Microsoft Word - wennemann.docx 3 A peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies ISSN XXXXXXXXXX 25(2) – September 2015 What World Do We Want? Daryl...

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Microsoft Word - wennemann.docx 3 A peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies ISSN 1541-0099 25(2) – September 2015 What World Do We Want? Daryl J. Wennemann Fontbonne University [email protected] Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 25 Issue 2 – September 2015 - pgs 3-13 Abstract Amitai Etzioni’s From Empire to Community traces the fundamental socio-political problem of our time to that of maintaining human primacy. He argues that the tendency of our technological means is to overtake our ability to assign worthy goals for their application. His analysis of the possibility of forming a cosmopolitan order can be applied fruitfully in a posthuman context in which emerging technologies pose a challenge for constructing a posthuman political and moral order. In this context, the task is to maintain posthuman primacy. I show that there are several converging lines of thought and supportive social factors that underwrite the construction of a posthuman cosmopolitan order. I argue that self-consistent recursivity must be applied to the very procedural character of reflexive modernization of institutions and to the creation of posthuman beings that may participate in the creation of a future cosmopolitan social order. Introduction In his 1795 essay, “Perpetual Peace,” Immanuel Kant asserted that a universal community had arisen among human beings, but only in varying degrees, and that such a community was necessary for achiev- ing perpetual peace. As evidence of its existence, Kant noted that a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere (Kant 2002, 107-108). Whether Kant was correct that humanity had entered into a universal community is a matter of fact. It seems clear that his assertion that a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere is very nearly true today. The events outside my home town of St. Louis illustrate the fact. Many people around the world identify with those in Ferguson, Missouri, who feel that their rights were violated by the unjust killing of an unarmed eighteen-year-old black man. The communication technologies we possess have made it possible for injustices to be seen with a remarkable immediacy. If the kind of universal human community Kant described in the late eighteenth century is to develop to an even greater degree in the future, technology will be an underlying condition of its possibil- ity. 4 In War and Human Progress, John Nef argues, contrary to Kant, that promoting perpetual peace as a goal would likely lead us unwittingly into war: Let us not hoodwink ourselves with notions of perpetual peace and of the millennium. These only in- crease the danger of war, for they rest upon a misunderstanding of human nature. Men and women are not angels. It is certainly their duty and their delight to create here on earth, in so far as they can, something that resembles the heaven of their dreams. But they should not confuse this with heaven it- self. The result of such confusion will not be the gain of either earth or heaven. It will be the loss of both. (Nef 1950, 416) The second part of Nef’s book is concerned with limited warfare and humane civilization. The third part deals with industrialism and total war. It is a difficult judgment to make as to whether setting an ideal like perpetual peace for ourselves has a value precisely because it is unattainable or whether such ideals un- dermine our efforts to produce a more humane existence. But surely a movement from total war to limited warfare would represent progress toward a more humane existence, and a movement from limited warfare to total war would represent a decline. Is a universal human community as Kant described it the kind of world we want? And who is the “We” that would make up such a community and decide what world is wanted? Is there a “They” that must stand over against the “We” of a given group that defines it as a distinct group (Etzioni 2004, 19)? And, in an age of posthuman reflection, must the universal community include only human beings? Could posthuman beings be something higher than what Nef sees as human nature and yet lower than angels? These questions might lead our reflection on the possibility of a posthuman politics. Posthuman primacy In order to introduce greater clarity into our reflection on the possibility of a posthuman politics, I will draw upon a distinction and linguistic convention that I introduced in my 2013 monograph, Posthuman Personhood. I will use the term “HumanB” and its cognates to designate biological humanity and the term “HumanM” and its cognates to designate moral humanity, i.e., persons. So, the issue of a posthuman poli- tics is partly a question of the meaning of the term “human.” The phrase “posthuman politics” seems to imply that such a political regime is posthumanB. Emerging technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and advanced pharmacology hold forth the possibility of a posthumanB condition. Many who reflect on such a possibility imagine an improved con- dition, perhaps one in which virtue pills produce a self-control greater than humanB beings have histori- cally been capable of.1 Such an enhanced self-control would be a condition for a posthumanB politics that would remain humanM or humane. Without such a technologically induced self-control, we might face a condition in which our technologi- cal means outrun our ability to control them, or to set morally worthy ends to justify them. This is the challenge Amitai Etzioni considers to be central to modernity overall, and particularly to a postmodern and perhaps posthumanB condition. Etzioni argues that the technological developments that ushered in modernity were so rapid, and of such fundamental significance to the form of humanB life, that they pro- duced a condition of alienation as our means outpaced our ability to apply them rationallyR.2 “The defin- ing characteristic of the modern age is the enormous expansion of human capacity, the vast increase in the power of instruments” (Etzioni 2004, 5). This is not just a matter of self-control as a traditional virtue, but of the control of our technological means. Of course, if we are alienated from the technological means of expressing our subjectivity or agency, we suffer a lack of self-control: “In sum, all too often the logic of instruments has taken precedence over the rationale of ends” (Etzioni 2004, 6). 