The new gods: ethics in the next decades

Ethics need to change radically to keep up with technology, write Julian Savulescu and Bennett Foddy.

Technology develops at an ever-increasing rate. This will have two major effects. Firstly, it will call us to question our nature as human beings.

Recently, researchers from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute peformed the first Australian liver cell transplant, a treatment which allows many people to be saved by one donor liver. Another group at that institute is developing an artificial chromosome, which can introduce new genes into an existing person, foreshadowing cures to genetic diseases and the correction of the genetic contribution to common disease. Further down the road, there is promising research into replacing failing organs with new ones grown from a patient's own stem cells, regrowing brain tissue, and even halting the ageing process. Humans may not just live longer, but much longer.

This change is most likely inevitable. We might decide not to use one medical technology or another, but we will never decide to stop curing the diseases and disorders which kill us when we are old. Every time a cause of death is cured, we will live just a little longer.

Increasing power and control

Not only may lifespan be increased, but so too may healthspan, or the span of healthy life. How will we confront a life of 120 or 150 good, productive years? Our concepts of work, family, retirement and relationships may have to change radically. At a population level, we will face enormous challenges. The structure of society will change with a declining birth rate and a so far unimaginable older population. How will we support such a changing demographic?

Our relentless course towards immortality is but one of the paths of human development that will be revealed in the next 20 years. Humans will become like gods in other ways. Humans will perform better than ever before and be capable of things they were never capable of.

This is obvious in sport, in the case of performance enhancement, which will continue to proliferate and become more powerful and harder to detect. The athlete of 20 years hence will be a superman or superwoman. Not only will we have unprecedented physical capabilities, but our minds will grow in ways not possible today. Cognitive and mood enhancers, such as Nootropil, Ritalin and Prozac, already exist today, but they are crude compared to the drugs we will soon develop. Soon, more beneficial drugs and other biological modifications will be developed to make humans smarter, calmer, happier, and better.

Increasing fragility

The new gods will have a second, darker power. Not only will we have unprecedented opportunities to improve length and quality of life, we will have the power to annihilate ourselves in many, difficult to control ways.

As our power and control increases, our fragility will also increase. Experts have estimated the risk that humankind will be wiped out by some technological disaster -- nanotechnology, biological warfare, nuclear war -- at 20-50 per cent in the next century. But when we live for much longer, we can also kill each other in an innocent way, because we will pollute so much more of the environment and consume so much more food and energy. Human enhancements threaten us with famine and environmental change.

The greatest ethical challenge facing humans is to protect us from ourselves. The human will come to pose the greatest to his or her existence. When gods weep, the world will flood. When gods rage, the earth will crack.

Increasing awareness

There is an urgent need to begin considering how we will face these new challenges to our nature and to our existence. Because technology begets further technological development, there is no halting or avoiding these problems. We must consider radically changing our practical ethics effort away from comparatively less important problems like privacy and reproductive cloning (which will never threaten our nature or existence) to these so critical and so far ignored challenges to humanity in the 21st century.

Julian Savulescu is professor of ethics at the Univeristy of Oxford, UK, and he is also part of the Melbourne-Oxford stem cell collaboration; Bennett Foddy is a postdoctoral student at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne.