Nicholas Agar

Nicholas Agar (born 1965) is a New Zealand professor of ethics at the University of Waikato. Agar has a BA from the University of Auckland, an MA from the Victoria University of Wellington, and a PhD from the Australian National University. He has been teaching at Victoria since 1996.

Work on human enhancement
Agar has written on the debate about human enhancement and eugenics. His wrote the 2004 book Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement (Blackwell Publishers). Agar has argued that a vigorous defense of procreative freedom could turn the morally misguided authoritarian eugenics into a morally defensible liberal eugenics. Agar has argued that a liberal state should ban choices judged injurious to children's well-being. And should exercise the same kinds of control over harmful genetic choices that it currently does over choices about how to raise children.

Agar's 2010 book Humanity's End (Bradford Books) argued against the doctrine of radical enhancement sometimes identified with the transhumanist movement. Agar claims that enhancement is a good thing that it is nevertheless possible to overdo. He advances a species-relativist view about the value of human experiences and achievements.

In his 2013 book Truly Human Enhancement (The MIT Press) Agar defines transformative change as altering "the state of an individual's mental or physical characteristics in a way that causes and warrants a significant change in how that individual evaluates a wide range of their own experiences, beliefs, or achievements." He uses examples from the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers to argue that there are transformative changes that we correctly predict we will endorse once we have undergone them but that conflict with our prudential values. The central characters in the body snatchers movies resist snatching by the aliens even if they expect to be content about this change once they have undergone it. We may predict that we will enjoy life as a radically enhanced being but nevertheless be justified in rejecting it.

Work on technological change
In the 2015 book The Sceptical Optimist: Why Technology Isn't the Answer to Everything (Oxford University Press) Agar challenges the view that great things will come from technological progress that will lead human flourishing. He describes a phenomenon called "hedonic normalization" that Agar claims leads us to significantly overestimate the power of technological progress to improve our well-being. According to Agar, we overlook hedonic normalization when we suppose that because we would be unhappy to find ourselves permanently transported back in time to the middle ages that people living back them must have been miserable too. The same distortions apply when we imagine a future with cures for cancer and colonies on Mars. Technological progress may make us happier but not nearly so much as we imagine it. Agar discusses the implications this has for our collective prioritization of technological progress.

In a 2019 book How to be Human in the Digital Economy (The MIT Press) Agar addresses challenges posed by automation and artificial intelligence to human work and agency. Agar argues for a hybrid "social-digital economy". The key value of the digital economy is efficiency. The key value of the social economy is humanness. A social economy would be centered on connections between human minds. Agar argues that we should reject some digital automation because machines will always be poor substitutes for humans in roles that involve direct contact with other humans. In a hybrid social-digital economy, people do the jobs for which feelings matter and machines take on data-intensive work.

Books

 * How to be Human in the Digital Economy (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA:, 2019)
 * The Sceptical Optimist: Why technology isn't the answer to everything (OUP, Oxford, 2015)
 * Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA:, 2013)
 * Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA:, 2010)
 * Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
 * Perfect Copy (Cambridge: Icon, 2002)
 * Life's Intrinsic Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)