Ronald Bailey thinks that the political conflicts of the 21st century will not be chiefly between right and left but between “transhumanists and bioconservatives/bioluddites.”
He worries that bioluddites will want to curtail “technologies that will enable people to boost life spans, enhance intellectual capacities, augment athletic abilities, and choose their preferred emotional states” and obstruct the transhumanist goal of enabling “people to use technology to transform their bodies, brains and progeny in ways they deem beneficial.”
Bailey appeals to the libertarian fetish of “choice” as a universal solvent of potential conflicts; he doesn’t think such technologies should be subject to democratic limits any more than others should “get to vote on whom you have sex with, what recreational drugs you ingest, what you read and watch on TV and so forth.”
One problem that comes up is in Bailey’s mention of “progeny.” If we get to “design” our progeny according to certain specifications, then what happens to their “choice”? As C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man (a book that looks more prophetic as time goes on),
In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. (My emphasis)
Even on the libertarian’s own terms, other people (both their descendants and those who have to live with them) are affected by their “choices” to augment or modify their faculties via bioengineering. Not to mention that a lot of funding for biotech enterprises comes from public funding (As a libertarian, Bailey presumably opposes that. But is he prepared to disavow the fruits of such research?).
But the more fundamental problem is the libertarian’s failure to recognize that discrete individual choices contribute to a social environment that we all have to live in whether we like it or not. Bailey’s denial of the legitimacy of democratic decision-making looks a lot like loading the dice in favor of the outcomes he favors, not unlike those who demand that religious values be kept out of the public sphere.
A Thinking Reed 
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