The Triumph of the Will: Evolutionary Psychology and the Conceptual Incoherence of Enhancement

Evolutionary Psychology and the Moral Imperative of Science

While there are clearly disagreements about specifics among the various advocates of an evolutionary perspective in psychology, all seem to agree that genuinely scientific explanations of human behavior are only those that are formulated within the conceptual framework of a neo-Darwinian worldview (see, e.g., Cartwright, 2001; Henrich & Henrich, 2007). That is, by means empirical methods that rely solely on quantification and the sensory observation of physical entities and processes in order to provide naturalistic explanations of the world, explanations framed solely in terms of the material constituents and mechanical–deterministic relationships presumed necessary to give rise to both biological and psychological/cultural phenomena. More specifically, for the evolutionary psychologist, human behavior is thought to be best explained in terms of the functional operations of specific evolved psychological mechanisms that are the natural products of certain complex gene–environment interactions that took place in early hominid ancestral settings, which proved beneficial at that time to the survival and reproductive success of our early hominid ancestors (Buss, 2015). Because it is conceptually rooted in “‘the grand unified theory’ in biology” (Verschuuren, 2012, p. 38), Cosmides and Tooby (2013) have argued, “evolutionary psychology is an organizing framework that can be applied to any [italics added] topic in the psychological sciences” (p. 224; see also Cosmides et al., 1992). Similarly, Geher (2006) asserts that “EP is an explanatory framework that has implications for understanding all psychological phenomena” (p. 185). Indeed, in the minds of many of its advocates, not only can an evolutionary explanatory approach be applied to any topic in psychology, it must be so applied or psychology will continue to flail about aimlessly in theoretical incoherence (see, e.g., Caporael, 2001, Geher, 2006). Once EP has been fully embraced; however, it will provide, Buss (1995) promises, the “key to unlocking the mystery of where we came from, how we arrived at our current state, and the mechanisms of mind that define who we are” (p. 27).

Such impressive and authoritative knowledge would seem to offer much in the way of helping us make the world a better place. By not only providing us with the means whereby we might identify the sources of so many of our human imperfections and imprecisions but also by encouraging the production of both psycho- and biotechnical avenues for addressing and rectifying human deficiencies, EP (and related endeavors) are clearly interested in more than just descriptive or explanatory science. Though often layered in the rhetoric of objective science and value-neutral inquiry, there is clearly a utopic spirit animating much of the EP project—particularly in its more applied formulations (Raz, 2009; Roberts, 2012a). Indeed, laying out the utopic promise of EP, Keith Stanovich (2005) assures us that genuine human flourishing and rational self-determination finally “becomes possible when humans begin to use knowledge of their own brain functioning and knowledge of the [evolutionary] goals served by various brain mechanisms to structure their behavior to serve their own ends” (p. xii). Similarly, Roberts (2012b), argues that “having a fuller understanding of the evolutionary history or likely adaptive value of particular behaviors might help to identify which of a range of possible interventions is likely to be most successful in achieving particular outcomes” (p. 2).

Ultimately, according to evolutionary bioethicist John Harris (2007), such sentiments are really just a reflection of the most basic purpose of science, that is, improvement of the human condition by means of the advancement of knowledge and the provision of practical contributions to achieving the common good. In fact, as Harris (2007) argues, “the overriding justification, both for scientific endeavor and for the vast amounts of public money that are devoted to science education and science research worldwide, is the good that science does” by means of the “development of processes, products, and technology that not only ameliorate or cure dysfunction but enhance function” (p. xv). He also notes that the moral impetus to do all we can do as scientists to “make the world a better place and people better people” (p. xv) flows directly and necessarily from the “social contract between science and society” (p. xv). Indeed, the principle thrust of Harris’s (2007) work is to show that biological, psychological, and ethical “enhancement is a moral duty” (p. 19) incumbent on all science. As we shall see, Harris is by no means alone in this assessment of the nature of science, or in his prescriptions for how best to fulfill the moral imperatives of a science of human enhancement.

