Implication of ‘Human Chipping’ on personal identity – Part 2: Are we artificial by nature?
Most human beings will consider implantation of RFID chips in the body as unnatural. But what is natural? One could say that what we are when we are born and the genetic information that we pass on to our children is natural. We are born naked, but we wear clothes to keep ourselves warm. Clothes are not natural to us. We are deprived of properties such as think skin or fur which many other animals have (Gehlen, 2003). We fulfill our requirements using technology.
It is natural that people contract diseases such as cancer and AIDS. Earthquakes and hurricanes are natural disasters. But these are not necessarily good for human beings. If it is possible to improve the situation through technological intervention, then why not? Like all changes in the society be it technological or not, the benefits are countered by the negatives. If the benefits outweigh the negatives then transhumanists would claim that there is no necessity for being skeptical about the technology (Bostrom, 2007).
Aristotle said that nature is grown while technology is made. Habermas claims that these categories de-differentiate when we interfere with nature (Habermas, 2003). He says humans should act morally as self-creating and autonomous beings. He claims that intervention leads to one category of ‘programmers’ and another of ‘programmed’. The ‘programmer treats the other person as object and has an attitude of domination while the ‘programmed’ will feel less free and lose autonomy as the attitude and behavior will be encoded. If Habermas’ categorization is applied to ‘Human Chipping’, the person or the organization who are implanting RFID chips on other human beings are the ‘programmers’ while the person with the implant is the ‘programmed’.
Let us consider the situation where newly born children are implanted with RFID chips. Initially these chips are used for identifying the infant in the hospital. This chip would be useful to monitor the health of the child throughout its life. Here there is no possibility of informed consent though. So the ‘programmed’ has no autonomy on choosing if it wants to be programmed or not. Humans are ‘by nature’ artificial and have no ‘natural origin’ and thus humans are a prosthetic being. Human evolution is the result of technical exteriorization of life. Humans are not autonomous but are ‘programmed’ by technology (Stiegler, 1998).
References:
Bostrom, N. (2007). In Defense of Posthuman Dignity. Bioethics, 206-214.
Gehlen, A. (2003). A Philosophical Anthropological perspective on technology. In R. C. Dusek, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology (pp. 213-220). Blackwell Publishers.
Habermas, J. (2003). The Future of Human Nature. Polity Press.
Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time: The fault of Epimetheus. Stanford University Press.
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