ABSTRACT
The transhumanist movement contains a number of philosophers—Nick Bostrom, Steve Fuller, Max More, David Pearce, and Julian Savulescu, among others—working from the Anglo-American or analytic tradition of philosophy. This chapter challenges these assumptions in ways that are somewhat similar to the views of other critics of transhumanism: Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama, Michael Sandel, and Bill McKibben. Like them, I believe it is possible to identify a workable notion of human nature. I share an orientation that might be cast as broadly phenomenological in nature. But there are differences. I do not share their focus on human dignity and religion; my concerns with transhumanism are more ontological in orientation.
I then ask, what can motivate people and governments to take seriously the possibility of slowing the technological juggernaut? Art and politics are two paths for prompting a fundamental shift in our outlook. There’s another possibility: the occurrence of a medium-sized catastrophe. “Medium-sized” is a relative term: I mean something that shakes our culture to its core, prompting the questioning of our fixation with technology, without being civilization- or species-ending.
