank more vodka and repeatedly had sex with all three men over a 20-hour period. Her family reported her missing and when the police found her at the flat the next evening, she couldn’t remember anything. She admits that the sex she had with those men may have been entirely consensual. However, because she was drunk at the time, it was ruled that she did not really have the capacity to consent, from which it follows that the men had sex with her without her consent, which fulfils the legal definition of rape. Hence the criminal conviction.

There are various things that puzzle me about this case. The first is that the woman seems to be absolved of any blame or even responsibility for what happened in that flat. The three men alone are seen to be responsible. The woman is simply a “victim” of a crime. She didn’t do things; things were done to her. The director of public prosecutions commented: “It is not a crime to drink.” Well, no, it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean that you are not responsible for what you do after you’ve gotten yourself drunk. If I get drunk and then drive home in my car and cause an accident, then it is unlikely that I will be exonerated on the grounds that I was so severely drunk that I didn’t really know what I was doing and thus incapable of consenting to driving a car. And that is because it was my decision to get so terribly drunk in the first place. I should have known better.

It may of course be argued that the case in question is different because other agents are involved and those agents committed a crime. If I get drunk and you relieve me of my wallet, and that is only possible because I’m so drunk that I don’t really know what is happening to me, then this is still a crime and you should rightly be convicted of theft. True, but in the rape case things are different. Here the crime does not simply remain unaffected by the victim’s drunkenness (as in the theft case). Rather, it is the victim’s drunkenness that turns the deed into a crime. Had the victim been sober, then she wouldn’t have been a victim and no crime would have taken place. Now imagine that you had not simply taken my wallet from me, but that I had insisted, in my drunken state, that you take all the money in my wallet. If you then did what I asked you to, you would of course still have taken advantage of me. It was certainly not a very nice thing to do because you could and should have guessed that if I had been sober I wouldn’t have offered you my money. And if later, after sobering up, I asked you to return my money, then I think you should return it, and perhaps even be legally obliged to do so. But I don’t think that you should be sentenced to prison for theft. One may disagree with this, of course, and insist that what happened did amount to theft, but my guess is that this would be mostly because you clearly inflicted harm on me, and that harm exists independently of my inability to consent to your actions. But in the rape case there is no harm other than the harm that consists in, or results from, the woman’s inability to consent. I’m of course not talking about rape in general, but only about this particular case where, it appears, there was no violence and no coercion. No physical or other direct harm was inflicted on the woman. Nonetheless what happened to her was regarded as a “horrific ordeal”, apparently not because she suffered in any way or even minded much at the time, but solely because she was not capable of consenting to it. The odd thing about this view is that it seems to suggest that the sexual act is intrinsically harmful unless it is consensual.

Imagine that the three men didn’t have sex with her, but instead played tic tac toe with her all night because that is what they are into. The next day she cannot remember anything, and it emerges that she was too drunk at the time to be able to consent to playing tic tac toe. If she had been sober, she would never have agreed to play that particular game with those particular men. Clearly, the men took advantage of her. Yet it would probably not occur to us to demand that those men be imprisoned for what they did to her. Seizing the opportunity to play tic tac toe with somebody because they are too drunk to refuse would not be considered particularly blameworthy. Yet seizing the opportunity to have sex with someone because they are too drunk to refuse is considered to be a heinous crime, punishable by six years of imprisonment. I wonder why exactly that is.

It is not only that I find it a bit worrying to be officially reminded and warned that “before engaging in any kind of sexual activity you must be absolutely sure that the other person has the capacity to fully consent and does so”, because this makes sex an awfully complicated and serious affair, full of legal pitfalls. This does not only rule out any drunken sex, but also any light-hearted sex, any sex that is not self-conscious and wary, stifled by the fear that one may have to pay for a misinterpretation of the signs with serious jail time. It’s going to be hard to actually live by that rule and still enjoy sexual encounters with people one hasn’t known for a long time. And even then we will not always have the required certainty. Do we ever have the capacity to fully consent to sex? What exactly does that mean? And can we ever be absolutely sure that the other has that capacity? How exactly do we become sure of that? Simply by asking? Are you sure you want this? Are you really sure? Are you sure you’re sure? But the most interesting question is why the absolute certainty of full consent is deemed so terribly important when it comes to sex, and to sex only. What is it about sex that makes it so special, so unlike all other activities that we cannot do it with another human being unless we are absolutely sure that they really want it?

