Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

7.6.4. Ghost in the God Machine: Who is dominating? 
Action without a name, a ‘who’ attached to it, is meaningless. 
Arendt, 1958, 
The Human Condition
36
We’d assume that the enhanced society is not blind to Clarke’s HAL-9000 lessons. 

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Max Weber held that the existence of domination requires ‘the actual presence of 
one person successfully issuing orders to others’ (1968, p. 53). On such a narrow 
conception, the pertinent question will not be about the domination of the God 
Machine, but rather who the God Machine serves and who controls it. Broader 
conceptions of domination may not require a specific agent ‘issuing orders.’ For 
example, domination may arise from the inadvertent and unconscious actions of 
agents as a by-product of social and economic forces (e.g. Shapiro, 2012). 
However, even here it is not the social and economic forces that are dominating – 
as domination presupposes a degree of agency that social, economic and natural 
forces do not have.
The extent to which the notion of agency is central to the political idea of freedom 
as non-domination is already indicated in Pettit’s explication of the idea of 
domination. In Pettit’s words, an agent is dominating when an agent has: 
‘1. the capacity to interfere 
2. with impunity and at will 
3. in certain choices that the other is in a position to make’ (Pettit 1997, pp. 578-
581). 
To interfere in this sense ‘with impunity’ is to do so without ‘penalty,’ be it 
resistance by the victim or punishment by some external authority (Pettit, 1997, p. 
580). To interfere ‘at will’ is, according to Pettit, to do so at one’s own pleasure or 
whim. In other words, the interferer has the necessary ‘discretion’ to act as he or 
she chooses (Pettit, 1997, pp. 580-587). Does the God Machine have a capacity to 
interfere at one’s own pleasure or whim? I very much doubt that Savulescu and 
Persson’s (2012a) God Machine experiences much pleasure or is capable of whims 
in any sense stronger than in an anthropomorphising metaphorical sense, similar to 
the way in which we are subject to ‘the whims of Nature.’ Similarly, I very much 
doubt that the ‘penalties’ Pettit refers to would have much impact on the God 
Machine – for a simple and sufficient reason that the God Machine is not the kind 
of agent that non-domination freedom theories refer to.
On the non-domination conception of freedom, it is not the ‘laws of slavery’ that 
dominate the slaves but rather slave owners, who are effectively allowed to do so 

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by the absence of effective laws that would curtail their arbitrary power. Similarly, 
to the extent that the God Machine is an analogy for state power and law, it is not 
the God Machine who dominates the citizens of society. In a more technologically-
fuelled example, drones flying the sky above the Afghanistan-Pakistan border do 
not dominate the local people. It is those who steer the drones, those who establish 
targets, those whose power the drones enable, further and protect.
37
But perhaps the God Machine is better seen as the analogy for the state. What are 
we to make of the state, ontologically? According to Hegel, the state was the 
‘Divine Idea on Earth’ (1837, p.39). Hobbes (1651) used the metaphor of an 
‘Artificial Man’. Nietzsche declared it the ‘coldest of all cold monsters’ (1883, p. 
160), although we would be hard pressed to take Nietzsche’s statement in his highly 
poetic work literally. John of Salisbury (1159) defines the republic as a ‘certain 
body’ and takes his anatomical metaphor rather far, perhaps sheltered by his 
reference to Plutarch:
38
The place of the head in the body of the commonwealth is filled 
by the prince, who is subject only to God and to those who 
exercise His office and represent Him on earth, even as in the 
human body the head is quickened and governed by the soul. 
The place of the heart is filled by the Senate, from which 
proceeds the initiation of good works and ill. The duties of eyes, 
ears, and tongue are claimed by the judges and the governors of 
provinces. Officials and soldiers correspond to the hands. Those 
who always attend upon the prince are likened to the sides. 
Financial officers and keepers
1
(I speak now not of those who 
are in charge of the prisons, but of those who are keepers of the 
privy chest) may be compared with the stomach and intestines, 
which, if they become congested through excessive avidity, and 
37
I do not wish to make claims about the arbitrariness of the military intervention in 
Afghanistan or in Pakistan. The presence of drones is a good illustration of the agents-
instruments distinction, on which I wish to focus. For the purpose of this argument assume 
that the intervention would not fulfil the conditions necessary for non-arbitrariness or 
appropriate control.
38
Which was most likely what scholars have kindly described as literary device, see: 
Canning (1996, p. 112).

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retain too tenaciously their accumulations, generate innumerable 
and incurable diseases, so that through their ailment the whole 
body is threatened with destruction. The husbandmen 
correspond to the feet, which always cleave to the soil, and need 
the more especially the care and foresight of the head, since 
while they walk upon the earth doing service with their bodies, 
they meet the more often with stones of stumbling, and therefore 
deserve aid and protection all the more justly since it is they who 
raise, sustain, and move forward the weight of the entire body. 
Take away the support of the feet from the strongest body, and it 
cannot move forward by its own power, but must creep painfully 
and shamefully on its hands, or else be moved by means of brute 
animals.
However, for Wendt, a political scientist and a social constructivist international 
relations scholar, the state
 is
a person. Wendt argues that it is not that the state ‘is 
like’ a person, it literally is a person: ‘states are people too’ (1999, p. 215). It is 
understandable that the problem of defining state agency emerged in the field of 
international relations with considerable force, where treating states as agents 
conferred descriptive ease yet influenced the kind of descriptions, explanations and 
predictions scholars would make (Wendt, 1987). In positivist explanations of the 
relation between the citizen and the state, personification of the state was treated as 
a useful metaphor – it was understood as an instrumental device aimed at 
facilitating explanation and implied no ontological commitment to the state actually 
possessing any of the properties assigned to it. To put it in the words of Gilpin, 
when we talk of ‘the state acting,’ we engage in a collective illusion (1986, p. 318): 
we all know that the state does not really act and we also know that in reality there 
is no such thing as a state. 
There are two separate questions here. First is the question of ontology: whether or 
not the state exists; is the state real, is it a fiction, or is it a theoretical abstraction? 
The second question concerns the kind of properties that make sense to ascribe to 
states (and, in our discussion, the God Machine): is a state (and the God Machine) 
an agent, or, to put it more strongly, a kind of agent that can dominate in a sense 

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that is relevant to freedom by non-domination?
39
I will briefly consider the second 
question as more relevant to the issue at hand.
What kind of agency is necessary for Sparrow’s objection to succeed? To answer 
that question let us look closer at the notion of agency accommodated by Pettit’s 
(1997) theory. Petitt himself attempts to apply freedom as non-domination to 
international relations and relations between state and non-state entities (Kukathas 
and Pettit 1991; Pettit 2010). In response to the agent/structure problem, he 
explicitly falls on the ‘agent’ side of the distinction: 
‘while a dominating party will always be an agent – it cannot just be a 
system or a network or whatever – it may be a personal or a corporate 
or collective agent’ (Pettit, 1997, p. 52). 
He recognizes the challenge of normative individualism, which he understands as a 
position that holds that ‘there can be no difference in the value of two institutional 
arrangements unless there is a difference in the value for individual human beings 
of those arrangements’ (Pettit, 2010). His justification for the extension of the non-
domination view of freedom to the business of what he calls ‘agencies’ (such as 
states, corporations and non-governmental organisations) and its normative 
importance, however, explicitly rests on the idea that the agency of collectives is 
rooted in the agency of the people that constitute them:
‘the domination of corporate agencies will matter insofar as those 
agencies are organizations whereby individual human beings 
combine to act together. If the things that the members do as a 
corporate entity are subject to the alien control of another agent or 
agency, then those members are themselves subject to alien 
control.’ (2010, p. 76) 
Pettit’s (1997) theory is built on a conception of domination as a relation between 
persons, or groups of agents that are capable of exhibiting collective intentionality. 
He proposes that a