Evolutionary Psychology, Eugenics, and the Ethics of Enhancement

It should not be surprising that one might find some of this rhetoric is reminiscent of that which animated the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unfortunately, a full treatment of the many historical and conceptual connections that exist between the “old eugenics” of thinkers such as Galton, Yerkes, Burt, and McDougal and their more contemporary, “new eugenics” counterparts like Harris, Roberts, Savulescu, and others lies beyond the scope of the present article. Suffice it to say, however, that although eugenicism clearly fell on hard times culturally and politically following World War II, the core concepts and conceits of the movement, for example, biological reductionism, the psychology of individual differences, behavioral genetics and genetic determinism, the dichotomous explanatory framework of nature versus nurture, scientism, so on—have never been far from the heart of modern theorizing and research in both biology and psychology (for more detailed, historically focused expositions see, e.g., Bashford, 2010, Duster, 2003, Ekberg, 2007, Leonard, 2016; Pilgrim, 2008).

Despite the historical and philosophical connections, evolutionary psychologists frequently disavow any substantive link between their own work and the political or scientific project of late 19th– and early 20th–century eugenics (Geher, 2006, 2013), or at the very least significantly downplay the current relevance of such linkages (see, e.g., Bridgeman, 2003; Workman & Reader, 2014). However, a growing number of thinkers from a range of disciplines have begun to embrace the possibilities of what they variously term genetic enhancement (see, e.g., Mehlman, 2003; Savulescu, 2009a), biological enhancement (Naam, 2010), cognitive enhancement (Knafo & Venero, 2015), and even moral enhancement (Douglas, 2011; Persson & Savulescu, 2012). It would seem that what Nathaniel Comfort (2012) recently termed the eugenic impulse is still very much alive and well in modern biological and psychological science, though now operating mostly under the guise of enhancement (see also Agar, 2004). ³

In their essay, “Breaking Evolution’s Chains: The Promise of Enhancement by Design,” Powell and Buchanan (2011) offer up the intellectual and moral warrant for the contemporary resuscitation of eugenicism when they write,

Only quite recently in the history of life has nature produced a species whose understanding of evolution makes possible the intentional modification of its own genome. . . . To an extent that is now impossible to gauge, human beings will be able to take charge of their own biological development and evolution. Evolutionary theory is becoming self-reflexive: Understanding how evolution works is enabling us to modify the course of our own evolution—if we choose to do so. (p. 49)

In other words, we now stand at a singular crossroads in human history. Empowered by our sophisticated technical expertise and vast scientific knowledge of how the world actually works, especially in the way in which all events in that world are shaped and governed by the forces of adaptation and the law of natural selection, we are at long last able to wrest control from the blind, mechanical forces of nature in order to steer a new developmental path; one that is finally of our own choosing.

Evolutionary psychologist Keith Stanovich (2005) strikes a similar chord when he writes of EP helping to foment a “robot’s rebellion.” Borrowing his imagery from Richard Dawkins, who famously referred to human beings as “gigantic lumbering robots,” Stanovich employs the term to “refer to the package of evolutionary insights and cognitive reforms that will lead humans to transcend the limited interests of the replicators (i.e., genes) and define their own autonomous goals” (p. 11). For an increasing number of thinkers, it seems, EP’s “evolutionary insights,” and the various “cognitive reforms” incumbent on such insights, are key ingredients in a project for applying the bounties of scientific knowledge to bring about a brighter, better world; a world populated by better, fitter, more intelligent, more authentic, and, ultimately, more moral beings (see, e.g., Persson & Savulescu, 2012). “We have a moral obligation or moral reason to enhance ourselves and our children,” evolutionary philosopher Julian Savulescu (2009b) argues. Indeed, Savulescu et al. (2011) argue that as the sophistication of biomedical and genetic technologies advance, “parents will have a duty to enhance their children” (p. 16). In the end, Savulescu (2009b) claims, “we have the same kind of obligation [to enhance] as we have to treat and prevent disease. Not only can we enhance, we should enhance” (p. 517).

