In what may or may not be a response to the gauntlet Jeremylott.net threw down the other day, Ron Bailey has responded to critics of transhumanism … in his own unique way. He’s the only person I know who can use the phrase “subhuman slaves” in conversation without being ironic or facetious:

Fukuyama’s concerns about subhuman slaves cannot be dismissed. Uplift advocate Dvorsky agrees: “Animals may also be engineered to have specialized physical or cognitive characteristics while lacking certain neurological faculties. Theoretically, such creatures could be designed for specific tasks, such as manual labour, dangerous work, or as sex trade workers–and at the same time be oblivious to the demeaning or hazardous nature of their work. For all intents and purposes these would be happy slaves.”

So would it be wrong to uplift animals and make them happy slaves? One could imagine uplifted animals designed to receive an addictive jolt of pleasure inducing dopamine every time they successfully carry out a human command. Something like that already happens when a dog gets patted on its head by its owner for fetching a ball. Dvorsky denounces the prospect of uplifted happy slaves as “a repugnant possibility and an affront to humanitarian values.”

Now imagine human beings who have been genetically engineered with a dopamine obedience circuit. It’s pretty clear that we would consider such engineered people as “diminished” because their capacity for self-government would have been deliberately limited. We generally regard people as acting freely when they act on their own intentions and for their own reasons without coercion. In this case, the biotechnically juiced-up dopamine circuit functions as a kind of gentle coercion. But wait, aren’t we all already in thrall to our un-tampered with dopamine reward circuits?

Creating happy uplifted animal slaves faces two chief moral objections. First, I would not want to be a happy slave. If I wouldn’t want to be one then I assume no one else, including uplifted animals, would want to be. Second, a society dependent on happy slaves would be morally corrosive.

So why wouldn’t I want to be a happy slave-after all I would be, by definition, happy. I reject happy servitude because I don’t want limitations placed on my capacities and my aspirations. But of course, my genes and environment have already limited my intellectual and physical capacities and aspirations. However, living as a human discontented with my shortcomings, I know that it is “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.” When sufficient progress has been made later this century, I hope to have the power of choosing how to use new technologies to enhance my capacities and even at the risk of overwhelming and destroying my own identity.

Uhhh … okay. Let me know how that works out for you, Ron.