Nicholas Agar

Nicholas Agar is a professor of ethics at the University of Waikato. His work explores the ethical implications of technological change, particularly the ways in which genetic and cybernetic technologies may affect humanity and logical and moral thinking. Nicholas Agar is the author of several books, including Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement, Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits, and How to be Human in the Digital Economy. His writing explores the relevance of humans in the digital age and the tendency for humans to over-glorify an advanced technological future (while equally underselling the less technologically-advanced past as primitive and dirty). He has written about personhood theory, environmental ethics, and the philosophy of mind.

Nicholas Agar was educated at the University of Auckland, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree. He earned his Master of Arts degree from the Victoria University of Wellington and his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Mind from the Australian National University. After receiving his Ph.D., Agar worked as a professor of ethics and as a senior lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington from 1996 until around 2021. He has also worked as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Australia, and since around late 2021, he has worked as a professor of ethics at the University of Waikato.

In his writing, Nicholas Agar has explored the broader human significance of technological progress. This includes an interest in the ethical implications of the digital revolution, the meaning of technological progress, and the ways genetic and cybernetic technologies may impact and change human morality and thinking. He has been described as occupying a position between bioconservatives, such as Leon Kass, and transhumanists (who tend to argue that biotechnology should be used to overcome human limitations). His work has won a 2011 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title award for Humanity's End.

In Nicholas Agar's first book, he sets out an ethical and moral principle that informs his thinking in his later work. This book argues that anything living is intrinsically valuable, which challenges received ethical wisdom in which only human beings are valuable in themselves. This argument results in a biocentric—or life-centric—morality, which forms the platform for an ethic of the environment. The book works to overturn common-sense moral beliefs and instead builds a bridge between biological science and "folk" morality to arrive at a new environmental ethic and a new spectrum or hierarchy of living organisms.

In Liberal Eugenics, Nicholas Agar takes his first look at one of his common topics—human enhancement. In this case, it looks at the idea that parents should be allowed to enhance their children's characteristics and allow parents to design their babies. He argues away from fears found in works such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or fascist eugenics of the past; he rather considers real and contemporary cases of parents choosing the kind of child to have, while using "moral image" to help the reader think about moral dilemmas in these cases. This book is less an argument but presents a moral framework for assessing new technologies.

In this framework, Agar presents the plausibility that different moral images will produce different results in designing a baby, as different cultures and peoples will desire different results, which is problematic for various reasons. Similarly, he rejects the idea of psychological eugenics, which would allow children to be born "superhappy" or unable to feel sadness, which he argues is not well understood—as misery and sadness may be necessary to experience happiness—and because he objects to the idea that we have an objective to ensure a maximal genetic for well-being for children; while superhappiness further slights the worthwhile lives of troubled souls in the world. Instead, that form of eugenics suggests a troubled or pain-racked life is no longer worthwhile or falls below the threshold of life minimally worth living.

He continues on some of this work in later papers, where he questions the moral acceptability of attempts to modify the human genome. He begins, in one paper, to defend his definition of gene editing and modification as a form of eugenics and proposes that eugenics does not have to mean condemnation, but there needs to be work to distinguish between morally wrong practices and morally problematic practices—with the former being condemned and the latter being solved.

Here, he identifies that much of the work done in the field has made a distinction between supposed therapeutic modification and eugenic modification. However, he rejects arguments around these distinctions, and Agar works instead to distinguish between permissible and impermissible forms of intervention in a way that does not appeal to a therapeutic/eugenic distinction. Central to Agar's argument is what he sees as an asymmetry in the way genetic engineers can influence a person's capacities on the one hand and life goals on the other, where genetic intervention can produce a mismatch of life goals and capacities and those should be ruled out.

In Humanity's End, Nicholas Agar presents a case for the rationality of opposing radical enhancement. Previously, arguments against the radical enhancement of humans have been characterized by irrationalism or mysticism, but Agar rejects these views and argues for a species-relative conception of valuable experiences, which offers a strong reason to remain unenhanced humans. This central claim is further bolstered by other arguments.