5 This is not a new observation. In his 1940 book, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940), Karl Mannheim employed a version of the concept of contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous in analyzing the imbalance that is introduced into a society when the means it employs outrun the ends it may rationallyR set for them.3 Mannheim stated that this phenomenon was first noticed by the art historian Wilhelm Pinder in Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas (1926). Mannheim ar- gued that different kinds of rationality may develop at different rates, so that the instrumental rationality (“RationalI”) embodied in our instruments (including our methods of social control) outruns the substan- tial rationality (“RationalS”) that involves understanding any system or structure. The result is anxiety: Thus here, too, we see that the social source of rationalization can be clearly determined and that in- deed the force which creates in our society the various forms of rationality springs from industrializa- tion as a specific form of social organization. Increasing industrialization, to be sure, implies func- tional rationality, i.e. the organization of the activity of the members of society with reference to objective ends. It does not to the same extent promote “substantial rationality”, i.e. the capacity to act intelligently in a given situation on the basis of one’s own insight into the interrelations of events…The violent shocks of crises and revolutions have uncovered a tendency which has hitherto been working under the surface, namely the paralyzing effect of functional rationalization on the ca- pacity for rational judgment. (Mannheim 1940, 58) This may be seen as a root cause of the movement to alter ourselves so as to produce a posthumanB being. It is an attempt to assert our agency over the technological means available to us. But the existential task of posthumanityB remains one of preserving what Etzioni called “human primacy.” According to Etzioni, human primacy involves making means serve ends rather than allowing means to pervert our purposes. And he holds that this alienation of modernity is becoming transnational. There are, in his view, challeng- es that now transcend national boundaries and that call for a cosmopolitan pancultural community. Hu- man primacy, in his view, is really a condition for the possibility of choosing a world that we want. Etzioni is not concerned with the issue of the posthumanB. But his notion of human primacy can be un- derstood from a posthumanB perspective in terms of maintaining humanM primacy. Surely, a posthumanB condition is one in which we hope to maintain humanM primacy. Indeed, humanM primacy would seem to be a condition for the possibility of bringing about a posthumanB condition that is something other than a mere historical accident. The accidental formation of a posthumanB condition would not contribute to the constitution of a posthumanB politics. As the traditional art of the possible, politics represents a realm in which agents can shape the world through their collective deliberative choices. A posthumanB condition that arises by chance seems not to be one that would produce a world that we want. In this regard, we should note that Ulrich Beck has argued that the human condition has become cosmopolitan (Beck 2006, 2). He goes on to argue that a cosmopolitanism that is not chosen is a deformed cosmopolitanism: There can be no doubt that a cosmopolitanism that is passively and unwillingly suffered is a deformed cosmopolitanism. The fact that really existing cosmopolitanism is not achieved through struggle, that it is not chosen, that it does not come into the world as progress with the reflected moral authority of the Enlightenment, but as something deformed and profane, cloaked in the anonymity of a side effect – this is an essential founding insight of cosmopolitan realism in the social sciences. (Beck 2006, 20– 21, italics in the original) If an authentic cosmopolitan order requires that it be one we choose,
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Answer To: Microsoft Word - wennemann.docx 3 A peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for...

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Contents
Discuss Etzioni’s view on Moral Dialogue    3
Describe Etzioni’s view on East and West    3
Discuss Fischer’s treatment on Reflexive Modernization    3
Works Cited    5
Discuss Etzioni’s view on Moral Dialogue
Amitai Etzioni is an American sociologist, who had provided his views through “Journal of Evolution & Technology”. Etzioni had discussed that cross-cultural moral dialogues are very important because it is necessary for the transformation of the international order from one of the empire to one of the community. He further elaborated the informal social bases of the political culture, which includes the common core of the moral values and a civil society that...
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