Advocates of enhancement readily admit that “what aspects of our biology and psychology we should alter will depend, in major part, on their contribution to a good life” (Savulescu et al., 2011, p. 17). ⁴ However, what exactly is meant by a “good life,” or how exactly science might go about determining its characteristics and contours, is seldom if ever actually spelled out by those articulating a vision of cognitive and moral bioenhancement. In fact, it all too often seems to be simply assumed that what constitutes a “good life,” and what sorts of cognitive and moral features persons should have in order to worthy of such a life, is fairly obvious to everyone and therefore in need of no further clarification. At best, advocates have thus far seemed able only to offer up vague (and, ultimately, circular) definitions of the good life as one in which individual well-being is enhanced or maximized. For example, Savulescu et al. (2011) state, “In the context of human enhancement, the value immediately in question is the goodness of a person’s life, that is, his or her well-being” (p. 9). Unfortunately, here again, little with any actual descriptive substance is provided beyond hopeful promises regarding science’s ability to objectively determine for us what well-being actually is and what specific sorts of conditions or traits might create, nurture, or diminish it. As Savulescu et al. (2011) note, for the advocate of cognitive and moral enhancement, “questions about enhancement are questions in value theory about the account of well-being we should employ,” and those questions “are questions in science about what brings about well-being” (p. 16). Unfortunately, settling the philosophical, religious, and political debate that rages between competing value theories, and, thereby, determining what in fact constitutes a “good life” and the proper manner in which it ought to be pursued, lies well beyond the purview of genuine science. ⁵

Conceptual Incoherence

Unfortunately, the intellectual promissory notes being written by those evolutionary psychologists advocating the ethos of enhancement are only exceeded by the conceptual confusion and incoherence at the heart of their philosophical and scientific framework.

Take, for example, Powell and Buchanan’s (2011) claim that nature has finally produced a species capable of intentionally “breaking evolution’s chains” by means of the exercise of its own will. Neo-Darwinian thought, the basis for almost all theorizing in EP and biology, and the explanatory framework that Powell and Buchanan both endorse, is predicated on the assumption that nature operates only in lawful and necessarily deterministic—though not always predictable—ways. That is, all events that occur in the world occur as they must given (1) the particular antecedent conditions out of which they arise and (2) the particular causal laws that govern all such events. In other words, given a particular set of antecedent conditions, and the mechanical operations of the laws of nature, events that occur in the world occur as they must necessarily occur and could not be otherwise than they are.

Thus, insofar as biological organisms (and their behaviors) are natural events occurring in the world, then they too must be the sole product of antecedent conditions and the operations of natural laws. Indeed, as Geher (2013) states, all organisms and their behaviors are “the product of natural selection and other evolutionary forces” (p. 20). According to Tooby and Cosmides (1992), when applied to human beings, such a perspective entails understanding us as really just

self-reproducing chemical systems, multicellular heterotrophic mobile organisms (animals), appearing very late in the history of life as somewhat modified versions of earlier primate designs. Our developmental programs, as well as the physiological and psychological mechanisms that they reliably construct, are the natural product of this evolutionary history. (pp. 20-21)

To adopt the neo-Darwinian explanatory frame is, then, with rare exception (see, e.g., Fowers, 2015; Malaterre & Merlin, 2015) to adopt the worldview of reductive naturalism, in which all events that occur in the world do so as the necessitated product of physical conditions and the mechanical, deterministic forces that act on them. To embrace this view is, as Tallis (2014b) argues, to embrace

a reductive misrepresentation of humans to animals (admittedly rather clever chimps) which are themselves ultimately reducible to material objects behaving in strict accordance with the laws which have been identified as governing the unfolding of the material world into which they are wired. (p. xii)

While most evolutionary psychologists reject the notion that that all human behavior is solely the product of genetic determinants (see, e.g., Buss, 2015; Geher, 2013), they nonetheless endorse the notion that all behavior necessarily results from a complex interaction of biological conditions and environmental forces. As Confer et al. (2010) state, “Evolutionary psychology forcefully rejects a genetic determinism stance and instead is organized around a crisply formulated interactionist framework that invokes the role of the environment at every step of the causal process” (p. 120). In this way, the long-standing nature–nurture debate in the social sciences is simply recast as a matter of “gene–environment determinism” (Sokolowski & Levine, 2010, p. 12). For example, as Workman and Reader (2014) state,

Many critics have accused evolutionary psychology (and sociobiology) of genetic determinism; of suggesting that everything about us—our intelligence, personalities, and sexual proclivities—is specified in our genes. This is simply not the case . . . evolutionists are at pains to emphasize the importance of environment and culture in making us who we are. . . . Genes do not cause men to commit violent acts; if they do anything they predispose men to such acts; whether men actually carry them out will depend on their life-histories, cultural contexts, and other genetic predispositions (such as conscience). (p. 30)

