There are discussions regarding the promotion and integration of transhumanist ideas in Africa, aligning with African cultural ethics. One such idea is moral bio-enhancement, which employs pharmacological and genetic technologies to improve moral dispositions. This article mainly emphasizes pharmacological enhancement rather than radical genetic technologies to avoid the significant shifts associated with genetic engineering. Although there is limited literature on moral bio-enhancement in Africa, the article highlights two concerns: first, biopolitics, a futuristic concern about possible outcomes of moral bio-enhancement; and second, the argument that any integration of moral bio-enhancement with African cultural ethics must consider religio-ontological moral determinism. Religio-ontological moral determinism, as part of religio-ontological morality, indicates that morality—whether in predisposition or action—derives not only from biological nature but also from a cosmic–spiritual relationship with forces in Africa. The article further suggests that, to avoid biopolitics, values within African cosmology should be adopted, and it concludes that relationships with spiritual forces are prima facie to moral actions in Africa.
African religions and philosophy
"A Doubleday Anchor book."; Includes indexes; Bibliography: p. [364]-371; Mode of access: Internet
Effective Altruism: doing transhumanism better
Effective Altruism (EA) is a Trojan horse for transhumanism, through which EA movement leaders and funders aim to naturalize transhumanism as the logical extension of the existing global aid and development sector. This paper traces transhumanism's mainstreaming, first via its rebranding as a humanitarian effort to save lives, protect vulnerable populations, and ensure global flourishing (what I term transhumanitarianism), and later by embedding transhumanitarianism in EA (now under the rubric of longtermism). A key component of this strategy was inverting transhumanism's techno-optimism to instead focus on safety and preventing existential risks ( x-risk ) from emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology, while simultaneously advocating for the creation of these same technologies. The paper focuses on some components of this strategy: the use of inoculation, speculative ethics, anticipatory governance, and the mobilization of apocalyptic discourse as means for producing material outcomes in the form of policy and research agendas.
Slave Songbook : Origin of the negro Spiritual
Biodiversity and global healthâhubris, humility and the unknown
Biodiversity and global healthâhubris, humility and the unknown, Stephens, Carolyn
say eugenics, say it again
For individuals This suggestion is to get comfortable and familiar with the concept of eugenics - a concept that holds a lot of information about cultura...
The King of Kings
Evolutionary Morality, the Judgment of Law, and the Necessity of God
Deleuze and Biosemiotics: Biological Emergence, Agency, and Subjectivity in Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus
Towards a Planetary Theology
Every political innovation requires, first of all, a corresponding transformation in the cosmos. To remake globalization from a gangster racket into a genuine political society, we must recognize theology’s foundational role in shaping political order.
Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology: Or, how to make sense of techno-optimist manifestos, the Open Ai/Altman affair, EA/e-acc movements, and the general sense of cultural stagnation
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 3
Darwin the abolitionist
The theory of evolution is regarded as a triumph of disinterested scientific reason. Yet, on the 150th anniversary of "On the Origin of Species," new research reveals that Darwin was driven to the idea of common descent by a great moral cause
The words we choose matter: recognising the importance of language in decolonising global health
Recognition of the relevance of colonial history to the contemporary practice of global health is not new, but the recent increase in visibility and prominence given to it by global health institutions and flagship journals is welcome when accompanied by meaningful reflection and action.1
Sacralizing Dominion: The Doctrine of Christian Discovery and the Religious Nationalist Imagination
White Christian nationalism presents itself as restoration—of a Christian nation, a moral order, a rightful hierarchy. This article argues that what it restores is the world-making rhetoric of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD). Reading the fifteenth-century papal bulls, their sedimentation into United States law, culture, religion, and contemporary dominionist discourse as a single rhetorical formation, we show that the bulls’ vocabulary of discovery, vacancy, and civilization did not describe a world but constituted one: a moral-legal order in which Christian identity conferred sovereignty and racialized peoples appeared as obstacles to salvation and property. That order persists as hegemonic common sense, carried by legal precedent, curricula, and popular culture, and it is re-performed today in the territorial rhetoric of the New Apostolic Reformation and white Christian nationalism. Following Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), repudiating the doctrine’s documents without dismantling its embeddedness within language and cognition leaves religious nationalism’s deepest resource intact. Against the discovery template, we set three counter-rhetorics—Indigenous theologies, Black theology, and womanism—and argue that desanctifying dominion requires conciliation, not reconciliation.
