Posthuman Life

Imagine beings who descend from humanity yet surpass it, made sharper or sturdier through breakthroughs in nanotechnology, biotechnology, computing and the study of cognition. Supporters of such enhancement often expect richer lives, while critics worry that reshaping our nature could erode what makes us human. Both camps tend to assume that whatever comes next will simply be a modified version of ourselves, a sort of second edition of the species.

David Roden contends that this framing smuggles our own outlook into a future we cannot picture. Since we are not posthuman, we have no reliable way to predict how such beings would weigh the world, and they may not share our sort of inner experience or our moral sense. Roden holds that any ethical or political judgment about this future must take the limits of what we know into account.

The book builds a critical metaphysics of posthuman succession and argues that only a genuinely speculative posthumanism can sustain an ethics equal to the transformative power of technology.