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

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed a profound increase in scholarly work and scientific research conducted under the banner of evolutionary psychology. Although evolutionary psychologists typically disavow any historical or conceptual link to the political or scientific project of eugenics, or at the very least downplay the current relevance of such linkages, a growing number of evolutionary thinkers have begun to embrace a biological science of cognitive and moral enhancement. This article examines some of the ways in which advocates of enhancement assume human agency as central to their project even as their naturalistic explanations of human behavior deny that agency. The article also argues that the utopian moral project that animates the evolutionary enhancement movement is undercut by the materialist metaphysics that undergirds the neo-Darwinian worldview employed to ground the project in the first place, a metaphysics that relativizes and ultimately rejects any meaningful morality or moral endeavor whatsoever.