CGS-authored
At a 2001 talk in Berlin, transhumanist and Oxford academic Anders Sandberg addressed the crowd. “I am hoping to demonstrate why the freedom to modify one’s body is essential not just to transhumanism,” announced Sandberg, “but also to any future democratic society.”
The exact freedom Sandberg desired was “morphological freedom,” the absolute ownership of one’s body, implying the right to undergo bodily, genetic, or prosthetic modifications. Technology has enabled a new world of sex expression, argued Sandberg, why curb the ability to improve health, life quality, and enhance our currently woefully human skills?
In many ways, the idea of morphological freedom has quietly become a cornerstone of transhumanist beliefs. It is mentioned early on in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, currently championed by Transhumanist Party Presidential Candidate Zoltan Istvan. Article 3 reads:
“Human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms agree to uphold morphological freedom — the right to do with one’s physical attributes or intelligence (dead, alive, conscious, or unconscious) whatever one wants so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone...