Humanitarian Expertise: Perspectives and Limits of its Capability

Abstract

The article discusses the problems of humanitarian expertise of technoscientific projects to determine the prospects and limits of the capabilities of such expertise. The author opposes the reassessment of these possibilities and proposes to concentrate the attention on real solvable problems. For example, humanitarian expertise is unable to stop or reverse the objective process of “digitizing” the education; the real problem is to determine the specific proportion between the living and digital components of learning, between the forms of direct and mediated human communication in the sphere of education. The author sees the principle of solving this problem in the following way: the more qualitative and meaningful the live communication is, i.e. the higher is the level of living teaching process, the greater should be the portion of time, allotted for it. To resist the digitalization of education actually, without slipping into luddism, is possible only by improving the quality of “living” education. Discussion of the confrontation between transhumanists and bioconservatives on the problem of “human enhancement” shows that both parties proceed from the same erroneous, naturalistic concept of human nature. The difference is that the former party protests against the technical transformation of the human body, while the latter one craves for its radical, unlimited “improvement”. For humanitarian expertise, the core question is the price and consequences of the transformation of human body for the genuine, social nature of man.