Daniel Sportiello

This essay addresses a serious question in theistic bioethics—what those of faith ought to make of transhumanism. In it, I argue for two theses: (1) Humanity—having slain Pestilence, War, and Famine—will slay Death as well. (In other words, the transhumanists are descriptively right.) (2) It is not death that really torments us. (In other words, the transhumanists are normatively wrong.) In doing so, I’ll suggest a theological solution to the Fermi Paradox: maybe we have not encountered any other technological civilizations because, while intelligent animals are fairly common in our galaxy, none of the others are driven by the restlessness that would drive us to sail the stars. In other words, maybe none of the others are fallen.

For many years, philosophers have argued about the Trolley Problem—but they've also argued about whether the problem ought to interest us. According to some, the artificiality of the situations means that they involve no complicating factors—and so we ought to take our intuitions about them especially seriously. According to others, though, the artificiality of the situations means that our intuitions about them are meaningless. I hereby name the puzzle of why our intuitions about this differ the "Trolley Meta-Problem." The story that follows illustrates this problem—and the Trolley Problem itself—in a humorous way.

Saint John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University may not be the best meditation on higher education—Plato's Republic has that honor—but it is nonetheless a classic. At its heart is a simple idea: to know any discipline well, one must also know well every other discipline—for only in knowing well every other discipline does one know the limits of that discipline. It is only by knowing history, for example, that one can know the limits of economics: the assumptions of economics are assumptions—and, as such, hold only in certain times and places. But what does Ireland have to do with any of this? Well, Saint John Henry Newman argues that studying at a university makes one a gentleman—but I argue that it does rather more than this: at its best, the university is the site of resistance. For it puts into context the claims of the mighty: it shows their assumptions to be no more than assumptions—and so open to question. Capitalism cannot allow its assumptions to be called into question. But capitalism needs the university—needs, at any rate, the specialists whom the university trains. And so capitalism has within itself, potentially, a site of resistance to itself. And something similar was true of subjugated Ireland, whether Saint John Henry Newman knew it or not.

If "rationalism" refers to the thesis that there is a right way to do whatever it is that we do—a way that we, with our reason, can discover—then Ludwig Wittgenstein is a critic of rationalism. For our words and deeds are justified only by the rules of particular language-games—but these language-games are themselves justified only insofar as they meet our needs; certainly none of them need be justified by reference to any of the others. Together, our language-games constitute our form of life; though this form of life is not entirely arbitrary—some of its features can be explained by reference to our nature—nonetheless it could be different in many ways. Indeed, it has been—and therefore probably will be—different in many ways; on some level, we all know this. Philosophy at its worst is the attempt to forget it; philosophy at its best is, therefore, the attempt to remember it.

In his New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin offers an analysis of modernity: at its heart, it is a radicalization of Christianity—a radicalization that counts as a betrayal. Like other movements of its time, Christianity judged this world in terms of another—one wherein all of us were brothers and sisters, wherein justice mattered more than victory and mercy more than justice. But rather than endure in patience their own limitations, those whom Voegelin calls “gnostics” tried to build heaven on earth—inevitably, by violence. This serves as his postmortem on the twentieth century: liberalism, communism, and fascism are all, according to Voegelin, trying to do what cannot be done—specifically, to do what Voegelin calls “immanentizing the eschaton.” Each is, in its own way, a revolt against the human condition—and so a revolt against God. But these gnostics would hardly have seen themselves in this demonic light. Indeed, they often called themselves “rationalists” and saw themselves as a brave few who might lead humanity out of the madness of the past. Of course, Voegelin would hardly grant that Plato or Saint Augustine were less rational than, say, Thomas Hobbes. But he would certainly grant that the gnostics hoped to render the world “rational” by abolishing whatever aspects of the human condition were “irrational”—in the case of Hobbes, our capacity for mystical experience of God. Of course, this is hardly how contemporary political scientists would explain Hobbes. In the introduction to his New Science of Politics, though, Voegelin offers an indirect explanation of this. He warns that the social sciences are prisoners of their idolatry of the natural sciences: they ignore any data that cannot be rendered in language that is entirely descriptive—insisting as they do so that this methodology is only “rational.”

In recent years, there has been renewed controversy about monuments to the Confederacy: these monuments, their detractors insist, are instruments of white supremacy—and, as such, ought to be lowered immediately. The dialectic is by now familiar: though some insist that these monuments are mere sites of memory, others note the relevant memory is that of the Confederacy—and that, because of this, the monuments are inevitably racist. Worse, the monuments were raised by racist individuals for racist ends; no surprise, then, that so many experience them as racist—that is, as instruments of white supremacy. For all of these reasons, the monuments ought to be lowered. And probably it is so. But what does one do when the instrument of white supremacy is a mountain? What does one do, moreover, when it is less than clear whether that mountain is an instrument of white supremacy? What does one do, in other words, when that mountain is a monument to a regime only ambiguously racist? What does one do when it was raised by a racist individual for a racist end—but has since that time come to be seen as a monument to precisely the opposite ideals? What does one do, in other words, when it is experienced by most not as a symbol of white supremacy but as a symbol—indeed, as the symbol—of freedom and equality? What does one do, in short, with Mount Rushmore at this moment—that is, in the wake of the Charleston shooting and the Charlottesville rally? And can the experience of those who saw the mountain prior to its status as a monument—that is, the Lakota—illuminate this question? In this essay, I examine these monumental questions. I ask them—and try to answer them—first as a consequentialist, second as a deontologist, and third as a virtue ethicist.