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The bio-ethicist Nicholas Agar uses the principle of Species Relativism to motivate arguments against

radical enhancement in his book Humanity's End.

Species Relativism is the claim that there are only certain valuable forms of life compatible withmembership of a given biological species:

(SR) According to species-relativism, certain experiences and ways of existing properly valued by

members of one species may lack value for the members of another species (Agar 2010, 12).

According to Agar, certain radical enhancements (e.g. becoming near immortal or becoming a

digitally uploaded personality) would 'export' human individuals from humanity into some

posthuman state. Thus radical enhancement violates the principle that humans should promote and

cultivate their values rather than undermining or violating them. This is nicely prcised over at

Philosophical Disquisitions :

Humans should pursue activities and policies that promote or honour their values; they should not

pursue activities and policies that do not promote or honour their values.

Agar states that SR is analogous to but different in scope to cultural relativist views of morality.

Cultural relativists state that the truth of moral claims is relativized to historical cultural norms:

(CR) According to cultural-relativism, certain experiences and ways of existing properly valued by

members of one culture may lack value for the members of another culture.

Thus while "'Slavery is wrong' is true" for cosmopolitan liberals, the same may be false for Spartans

because the standards and practices by which each measures a worthwhile life are different.

Agar does not provide a detailed refutation of cultural relativism. But he suggests that intra-species

disagreements between members of different cultures do not reflect deep constraints on the values

accessible to their members. Thus "if the Spartans were to find that they were under no threat ofinvasion and that sporting rivalries with Australia were their only outlet for collective aggression,

then they too might abhor slavery" (Agar 2010, 13).

The implication here is that cultural relativism is false for humans because for any human there are

accessible forms of life other than ones they happen to occupy. By "accessible" I take we should

mean something like "biologically accessible". That is cosmopolitan liberalism is not an inaccessible

form of life for a typical Spartan because under favourable circumstances they could engage with it

and compare its virtues with the Spartan arte without altering their biological substrate.

Understanding or acquiring a new culture may not be easy but it is well within the biological scope of

most humans, particularly human children.

The inference to the falsity of CR, then, seems to be that culture is too soft a constraint on thepossibilities accessible to individual humans to settle moral disputes. The set of truth-makers

(potential values, whatever) for moral claims made within any culture C is fixed by the range of

accessible forms of life for its members. CR would be true only if the forms of life accessible to

members of C were limited to those compatible with C. But they are not so limited. Thus CR is false.

By parity of reasoning, SR is true for humans only if there are a limited set of forms of life accessible

to members of the human species. If species-membership turned out to be an analogously soft

constraint on the accessibility of forms of life then SR would be likewise be false. In that case the

range of values that humans were obligated to cultivate could potentially include values that are

only accessible to members of other species with the proviso that human individuals could acquire

membership of the relevant species.

Now, why should we believe that species-membership is not analogously pliant?

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It's worth pointing that that Agar is not a species-essentialist. He doesn't think that species-

membership is conferred by satisfying some historically unchanging list of individually necessary and

jointly sufficient conditions. Nor (on pain of irrelevance) can he claim that any member of a species

is necessarily a member of it.

In this he is line with post-Darwinian population thinking which sees species not as abstract kinds but

as temporally and geographically-extended individuals (Tim Morton would call these "hyper-

objects") characterized by clusters of properties maintained by homoeostatic mechanisms such as

ecological or reproductive isolation (19). On this view species differences are historical in much the

way that cultural differences are; they depend on the existence of mechanisms for restricting gene

combination and thus phenotypic variety. Absent those restrictions and the property clusters

characterizing a particular species will change (See also Roden 2012).

So what's so difficult about jumping species? Well, if a key isolation mechanism is reproductive

compatibility, then you could jump species by undergoing a biological change which allows you to

mate with members of a nonhuman species. Agar imagines genetic engineers travelling back 45000

years and conducting this procedure on a human, turning him into a Neanderthal. Following the

procedure the subject 'can no longer produce offspring with humans. He is, in compensation,attracted to Neanderthals and can reproduce with them' (24). Humans are relatively good at

acquiring new languages and habits but are not currently able to alter their sexual characteristics in

this way. So jumping reproductive species barriers in this way is currently much harder than jumping

cultures. Does this suffice to protect SR from the objections levelled at CR?

If species-membership is a harder constraint than culture-membership it cannot be because it is

metaphysically impossible because (as we have noted) it would make it irrelevant to the

enhancement debate. If species-jumping were metaphysically possible but technically impossible,

then this would also render Agars principle moot. Thus lets assume that species-jumping is

technically feasible by various routes. If that is the case then the range of forms of life accessible to

representative humans is a variable set which depends on culturally-available technology at a given

time.

However, if this is right, then species-membership may not be as pliant as cultural membership has

been to date but could become increasingly soft as the technologies for altering our morphologies

(posthuman-makers) become more powerful and widely available. In a posthuman republic

characterized by great morphological variability species, membership would have no more

constraining power than culture-membership currently has. Thus given that the accessibility of

culturally variable forms of life is an argument against CR, is the dated accessibility of

morphologically variable forms of life an argument against species-relativism? The obvious response

would be that the SR objection is historically relative. It applies to the extent that posthuman-making

is not feasible and our accessible forms of life remain species-constrained. Thus as posthuman-

making becomes more feasible the Species Relativist argument must suffer a decline in its relevance

and plausibility.

Agar, Nicholas. 2010. Humanitys End: Why we should reject radical enhancement.

Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Roden, David (2012). The Disconnection Thesis, in The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and

Philosophical Assessment, edited by Amnon Eden, Johnny Sraker, Jim Moor, and Eric Steinhart.

Springer Frontiers Collection.

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