One more thing: the unacknowledged gender aspect of the whole case. Imagine everything had happened the exact same way, but with the victim being a man and the perpetrators being women. After 12 pints in a pub the man is taken to their flat by three women who take advantage of his intoxicated state and repeatedly have sex with him. The next morning he finds he cannot remember anything, but, reasoning that he had clearly been too drunk to give his consent, he sues the three women for rape and they all get convicted and sentenced to six years of prison. The public and the media applaud the decision, and everyone, including the man himself, is very pleased that justice has been served. How likely is that scenario? Not very, I should think. And that is not because men are any less likely to suffer and be traumatized when they are subjected to sexual violence. I think it’s rather because we find it very difficult to see the violence in this particular case when the main protagonist is a man. In fact, I don’t think we would accept that the man has been harmed at all by the sex he engaged in, despite his alleged inability to consent, and we would most certainly not think that he went through a “horrific ordeal”. But why would that be? Assuming I’m right about this, what  makes the two cases so different that they are evaluated so differently morally?

At the moment I can only guess that it has something to do with the way we view human male and female sexuality. Despite the fact that women want and enjoy sex just as much as men, we are for some reason assuming that for women the sexual act is intrinsically harmful,  so that they should only be subjected to it if they explicitly consent to it, while for men the sexual act is intrinsically not harmful, but on the contrary pleasurable, so that, since pleasure is good, explicit consent to the sexual act is not morally required.   

Erik Parens on Binocularity

Erik Parens just published a wonderful new book on human enhancement and related issues. It is called Shaping Our Selves. On Technology, Flourishing and a Habit of Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) and I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone working in the field, and indeed everyone who is interested in ethics in the broadest sense, that is all serious reflection on what it means to live a life well.

Parens is uncomfortable with the label that is usually attached to people like him, namely that of a bioethicist, because bioethicists are often seen (and indeed behave) as if they had all the answers. If you don’t know what’s right or wrong in a tricky moral situation, ask a bioethicist and they will tell you. At least that is what we have learned to expect from the profession. But ethics, including bioethics, is not really about what is right or wrong, permissible or impermissible, what we are obligated to do and what we are obligated not to do. Instead, the questions that we actually ask when we engage in ethical reflection are much bigger and less simple (or simple-minded) than that. What the inquiry is really about is “the meaning of being human and about how we ought to live: questions about the nature of persons and what makes them truly flourish, about the nature of the various means we use to pursue our flourishing, about what if anything we owe our fellow citizens when we seek our flourishing, and so forth.” (3-4)

In other words, it’s complicated. There’s a lot to consider, and there are no simple, straightforward answers that can claim to capture the truth of the matter. There are always other sides to the issue, other perspectives to be considered, and only if we do that can we hope to get an adequate understanding of what is at stake when decisions have to be made that concern life and death and generally the well-being of people.

This is also true for human enhancement. The nature of the (academic) game often entices us to make a clear stand for or against enhancement, or for or against a particular kind of enhancement, although we actually know very well that it is hardly ever so easy. Our position usually reflects some true insight, but so does the position of our opponents, and it is important to be aware of the lop-sidedness of our own view, the fact that it roots in our personal experience and our character, which determines our individual perspective on life, and that we have no privileged access to the truth. Even though our own view might strike us as perfectly rational (and as the only truly rational view on the matter), it never is. There’s always something important to be learned from listening to the other and trying to understand where they come from and what is right and true about their way of seeing things. This is why we should learn to embrace what Parens calls binocularity, which he defines as “a habit of remembering that my insights are partial, both in the sense that they are always incomplete and in the sense that they reflect a stance toward the world that feels congenial to me.” (10)

Adopting this habit of thinking might even help us to discover that we and our opponents are actually not so far away from each other as we thought. We may find that we actually “share the same fundamental moral ideal but see it from such different stances and through such different lenses” (50) that our agreement on a deeper level is easy to overlook. Thus both those who think that human enhancement is generally a good idea (the “enthusiasts”) and those who are rather suspicious of it (the “critics”) seem to share the same moral ideal of authenticity. They just interpret it in different ways because the former are more inclined to see human nature as essentially transformative and progressive (thus adopting what we may call a “creativity stance”), whereas the latter feel more inclined to emphasise the essential goodness of what we have and are (thus adopting what we may call a “gratitude stance”). Accordingly, staying ‘true to ourselves’ can mean very different things to us, neither of which – and that is the important point to remember – is truer or more appropriate than the other. Creativity and gratitude both have their place in a well-lived life, and it would suit us well to remain aware of that.

The truth is that we are always biased towards one thing or another. Enhancement critics have been accused of suffering from a “status quo bias”, which may well be true, but the enthusiasts suffer from their very own status quo bias because “they tend to be biased in favor of accepting more of the same, where ever-expanding technological intervention into our selves and the rest of the natural world is the status quo.” (90) Bias comes natural to us, and complete objectivity is impossible to achieve. All we can hope to achieve is a viewpoint that is informed by the knowledge that we are biased and that the biases that other people have often represent genuine insights that are likely to complement (rather than refute) our own. 

That is certainly a lesson worth learning.

Do Women and Men Actually Exist?

