Post-Human Ethics

Content warning

This essay explores the philosophical implications of vampirism. In doing so, the essay directly addresses the topics of sexual abuse and sexual sadism. I do not wish to normalize or glorify these practices. Instead, I reference this subject matter with the intention that the distress associated with such practices highlights the distress which is intrinstric to the underlying philosophical problem.

The poignancy of the Dracula story stems from the mythological trope of corruption. Dracula bites the neck of a young woman and transforms her into something evil. This deeply troubling scene evokes that oddity of the human spirit which fears rape more than death; however, there is a deeper metaphysical layer to such horror. One might recall the gruesome case of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who not only raped and tortured his victims, but performed sham neurosurgeries on them in hopes of transforming them into sex slaves. The absurdity and stupidity of these procedures seems to accentuate the terror of the story; but the impetus for my essay is this strange question: What would happen if the neurosurgery actually worked?

Imagine a mad neuroscientist falls in love with a young woman who does not reciprocate. He kidnaps her and forces a transformational procedure on her, such that she now truly loves him. I do not mean the kind of severe abuse which can break a victim into conceding that they “love” their abuser. Let us suppose that the procedure genuinely works and that the woman now feels genuine love for the neuroscientist.

The police discover this atrocity and arrest the man. They hire some scientists from the university to perform the reverse procedure on the woman, so that she is transformed back into her original state. But herein lies the difficult question: is it actually ethical to perform the reverse procedure? At first glance, the answer is obviously yes. It is hard to imagine a scene more disquieting, and remediation seems a matter of urgency. But remember, the procedure genuinely worked. The woman truly loves the neuroscientist now. If the university scientists perform the reverse procedure, they will be violating the will of the current woman, and non-consensually transforming her into a different person. What if the currently existing women does not want to be transformed? What if she protests that she truly loves the neuroscientist and that any procedure to change her love is an abjection to her freedom and her selfhood.

In this sense, one could argue that the reverse procedure is exactly as immoral as the original procedure, for in both cases, a woman had her mind non-consensually transformed. Obviously, it does not feel that way. The neuroscientist appears to be an appalling monster, and the reverse procedure seems to be a wholesome miracle. But, from a strictly theorectical sense, both procedures are equivalently violational. Both procedures are forced upon a mind that does not consent.

Now allow me to add to our confoundment. Let us suppose that, a day before the police arrive, the neuroscientist performs a procedure on his own brain, which transforms him into a genuinely kind person - a man who would never fathom these horrible ideas. We want to viciously punish the neuroscientist. But the man that is there now (or rather the new mind that occupies that same body) is not longer that person. Imagine a cruel and terrible man who bears a son and them commits suicide. We would want to reprimand this man for his transgressions. Given that he has passed, it could be suggested that we instead punish his newborn son. But who would even consider such a terrible act? Obviously the son is not culpable for the crimes of the father. What is not so obvious is how we should understand the transformed neuroscientist. The original neuroscientist created the new neuroscientist - in a sense “birthed” the new one. Ought we consider the new neuroscientist to be a pseudo-son? And if he is a pseudo-son, how could we possibly condone punishing him?

Clearly, a terrible crime has been committed; but both the perpetrator and the victim seem to have vanished. So, the police just leave? They let the depraved transformations live on as couple, happily ever after? It is in these questions that we find the metaphysical horror that underlies the Dracula story: the mutablility of the soul and the erosion of the subject.

Most ethical theories are predicated upon the notion of the human “subject”. The human subject is an autonomous rational agent with an internal set of cognitive/emotional mappings that we call “preferences,” “values,” or “belief systems.” But I wonder, if and when we gain the technological sophistication to effectively modulate the nervous system — and are thus able to select and program our “values”, can we realy speak any longer of an authentic “subject”? How can we ask “what does a man want?” when we, or he himself, can change and select what he wants? Moreover, let us say he selects to have a certain set of beliefs and undergoes a transformation. The transformed man, with the selected beliefs, will now have to make another decision about changing or keeping these beliefs. And he will make that decision entirely based upon the beliefs that were newly programmed into him (what else could he use?). He might choose to change his beliefs again and again, until he reaches some belief-system equilibrium point. Or his beliefs might keep cycling back and forth endlessly - the metaphysical analogue of what the computer scientist calls “live-lock”. When man becomes a cycle of preprogrammed values selecting transformations into different preprogrammed values, is this thing that we call “ethics” any longer coherent?

Baudrillard saw the ontological terror implied by cloning. The arbitrary replicablility of man destroys his “aura”. A man is no longer a special and unique historical event, but simply a genetic code - a blueprint that can be repeated ad infinitum, a GitHub repo that can be “cloned” with a simple terminal command. If the social engineers realize that society has not met it’s quota of good books, they can spawn a few Nietzsches and a couple Joyces to remedy the situation.

But perhaps more grotesque is to clone with modifications - genetic engineering. At least our Nietzsche-clones reference a man that did truly exist and a time in history when existence mattered; but the genetic engineer discards this referential. Man no longer enjoys even the pretense of authenticity or historicity. Man is simply the solution to an optimization problem - how can we tinker with the genetic code to satisfy certain constraints? Man is no longer an end, but a means. There will be a master algorithm, behind all extant men, which designs them from code according to its internal objective function. The age in which men write algorithms will soon pass, and we will be resigned to the age in which algorithms write men.

Marshall McLuhan offered the fascinating idea that once a technology becomes obsolete, it transforms into an art form. Vinyl records used to be the most efficient medium of exchange for recorded audio. When digital formats made vinyl obsolete, the records became a decoration and fashion statement for youth culture. When the nervous system becomes programmable, perhaps we must concede that the concept of the “subject” has become obsolete. And at this point, does the subject now become an art form?