Bioenhancement Technologies and the Vulnerable body

Over the past decade, some of the richest and most influential men in Silicon Valley have made considerable investments in biotech, hoping to change the future of human embodiment. Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Sam Altman and others are financing research that promises to enhance human bodies, radically extend the human life span, and even eliminate death. That the public faces and investors in bioenhancement tend to be white, wealthy, educated men who see death as the next arena for technology to conquer should not be overlooked.
Participants in this round table were part of a grant from the Issachar Fund as well as an edited book volume, Bioenhancement and the Vulnerable Body: A Theological Engagement (Baylor University Press, 2023) to examine bioenhancement technologies from the perspective of minoritized communities. Authors within the volume critically examined bioenhancement technologies with two key questions in mind: what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be vulnerable?
While theologians and religion scholars have been engaging the bioenhancements and transhumanism for over a decade, few do so explicitly using the insights from minoritized communities. Social justice concerns related to the use of human enhancement and access to these technologies remain woefully underthematized in religious ethics and theological discourse. This is perhaps because those writing about enhancement, not to mention the biggest proponents of enhancements technologies, have a privileged status in our society. Those who inhabit bodies that are “othered” are often skeptical of the aims of bioenhancement technologies as well as the ambitions of transhumanists.
And of course, there is good reason to be skeptical. Historically and at present, there are well-documented inequalities in medicine that produce vast healthcare disparities in developed Western nations and particularly in America. From the involuntary sterilization of persons with disabilities during the eugenics movement to the decades of deceptive clinical trials on African Americans, biomedical technologies often advance on the backs of minority groups while disproportionately advantaging majority groups. Why should bioenhancements be any different? Moreover, the central premise of transhumanism is questionable from the vantage point of many minorities. Those of us with disabilities, for example, may rankle at the idea that our bodies are not only deficient but would not be optimal even if they were normalized to the current standards of health. The goalposts for what constitutes a well-functioning or flourishing body are becoming ever out of reach. Now, more than ever, there is a need for religion scholars to engage in thoughtful deliberation about the potentialities and challenges of technologies that seek to overcome our human vulnerabilities and finitude.
The participants in this roundtable all agree that minority perspectives yield new insights into biomedical enhancements, particularly when persons are vulnerable to health disparities, including persons with disabilities, and persons of color. The presenters for this round table come from different denominational backgrounds and represent different minority perspectives and they bring those perspectives to bear on questions of bioenhancement.
Each presenter will briefly (5-7 minutes) highlight how they have come to evaluate particular bioenhanmcent technologies using insights from their religious traditions and minority communities. Presenters will describe how their theological methods and ontological suppositions reflect on the distinctiveness of human creatureliness in relation to technology and what difference bioenhancement might make for our conceptions of vulnerability.
Presenter one will lay the groundwork for the importance of developing an “ontology of the flesh” to evaluate transhumanist approaches to body modification. They will argue that the flesh extends beyond the skin of bodies, bridging without collapsing the distance between the self and technologies in the world. The lived-experience of the hybridity of disabled bodies in particular opens onto an “emancipatory transformation” whereby the mutability of the body is revealed through newly realized freedoms stemming from the incorporation of insensate technologies.
Presenter two will discuss how secular and religious understandings of personhood affect people with disabilities and the ways in which bioenhancement technologies are produced. They will argue the intimacy of the relationship between ontology and moral action is part of what grants creaturely life its moral salience. The conversation then turns to the importance of intimacy for moral life, how the theology does or does not make good on intimacy in how it imagines the disabled, and how bioenhancement technologies can help and hinder our intimate relationships with one another.
Presenter three will discuss the eschatological allure of bioenhancement technologies, which often portray disabled bodies as unfit for the future. The erasure of disabled bodies from religious and secular eschatologies results from and can lead to eugenic practices that violate the integrity of disabled bodies, fail to acknowledge the value and moral worth of disabled people, and reinscribe ableist structures and practices. The presenter will compare eugenic bioenhancement technologies with technologies that celebrate and amplify disability and prefigure a future in which bodies that are transformed may remain disabled.
Presenter four will examine how our norms for human life are shaped by ability and race, rather than a Christian ideal of what it means to embody Christ. The danger of normalization is that the identity of vulnerable bodies and selves is defined by their relationship to culturally imposed norms. These norms tend to other and exclude certain bodies and may even incite violence toward those who do not “measure up.” Faith communities minimize the effects of culturally mediated values of normativity by reinforcing the proposition that human nature is as it is and by focusing on the transfiguration of our bodies promised in Christ.
Round table participants will end by posing key questions related to how the audience’s own traditions and communities might critically engage the topic of bioenhancement, including, how does your religious tradition understand “human nature”? How does your tradition/community understand vulnerability and its relationship to human nature? How can technology be incorporated into or shape our natures? What, if any, limits should we place on biotechnologies that seek to eradicate humans’ fragility and finitude?