I have yet to have written much on the topic of transhumanism, but this is an important topic we need to concern ourselves with as the capabilities of technology may be growing too fast for our ethics to keep up with. 

Essentially, tanshumanism is the notion that man can eclipse himself through any number of different ways whether through bioengineering or cyberengineering, etc.  It posits that humans can and will be surpassed in intelligence and other capabilities and, for the most part, this is a good thing.

However, this obviously raises potentially terrifying ethical conundrums.  Probably, one of the greatest is the question as to how humans should be treated if something as far advanced beyond us as we are to other animals should emerge.  How should such "Supermen" treat us mere mortals that are way down on the so-called evolutionary chain?

This piece is part of a good blog hosted by the technology journal, the New Atlantis (named after the famous book of the same name by Francis Bacon).  It is part of a longer chain of blogs that is describing a debate among "tranhumanist" thinkers as to what a future morality should look like.  I was struck by the conclusion of the blog,

"It is surely true that there is an irreducible element of Enlightenment thinking in transhumanism, but it has little to do with transhumanist politics and morality per se, and is to be found rather in the topic of another of Prof. Hughes’s posts: scientific and technical progressivism. For the most part, though, transhumanism seems to rely on thinkers who reacted against Enlightenment liberal universalism, as is the case of Mill, whose utilitarian libertarianism explicitly eschews any rights foundation. Indeed, the éminence grise behind transhumanism may well be that great anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment thinker Nietzsche. Too few transhumanists, if any, have fully come to grips with the significance of a crucial point of agreement with Nietzsche: that mankind is nothing other than a rope over an abyss, a rope leading to the Superman."

This dovetails with a recurring themehere at my own blog.  I even left the below comment to make the point there.

"It should be noted that without some transcendant entity of some kind capable of standing outside of what is rationally observable and making judgements, there is no way to erect a moral framework that is not parochial and utilitarian.

Universalism is impossible without transcendentalism.

Nietzsche understood that and understood the moral quandaries posed by this. Indeed, many travel down the road he did, few can match his ability to look the consequences in the eye... or the abyss as the case may well be."

Essentially, without God there can be no meaningful morality, none that can ever really be judged by any standard that exceeds the extreme finitude of our ability to experience and reason from that experience.  Yes, we may be able to "construct" some ethical system without a transcendant God, but it would ultimately be absurd because it would have no ultimate purpose.  it would be a temporary construction waiting to be torn down so a new morality could take its place.

We might as well be Nietzschean.