For example, Agar examines the proposals of four prominent thinkers who argue for radical enhancement of humans, including Ray Kurzweil, who argues that technology will enable an escape from human biology; Aubrey de Gray, who calls for anti-aging therapies to achieve "longevity escape velocity;" Nick Bostrom, who defends the morality and rationality of enhancement; and James Hughes, who envisions a harmonious democracy of the enhanced and the unenhanced.

Agar argues that the outcomes of radical enhancement—such as those to make individuals smarter than the greatest geniuses or add thousands of years to an individual's life—could present a darker future than the generally presented rosy future. He argues that the most dramatic means of enhancing an individual's cognitive powers could kill the individual, if not the species, and that the radical expansion of a human life span could eliminate the experiences that humans generate value from for their lives (suggesting these long-living humans would live in a state of depression, devoid of the vibrancy of life associated with morality). Agar's darkest vision tends to portray a situation in which the radically enhanced humans rule in a tyranny over the un-enhanced humans.

In Truly Human Enhancement, Nicholas Agar further refines his previous arguments on human enhancement, in which he argues for improvement that does not significantly exceed what is possible for current human beings. In the work, he explores various notions of transformative change and the motives for human enhancement while distinguishing between the instrumental and intrinsic value of enhancements and arguing that too much enhancement undermines human identity, as he has previously. In making the case for moderate enhancement, Agar argues that objections to enhancement are better understood as concerns around the degree of enhancement, rather than around enhancement itself. Agar sees this moderate enhancement as offering a potential for a more appealing future and relationship to technology while avoiding the potential tyrannical pitfalls of radical enhancement in which "post-persons" could feel entitled to benefits and protections greater than a regular person.

In The Sceptical Optimist, Agar argues that the rapid development of technologies has led to a view he describes as "radical optimism," in which individuals claim that accelerating technological progress will end poverty, disease, and ignorance while improving happiness and well-being. Agar disputes this claim and instead argues that radical optimism assigns to technological progress a pre-eminence among the goals pursued by a civilization. He does not argue that technological advances produce benefits; rather, he suggests these benefits are less significant than those proposed by radical optimists, and aspects of this supposed progress can pose threats to values such as social justice or humanity's relationship to nature. He writes that problems such as poverty cannot be understood in technological terms. He further cites that a more realistic assessment of technological advances can produce better management of technology and its benefits.

In his 2019 book, How to be Human in the Digital Economy, Nicholas Agar argues in favor of finding a place for humans in the future digital economy. This digital economy is defined by Agar as the accountants, baristas, cashiers, surgeons, airline pilots, and cab drivers who can be automated out of employment. Especially as machines can do these jobs more efficiently, accurately, and inexpensively. Agar warns that these developments could result in disempowered humanity, where developments such as artificial intelligence will continue to automate not only the routine tasks but also the "mind work" that previously required human intellect, which further begins to threaten human agency.

For Agar, the solution is a hybrid social-digital economy, where the digital economy values efficiency and the social economy values humanness. This social economy would be centered on connections between human minds, which would reject some digital automation because machines are poor substitutes for humans in roles that involve direct contact with other humans. While a machine can count pills or pour coffee, people tend to want nurses or baristas to have a similar mind and to be able to connect with them. In this hybrid digital-social economy, people have jobs where feelings matter while machines can continue to do the data-intensive work.

An extension of Agar's discussion around the social economy is the use of automation in academia. This discussion was in part around an experiment in which OpenAI's GPT-3 was used to generate an academic paper, which led some to suggest that humanities professors could be made redundant—or at least their academic publishing. He notes that with access to Google Scholar, an AI system could expand into new frontiers. And Agar notes that the process for writing academic papers and teaching in academic settings creates an opportunity for that automation. His suggestion ends up being somewhat simple, in that he believes structuring a course to reconnect with what is "human" in the humanities is the way forward. This would look for the credibility and authenticity in these studies, with genuine forms of human persuasion rather than the world of AI writing where rhetoric becomes flattened and formulaic. Further, he urges that as AI gets more powerful, the need for humanities increases, and these courses of study can help people navigate the novel terrain.