In short, while a crude genetic determinism is something that evolutionary psychologists clearly reject, a more elaborate version of determinism nonetheless remains firmly ensconced at the conceptual center of their explanatory efforts. While this move allows the defenders of EP to nimbly sidestep dismissive accusations of genetic determinism, it does little to inoculate them from valid critiques of their thorough going commitment to determinism in general. In the end, however, insofar as one seeks to preserve some degree of meaningful agency, will, or intentionality in human action, it makes little difference whether human action is the result solely of genetic determinants or of some complex interaction of both genetic and environmental determinants. In either case, meaningful agency will have no role whatsoever to play in human thought, feeling, or action. If determinism is one’s foundational explanatory starting point in accounting for human action, it is simply not intellectually consistent or philosophically coherent to also claim that human beings—of whatever sort, scientist, psychologists, or otherwise—are truly capable of any sort of real meaningful, purposive, agentic action.

It is, perhaps, important to note here exactly what we mean by meaningful human agency, so that it will be clear exactly what we take to be at stake in accepting the deterministic presumptions of the various enhancement arguments of evolutionary theorists and researchers. By the term agency, we are broadly implying something akin to the concept of “intentionality” as articulated in the work of the early phenomenologist Franz Brentano (1838-1917) and then developed by his student Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), as well as other key thinkers in the phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition (e.g., Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, etc.). In the use of “intentionality” here as a characterization of meaningful agency, we are not referring to the common sense of the word as merely conscious rational deliberation directing decisions and action (e.g., as in utterances such as “I intend to go to the store” or “What are your intentions?”). Rather, we wish to refer only to the fact that human action is always situated within a nexus of biological, historical, moral, interpersonal, and emotional contexts while at the same being irreducibly individual and telic (see Martin et al., 2003; Richardson et al., 1999; Taylor, 1985). Furthermore, such “situatedness” always entails that, at every moment, our being-in-the-world is always already a being among others and things as something (i.e., meaningful) and never as simply sensory stuff without meaning or awaiting assignment of meaning by a powerful rational self. Such contexts, however, are not to be understood as occult causes—hidden, powerful determiners, or influencers. Their existence and their influence depend on their being “taken up” and maintained—given legitimacy by—perpetuated, and incorporated in the cognitive, emotive, conative, and behavioral events and expressions that constitute human agentic activity and typically in ways that do not require or reflect conscious, logical, or detached deliberative weighing and choosing among options.

Agency, then, as an ontological feature of our humanity is at play in our human actions by their very nature and is not reserved for special cases of “choosing from among alternatives.” In short, then, as Martin and Bickard (2013) explain, agency includes,

intentionality and two-way volitional control (to act or refrain from acting), a reasoning intelligence, a moral concern, the ability to take and integrate different perspectives, and the experience of psychological time in which past experiences interact with current circumstances and anticipated futures to afford alternative possibilities for thinking and acting. (p. 2)

Furthermore, “persons are biological in so far as they are embodied, but their embodiment is enacted within a world that is simultaneously both biophysical and socio-cultural” (Martin & Bickard, 2013, pp. 1-2). Unfortunately for the evolutionary psychological accounts we are considering here, this sort of agency, the very sort of thing presumed to permit us the ability to take control of our psychological, moral, biological, and even political destiny is precisely what is denied at the outset by the reductive materialism and necessary determinism at the foundation of such accounts.

Hopefully, by this point, the irony of arguing on behalf of a universal, closed, deterministic system of natural causes and necessitated effects, on one hand, while invoking the power of a human capacity for meaningful, purposive, agentic action sufficient to take control of one’s destiny and reshape one’s future, on the other, should be quite apparent. Thus, when an advocate of EP, such as Geher (2006), states that he is “very uncomfortable (on both moral and intellectual grounds) with any perspective that sees humans as fully incapable of choosing their own behaviors” (p. 184) in one paragraph and then states in the very next paragraph that EP is a “set of principles which, at its core, simply asserts that the human nervous system and resultant behavior are ultimately products of organic evolutionary processes” (p. 184), one begins to suspect some serious conceptual confusion is afoot. And, when, in a more recent work (Geher, 2013), he claims that “all behavior is the result of action of the nervous system” (p. 20) prior to arguing that the evolutionary perspective “sees humans as capable of extraordinary conscious decision making” (p. 175), one can perhaps be forgiven a disgusted shake of the head. As Schindler (2017) trenchantly observes, it is to believe “I am simultaneously a pure product of external causes and the unassailable master of my own fate” (p. 60). ⁶