A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference on posthuman politics in Mytilene (Greece). It was dominated by critical posthumanists (with a few transhumanists thrown in for good measure), most of whom seemed to be convinced that “humanism” and “dualism” were brought into the world by the devil (or, which is more or less the same, dead white males) to make life hard for oppressed minorities (i.e. people with the wrong skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, or species membership). Some presenters suggested that we seek guidance from Buddhism or “spiritualism” (teaching us the all-oneness of all things etc.) to overcome the dominant worldview. Towards the end of the conference I was so thoroughly fed up with the consistent and never really questioned damnation of dualism-and-humanism, which was believed to dominate Western philosophy and thinking (and hence politics) in general and to be the root of all evil, that I could no longer contain myself. After a the final presentation (in which Stefan Sorgner very originally managed to utilize the shared anti-dualist stance in support of his not very original argument for the ethical equivalence of traditional education and genetic cognitive enhancement, thus bridging the gap between posthumanism and transhumanism), I committed unspeakable sacrilege by asking what was actually wrong with dualism. My question remained unanswered. Apparently it was too obvious what was wrong with it to merit any explanation.

Of course, Cartesian substance dualism is very implausible, but is there anyone out there who still believes in it? Today? The same holds for humanism, or Humanism, with a capital H. Very few, at least in Western Europe, still believe that humans have been created in the image of God, or something like that, elevated and positioned above all other living creatures, to rule the earth and everything that lives on it. But it is hard to deny that there are differences between humans and other animals. How categorical they are, and how relevant, is of course a different question.

Anyway, after the discussion (which focussed on other issues) was over, I was approached by the Spanish artist and self-declared meta-humanist Jaime de Val, who essentially accused me of being an undercover agent of the establishment, hell-bent to destroy the tender plant of metahumanism (or posthumanism, or whatever). By questioning the validity of the habitual anti-dualist stance I had revealed myself as the enemy of the people, and it was made very clear to me that I didn’t have any business being at that conference in the first place and that it would be very much appreciated if I didn’t show my face again (that is, at similar events planned for the future). When I tried to direct the argument away from the personal and back to the issue of dualism, I suddenly found myself debating the question whether men and women actually exist, which I had, rather naively, proposed as an example of a duality (one of many) that actually existed. It seemed to me that the existence of men and women was undeniable, but I could probably not have picked a worse example, judging by the wrath that the example provoked in my opponent. I was brusquely told that men and women did not exist and that the fact that I did believe in their existence just demonstrated the depth of my ignorance. 

Unfortunately I didn’t learn much more than that, so I don’t really know why de Val thought men and women did not exist and what exactly he meant by it. I suppose it’s got something to do with posthuman politics. By affirming the existence of men and women, I probably committed to some sort of hierarchy between the two, inviting people to think that if women are really in some substantial way different from men, then perhaps men are justified in treating them differently. Or my ontological claim was tantamount to saying that every person must be either male or female, that nobody can be both or neither, and if there are persons that seem to be both or neither, then they need to be ostracized as monsters, assigned to either of the two categories, or changed in such a way that they can plausibly be regarded as either male or female. Needless to say, that was not what I had intended to convey.

It seems to me that we should be able to make claims about the existence of differences without thereby making certain normative commitments. I’m more than happy to concede that there exist, or may exist, people who are neither male nor female, people who are both, people who are biologically male but feel female and vice versa, and who knows what else. And as far as I’m concerned, they can all live merrily and do whatever they damn well please. It’s none of my business, and I’m not partial. But that doesn’t change anything about the fact that some people are actually men and some others are actually women, and that most people are either men or women, and I don’t really see anything wrong with that. I don’t see any need to diversify the sexes through reconceptualization or (for the more practically minded) genetic modification and thus to abolish the basic sexual dimorphism characteristic of our species. That is probably because I’m fine with being a man.

I can assure you I’m not blind to the fact that many of the differences that we see between the sexes are socially constructed. My point is not that there is still a biological foundation to the distinction between male and female (although I find it hard to understand how that can be denied), but rather that socially constructed differences are as real for us as biological differences. The distinction is not so much ontological as experiential. In our life-world, in the way we experience the world, men and women undoubtedly exist. And so do animals and machines, subjects and objects, the self and the other, the human and the non-human, the living and the dead, adults and children. Those differences are real. It may be theoretically possible to structure the world differently, to pay more attention to other differences and less to these, but it is very hard to actually live by an alternative (non-dualistic) ontology. Even posthumanists act like humanists most of the time, simply because it would be very difficult not to. You may fervently deny that there is any relevant difference between human agency and the agency of things, but you will probably not try to convince your furniture of this. Instead you will give a talk at an academic conference, where you will talk to other humans, who will politely listen to you, one human (in most cases male or female) subject talking to other (again mostly male or female) human subjects. Inanimate objects and animals (several cats and dogs who appeared to be living in the university buildings) were ignored, on solid humanist grounds. And during the breaks people visited the toilets. There were two kinds, one for women and one for men, which I’m sure is very oppressive, but it actually worked. Nobody seemed to be confused by it. I wonder why that is.