living the good life in the twenty-first century: technology, human enhancement and contemporary debates

What this dot point is asking

VCAA wants you to apply theories of the good life to a contemporary debate, here technology and human enhancement, and to evaluate whether modern developments help or hinder living well. The high-band answer does not just list pros and cons of technology. It connects the debate back to specific theories of the good life (Aristotle, Mill, Nozick), reconstructs a named argument on each side (transhumanist and bioconservative), and reaches a reasoned judgement that the chosen theory of well-being supports.

Framing the debate through theories of the good life

Living the good life in the twenty-first century raises the question of whether new technologies, especially human enhancement, make our lives go better. The answer depends on the theory of well-being in play, so the debate is really an application of Unit 4 Area of Study 1.

On hedonism, enhancement that reliably increases pleasure and reduces suffering straightforwardly improves the good life. On desire-satisfaction theory, enhancement is good insofar as it helps us get what we want and bad if it distorts our desires. On an Aristotelian or objective-list view, what matters is the active exercise of our capacities and genuine achievement, so enhancement is good only if it supports, rather than bypasses, that activity.

The transhumanist case

Nick Bostrom argues for a permissive, pro-enhancement position. His core claims:

1. We already accept enhancements that improve human capacities: education, nutrition, vaccination, caffeine and spectacles all push us beyond an unaided baseline.
2. There is no principled moral difference between these and newer biotechnological enhancements of cognition, mood, health and lifespan.
3. Greater capacities expand the range of goods a person can access and achieve.
4. Therefore, suitably regulated, enhancement promotes well-being and we have reason to pursue it.

Bostrom adds that appeals to the natural are unreliable, since much of what is natural (disease, early death) is bad, and much that is good (medicine) is artificial. He frames the rejection of enhancement as status-quo bias dressed up as wisdom.

The bioconservative case

Michael Sandel, in The Case Against Perfection, presses the opposing view. His argument:

1. The deepest objection to enhancement is not safety or fairness but the drive to mastery it expresses.
2. A proper relation to our own gifts involves an openness to the unbidden, an appreciation of life and talent as in part a gift rather than wholly our achievement.
3. Enhancement, by trying to engineer ourselves to specification, erodes three goods: humility, responsibility kept within bounds, and solidarity (the shared lottery of nature grounds our concern for the less fortunate).
4. Therefore the pursuit of enhancement, even where safe and fair, threatens goods central to a shared human life.

This connects to Aristotle: a good life is one of activity and earned excellence; an enhancement that simply installs an ability may deliver the outcome without the cultivated character and effort that make achievement valuable. It also connects to Nozick: just as we would refuse the experience machine because we want to actually do things, we may resist enhancements that give us the result without the doing.

Evaluation

The transhumanist case is strong where enhancement is therapeutic or capacity-supporting: curing disease, extending healthy life, sharpening attention so we can pursue our projects. Here Bostrom's continuity argument is compelling; opposition does look like status-quo bias, and on every theory of well-being such enhancements help. The appeal to nature is genuinely weak.

But Sandel's argument bites hardest against enhancements that bypass the activity in which the good partly consists. On an Aristotelian or objective-list view, the value of an achievement lies partly in the cultivated effort that produced it, so an enhancement that hands you the outcome ready-made may increase your capacities while reducing the achievement-value of your life. A drug that makes you a brilliant musician overnight gives you the skill but not the practice that, on this view, is part of what made musical excellence good for you. The hedonist will not feel this loss; the objective-list theorist will. So the force of the bioconservative worry depends on rejecting hedonism, which the experience machine independently gives us reason to do.

Sandel's argument has limits. The solidarity and humility points are suggestive rather than decisive: we already intervene heavily in nature without obvious loss of solidarity. The responsibility worry may be a reason to regulate, not to prohibit.

Judgement: technology and enhancement can both promote and undermine the good life, depending on the type of enhancement and the theory of well-being. Capacity-supporting technologies clearly promote well-being on every theory and the transhumanist case for them is sound. But enhancements that replace the activity in which the good consists threaten the good life on the objective-list views the experience machine vindicates. The defensible position is neither blanket acceptance nor blanket rejection, but a discrimination between enhancements that extend our agency and those that substitute for it.