Unfortunately, the presumption that we are at the same time (1) the necessary products of and operate solely in a closed system of lawfully governed causes and effects and (2) possess the capacity to transcend this causal order in genuinely agentic acts—a capacity whose very existence expressly denies the universality and necessity of the deterministic system initially postulated—is one that is widely shared across the literature of EP and moral bioenhancement. Indeed, the very notion of enhancement at work here seems to logically require that we presume the ability of the scientist, as an independent rational actor possessing a will free of the nonrational and deterministic forces of nature, to step outside the causal framework governing all other events in the world so as to engage in the free act of “breaking evolution’s chains” (Powell & Buchanan, 2011) so as to chart a new, self-selected practical and ethical course for human evolution, growth and betterment. Such presumption, however, unless more carefully articulated and defended that it currently is, seems little more than a case of either special pleading or just plain old conceptual sloppiness.

Responding to the Critique

There are, admittedly, at least three possible objections—and, perhaps, more—that a defender of EP and biosocial enhancement might make here in the attempt to rebut my critique of conceptual incoherence. First, one could argue that the language of “breaking evolution’s chains” by means of our accumulated scientific knowledge and taking the power of evolution into our own hands so as to direct the course of our own future development is simply a bit of rhetorical flair with no real scientific or metaphysical substance behind the claim that we have meaningful, purposive agency of any sort. In this approach, the notion that we possess a genuine agency, or are able to make genuinely meaningful choices, is rejected as scientifically untenable and inconsistent with the conceptual demands of reductive materialism, even as it is nonetheless deployed as a rhetorical device for helping to convey a picture of the bright future possibilities of science for human betterment. Such a defense is, however, no real defense at all. It is rather an admission of that one is using deception in the service of one’s own purposes and, as such, is not only unethical but also entirely inconsistent with the proper conduct of science.

A second possible response would be to argue that there actually is no inconsistency in the first place because while we certainly experience ourselves as possessing a capacity to make meaningful choices, such experiences are in fact illusory in nature. That is, while we perceive ourselves as willing beings capable of choosing from among alternatives, such perceptions are actually the product of specifiable psychological mechanisms that are themselves the product of evolutionary selection. Early hominids who experienced themselves as capable of choosing from among alternatives and, thereby, able to make some manner of difference in their world were more likely to survive the harsh environmental challenges of our prehistoric ancestral past than were other hominids that had no such sense of personal agency, or so the argument goes.

The presumption seems to be that those of our ancestors who felt powerless to make any difference, or who lacked a sense of personal will, were more likely to succumb to depression or apathy or simply did not strive as fervently to survive when confronted with various adaptive problems. Those, on the other hand, who did have a sense of personal agency, and who thereby sensed that they had some control over the events the world around them, had the fortunate mental resources to strive more valiantly to survive and, thus, were more likely to pass along their genetic makeup to future generations. On this model, then, agency simply constitutes a perceptual, rather than metaphysical, reality—a sort of “user illusion” that has served as a fortuitous solution to certain evolutionary problems of adaptation, but which in fact possesses no real-world referent. Thus, in the end, while we may legitimately speak of “breaking evolution’s chains” and taking our own biological and psychological development firmly in hand, we are really only living out the deterministic dictates of an evolutionarily useful illusion. So, we may well think we are using our accumulated scientific knowledge to further our own aims, we are in fact still only furthering the “nonpurposive purposes” of our genetic and evolutionary inheritance.

The problem with such a response is essentially twofold. First, while a bit more nuanced and complex than the prior argument, this form of rebuttal is really just a reiteration of that previous argument and, as such, unpersuasive (not to mention morally objectionable) for all the same reasons. However, more troublesome for the argument’s persuasiveness, despite the fact that the notion that our conscious will or sense of personal agency is an illusion is one that is quite popular in contemporary psychology, both in and out of EP and biology, one cannot help but wonder whether the notion makes any actual sense. After all, an obvious question in the face of the claim that human agency is an illusion is “an illusion of what?” An illusion is the sort of thing that is only possible if there is some reality to which it actually corresponds (albeit as a counterfeit) and to which the individual identifying the illusion has some recourse in order to demonstrate to another the existence of the illusion in the first place. In other words, in order to make the metaphysical case that all human agency is an illusion, one has to presume the metaphysical reality of human agency in the first place. While there may well be some instances, perhaps even many, where human beings are mistaken about the nature and extent of their own agency—and which would, thus, lend some credibility and explanatory utility to the notion that the experience of agency can on occasion be an illusion—the notion that human agency, per se, is an illusion make little actual sense because it denies the very thing it must admit in order to have any explanatory coherence at all.

A third and final possible response, and one that enjoys a great deal of endorsement across the social and biological sciences, involves an appeal to the notion of emergence. The concept of emergence is one that is widely employed in the natural sciences—especially in biology and chemistry—to account for the appearance of certain unexpected properties in compound substances. It is, however, as Vogler (2015) points out, “a notoriously slippery philosophical notion” (p. 74). A commonly invoked example of emergence in nature is water. Water is a compound substance composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, but which possesses certain properties that are intrinsic to neither hydrogen nor oxygen (e.g., wetness). Because these properties are not reducible to either of water’s constituent parts, such properties are said to emerge from the elements in their new (combined) state. Borrowing this concept from the natural sciences, many in the social sciences invoke emergence as a means of explaining the biological origins or such apparently nonbiological things as agency, consciousness, meaning, intentionality, and so forth.

The above example of water as an emergent property of the combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms is what is usually known as an example of “weak emergence” (Bedau, 1997). The concept of weak emergence is typically applied in cases where two physical substances combine to form a new substance with emergent properties that neither of the original substances possess alone (Luisi, 2006). Some scholars (e.g., Smith, 2011) have pointed to examples of weak emergence in the social world where social institutions and structures emerge from combinations of simpler structures and exhibit characteristics not found in the original social structures. It must be noted, however, that in both these instances the original substances (or institutions) and that the resultant ones are all of the same ontological type. In the first case, all the constituent parts and subsequent emergent properties are physical in nature. In the second case, the institutions are ideas of human social and moral creation, and the emergent properties are, therefore, also all properties indigenous to ideas and other such human creations. In both cases, the constitutive elements and the subsequent emergent properties are all the same ontological order.

A defense of human agency as an emergent property of biology, chemistry, and the forces of evolutionary selection, however, requires something more than what we find in examples of weak emergence. It requires rather the reality of what is usually termed strong or radical emergence (see Bedau, 1997; Seager, 2012). In strong emergence, it is posited that the properties of one ontological type ultimately arise out of the substances and properties of an entirely different ontological type. The hypothesis that such things as consciousness or personal agency arise out of the meat and chemical of the nervous system is, thus, an example of strong emergence. Unfortunately, as we have argued elsewhere (see, e.g., Gantt & Williams, 2014; Williams & Gantt, 2013, 2014), the only examples of emergence that seem irrefutable in the literature on emergence are all examples of weak emergence. There are virtually no examples of strong emergence to be found anywhere. Indeed, as Bedau (2010) notes, “All the evidence today suggests that strong emergence is scientifically irrelevant” (p. 51). ⁷

Indeed, given the lack of clear empirical or conceptual evidence, what is most often offered in the literature are suggestions that strong emergence “could” happen, or that, because of an a priori commitment to scientific naturalism and a materialist orthodoxy, it “must” happen. Granted, some scholars (e.g., Silberstein, 2006) have attempted to explain strong emergence (e.g., of agency from the meat and chemical of the nervous system) as dependent on the presence within matter of a capacity to generate such things. This is, of course, pure question begging. As Bedau (1997) has observed, explaining strong emergence by invoking some hypothetical supervenient process or a principle of self-organization that just happens to have the capacity to produce something of one ontological type out of the stuff of another ontological type “is uncomfortably like magic” and only serves to “heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing” (p. 377). Similarly, Nagel (2012) has noted that the notion that

purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should necessarily produce a state of the whole that is not constituted out of the properties and relations of the physical parts still seems like magic even if the higher-order psychophysical dependencies are quite systematic. (p. 56)

