In the years
immediately following World War II, a debate raged among U.S. policy officials
over whether to place nuclear weapons – and the technological production
systems that made them possible – in the hands of the military. They decided
no, instead establishing the Atomic Energy Commission as a civilian nuclear
weapons agency. Their goal: to ensure democratic control over the production
and use of this most dangerous form of technology.
I wonder,
today, whether the United States ought to ask the same question about
technologies of human enhancement. Should the production and use of human enhancement
technologies for military purposes be placed in the hands of a civilian agency?
The basic argument
supporting a yes answer to this question is relatively simple. The
militarization of human enhancement technologies will potentially be extremely
dangerous – to individuals and to democracy – in part because military
organizations are hierarchical and secretive and in part because battlefield
performance is arguably the most competitive, coercive, and destructive context
on the planet. The most enhanced soldiers are likely to be put on the deadliest
missions (indeed, they already are). Unanticipated flaws in or consequences of
the design of enhancement technologies may create glaring vulnerabilities in
conflict settings. Yet, the history of militaries all over the globe
demonstrates that neither the welfare of individual soldiers nor the long-term
societal consequences of the use of particular technologies long survive
efforts to achieve greater military effectiveness. Witness, for example, recent
debates over torture, landmines, and depleted uranium.
The U.S.
military clearly believes that both physical and cognitive enhancement of its
soldiers hold significant military value. As Jonathan Moreno details in Mind Wars,
military research agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
have spent untold billions on efforts to enhance human physiological and
neurological characteristics in the search of the next generation of military
advantage in the name of continued U.S. national security. See, also, the 2008
National Research Council report, Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and
Related Technologies, commissioned by the Defense
Department’s Defense Intelligence Agency.
It is hard
to deny the potential military value of enhancements – although if we arrive at
the point where we can protect our national security only through transforming
ourselves into high-tech battle machines, I will count it a serious failure of
humanism and the human race. Nonetheless, I would suggest several reasons to
take decisionmaking about human enhancement research and application to soldiers
out of the hands of the military.
First,
soldiers are not just instruments, and the military has a poor record of allowing
its personnel to opt out of dangerous experiments. They also own a culture of
machismo not unlike that which makes it so difficult to protect NFL players
from the long-term dangers of concussions, as well as a hierarchical command
structure that brooks little in the way of disobeying orders. Human rights
demand stronger protections for soldiers in the realm of human enhancement than
may be strictly possible within military organizations.
Second, the
long-term, civilian implications of human enhancement are too great to simply
be ignored in the development of human enhancement for military purposes.
Beyond such blunt arguments as the fear of creating super-humans who would out
compete their civilian counterparts lies a more subtle threat to democracy from
human enhancement. The concept of achieved merit lies at the core of modern liberal
forms of democratic governance, as John Carson has so brilliantly demonstrated
in his comparative
history of intelligence testing in the U.S. and France.
Yet that idea is potentially fatally undermined by human enhancement
technologies.
Decisions
about how to proceed with human enhancement – if at all – must be made
democratically, with full recognition of the uncertainties that surround these
technologies and the consequences for both individuals and the arguably increasingly
fragile political underpinnings of democratic societies. That can only happen
if those decisions are made explicitly, by democratic institutions, and not by
default by military commanders looking for the next battlefield edge.
