Planet of the Apes and Philosophy by John Huss Page B

temporarily, until everyone has access to the same technology) genetic enhancement.
    Lastly, it’s a distinctive human characteristic to want to shape our own destiny, in this case literally taking the course of evolution in our own hands.
    This seems like a powerful case in favor of inevitability, except for two things. First, we do have examples of technologies that we have developed and then abandoned, which makes the point that technological “progress” is a rather fuzzy concept, and that we can, in fact, reverse our march along a particular technological path.
    For instance, we have given up commercial supersonic flight (the Concorde) for a variety of reasons, some of which were economical, other environmental. We used to make industrial use of chlorofluorocarbons (in refrigerators and aerosol cans), but we have eventually curbed and then banned their production because they were devastating the environment, creating the infamous ozone hole. And we have developed the atomic bomb, but have refrained from using it in a conflict after the devastating effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and indeed are trying to ban nuclear weapons altogether. (Well, okay, according to the 1968 movie we will apparently end up using it again, in the process causing our own extinction and giving the planet to the apes. But hopefully that’s a timeline that does not actually intersect our own future. . . .)
    The second objection to the “inevitability thesis” is that most of the attitudes described by Baylis and Robert are actually very recent developments in human societies, and are restricted to certain parts of the globe, which means that there is no reason to think that they are an unavoidable part of human nature. Capitalism is a recent invention, and it is actually managed and regulated one way or another everywhere in the world. The “liberal prejudice” is actually found only among the libertarian fringe of the American population and almost nowhere else on the planet.
    We may be a naturally inquisitive species, but we are also naturally endowed with a sense of right and wrong, and the history of humanity has been characterized by a balance—admittedly sometimes precarious—between the two. Our alleged competitive “nature” is, again, largely a reflection of a specific American ethos, and is balanced by our instinct for cooperation, which is at least as strong. As for shaping our destiny, we would be doing so whether we did or did not decide to engage in human enhancement, or whether—which is much more likely—we decided to do it, but in a cautious and limited way.
    The danger inherent in the sort of techno-inevitability espoused by Baylis and Robert is that it undercuts the need for deliberation about ethical consequences, attempting to substitute allegedly unchangeable and even obvious “facts” for careful ethical reasoning. This sort of capitalism-based hubris is captured in Rise when CEO Steven Jacobs tells our favorite scientist, Will Rodman: “You know everything about the human brain, except the way it works.” Except, of course, that the (lethal) joke is on the ultra-capitalist Jacobs, since he is the one who plunges into the cold waters of San Francisco Bay a few minutes later into the movie.
    Whether we are talking about human genetic enhancement ( Rise ) or the deployment of nuclear weapons (the 1968 Planet of the Apes movie) these are not issues we can simply deputize to scientists or captains of industry. Rather, they’re the sort of thing that requires everyone to come to the discussion table, including scientists, technologists, investors, philosophers, politicians, and the public at large. The price of abdicating ethical decision making is the risk of forging a future like the one that brought Heston’s George Taylor to exclaim in desperation: “Oh my God . . . I’m back. I’m home. All the time it was . . . we finally really