Any alternative account of the nature and origin of the meaningful amalgam of distinctly purposive, effectual, and genuinely relational activities that constitute human rational and moral agency must be grounded in an ontology other than what is available in any mechanical–materialist metaphysic. All attempts to date to derive genuine rational meaning and intentionality from physical substance have been tautological. Even if it is granted that consciousness and agency might arise from meat and chemical the only kind of consciousness and agency that could thus arise will be determined by the particular physical realities in play at the instant of creation, regardless of how complex the unique network of such singular realities might be as it unfolds causally across time. Furthermore, this will be the case even if we lose track of the particular operative causal chain, as Daniel Dennett (2003), for example, suggests we will, the necessary result will be ignorance and not agency. Alternative accounts of meaningful, purposive action based on an agentic ontology are available in the contemporary literature of the discipline (see, e.g., Frie, 2008; Gantt, 2002; Gantt & Williams, 2014; Guignon, 2002; Korsgaard, 2008; Martin et al., 2003; Martin et al., 2010; Taylor, 1985; Slife & Fisher, 2000; Williams, 1992, 1994, 2005). What these alternative accounts have in common is a commitment to taking human agency seriously and the ontology that makes agency possible in ways that do not see agency as derivative in nature, but as a fundamental starting point for fruitful analysis. We conclude that there simply seems to be no other way to preserve the phenomenon (Gantt & Williams, 2019).

Conclusion

Ultimately, then, because of the seemingly insurmountable difficulty involved in bridging what has been termed the ontological gap (Gantt & Williams, 2014) strong emergence is not a sufficiently hefty conceptual tool for doing the heavy explanatory work that evolutionary theorists in psychology and biology require. It simply is not capable of bearing the weight necessary to establish the claim that human beings are both rational agents capable of making meaningful choices and merely natural organisms whose every thought, desire, and behavior is driven by the inexorable nonrational and mechanical forces of biology and chemistry confronted by the implacable exigencies of the environment. Significant and persistent philosophical problems simply cannot be banished by invoking a construct (i.e., emergence), no matter how magical or how scientific in might sound.

In short, and perhaps somewhat too flippantly, EP and the advocates of cognitive and moral bioenhancement simply cannot have their cake and eat it too. Either we are not the rational agents we take ourselves to be, especially as scientific students of nature and humanity, or we are in fact rational agents—embodied and embedded in a material context, to be sure—capable of genuinely meaningful and morally purposive action. If the former, then our aspirations to use our knowledge and evolutionary science to build a better, fitter, more moral world for ourselves are not in fact our own, but rather are themselves a necessitated—and, hence, meaningless—product of the mechanical interactions of meat and chemical and environment in the ongoing struggle for survival and reproduction. Indeed, whether we will create a “better” world or “worse” one remains to be seen, ultimately only a matter of blind and purposeless chance. Indeed, what we will even think is a better or worse world will depend entirely on those same mechanical interactions that produced the desire to create a better world in the first place, and the belief in our own self-efficacy to do so. Indeed, the noble intentions articulated in the literature of moral bioenhancement—to produce a kinder, gentler, more just world through the mechanisms driving our evolution—can only be expected to themselves embody the evolutionary imperative of those processes that have produced our agency and our capacity for bioengineering cognitive and moral attributes. That is, the inevitable causal thrust of natural selection and the enhancement of reproductive success will still be operative in all individuals in the species. What was ubiquitous and primal in the first causal instant must be operative in all subsequent instances, including instances of “choosing” what sorts of genetic interventions to introduce. In other words, the central criteria for determining what sorts of enhancements are needed for improving the world will always be functional ones, selected for their utilitarian value and efficiency—not for any way in which they might preserve human dignity.

However, if we are in fact rational, moral agents, capable of making meaningful choices and engaging in genuinely purposive acts, then the entire edifice of universal necessary determinism on which EP rests, and against which calls for moral bioenhancement are made, comes crumbling down in a heap. Take away the universalism inherent in its commitment to material reductionism and mechanical determinism and EP can no longer lay claim to being the “new paradigm for psychological science” (Buss, 1995) that has been advertised. Rather, it reveals itself as simply one more in a long line of muddled scientistic and conceptually incoherent explanations of human personhood that not only does not advance the cause of a legitimate psychological science but also ultimately emaciates our humanity.