Transhumanism as a Thin-centred Ideology

As a product of the ongoing scientific and technological revolution, transhumanism has grown into a worldwide movement and its ideas penetrated the public discourse and popular culture. Transhumanism promotes the radical idea that humanity will be able to transcend its biological limits and enhance individual cognitive, physical, psychological and moral capabilities far beyond the current nature-driven level through new techno-scientific innovations applied on the human body. These changes demand radical changes in society and the reconfiguration of all aspects of politics. The transhumanist movement has recently grown political branches that exert influence on policy-making by inviting transhumanist topics into the political arena that other political ideologies neglect. The latest development is the emergence of transhumanist political proto-parties worldwide. These changes signal an ideational thickening of transhumanism. This thesis presents the first ideological analysis of political transhumanism applying Michael Freeden’s morphological approach. Its hypothesis is that transhumanism is a thin-centred ideology. To test this hypothesis, this paper conducts the morphological analysis of key transhumanist political texts. It investigates whether transhumanism can be described as having ideological coherency, what core ideas, key values, and claims (decontestation chains) make up its ideational architect, how, if at all, the conceptual structure of transhumanism can best be described, to what extent these transhumanist concepts and claims are distinct from those of other ideologies. To start with, three arguments are suggested to support the choice of Freeden’s morphological approach to be the right methodology for the ideological analysis of transhumanism. The subsequent section presents the selected transhumanist literature and other texts that the ideological analysis was conducted on explaining the criteria of selection. Next, a concise argument was put forward to underpin the relevance of transhumanism as ...