Authenticity and ambivalence: toward understanding the enhancement debate.

As both a participant in, and an observer of the "enhancement debate" over the last decade, I am intrigued by how frequently this debate features decent, smart people talking past each other. To suggest a way to understand its structure, and maybe even to gesture toward improving its tenor, I want to do three things. First, I want to suggest that both proponents and critics of so-called "enhancement technologies" proceed from a "moral ideal of authenticity," although they differ in how they understand it. Here I'm trying to emphasize that critics and proponents share more than they usually remember in the heat of academic battle. Second, I want to suggest that these different understandings of authenticity grow out of two different but equally worthy ethical frameworks, which stand in a fertile tension with each other. I will emphasize that reasons alone cannot account for why most of us feel more comfortable in one framework than in the other and that none of us feels comfortable only in one of them--we all move back and forth between them, to some extent. Finally, I will discuss two examples to show that, on reflection, none of us should want to speak only out of the framework in which we feel most comfortable. If understanding is what we are after, we should embrace rather than suppress the ambivalence we often experience when we think about specific interventions. The Moral Ideal of Authenticity In The Ethics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor reflects on the debate between "the knockers and boosters of modernity." According to Taylor, much of that debate, which simmered in the twentieth century and continues today, is rooted in each side's different mistake about the same moral ideal. The moral ideal of authenticity, which he says emerged fully at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, is that each of us finds our own way of being in the world. It is my job as a human being to find my way of flourishing, of being true to myself. "If I am not [true to myself], I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me." (1) Taylor says that this debate about the moral ideal of authenticity is "inarticulate." He writes, "Its opponents slight it, and its friends can't speak of it." (2) What he means by that somewhat oracular formulation is, I think, important. When Taylor wrote The Ethics of Authenticity, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind was still being widely discussed, and Bloom becomes Taylor's paradigmatic knocker of modernity. Much of Closing of the American Mind lambastes American college students (and their teachers) for their self-indulgence and shallowness, which Bloom says they cloak in "a certain rhetoric of self-fulfillment." (3) What Bloom doesn't get, according to Taylor, is that, even if some students and their teachers are guilty of self-indulgence and shallowness, many in fact are striving to live up to the moral ideal of authenticity. Whether or not they achieve it, they aspire to find self-fulfillment, to become who they really are. Bloom doesn't get that beneath what he takes to be rampant immorality is the expression of a thoroughly moral ideal. I am not a serious student of political philosophy and do not mean here to play one. But I need to point out why Taylor thinks it's not just the knockers of modernity who make a mistake about that ideal. According to Taylor, the boosters' view of what's going on is obscured by what he calls "the liberalism of neutrality." (4) He suggests that this sort of liberalism (John Rawls is his first cite) has as one of its basics tenets "that a liberal society must be neutral on questions of what constitutes a good life." (5) To put Taylor's now familiar point even more bluntly than he does in The Ethics of Authenticity (or in Sources of the Self), there is an important respect in which no theory about living well together can be neutral about what constitutes a good life. A theory about living well together requires a conception of what is good the way seeing requires a horizon. …