Mark Walker

Research Associate, Trinity College, University of Toronto

Mark Walker, Ph.D. is a research associate in philosophy at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and lecturer in Philosophy at McMaster University. Additionally, he is a lecturer in philosophy at McMaster University. He is founder and president of Permanent End International, a nonprofit organization devoted to ending hunger, illiteracy and environmental degradation and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Evolution and Technology. From 2002 to 2006 he served on the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association. His research interests include ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of science.

In December of 2006, Dr. Walker wrote "In Praise of Bio-Happiness," available for download as a pdf from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies website. Most of the paper is devoted to defending the prospect of conferring happiness by way of biopharmaceuticals and other interventions against the following three critiques: Happiness is not of moral importance. (2) Bio-happiness cannot increase our happiness. (3) Bio-happiness will come at too great a cost to other moral values. He later presented his argument at the 2007 Transvision conference in Chicago, Illinois.

On Saturday, June 14, 2008, Dr. Walker will be giving a presentation at the Toronto Transhumanist Association titled "Apocalyptic Threats and Happy Pills." He will delineate two broad strategies for attempting to mitigate such threats: the technical and the social. Technical mitigation seeks to use technology to defeat, defend or disarm the threatening events; examples include fallout shelters, antivirals and universal surveillance. Social mitigation of apocalyptic threats work indirectly to reduce the social causes that may contribute to an increased probability of such threats, or reduce the probability that we will effectively deal with such threats, for example, removing sources of conflict such as poverty and injustice.

audio

Transvision 2004, Neurotheology and the Moral Duty of Self-improvement panel, "Becoming Godlike"
4.20.06 Sentient Developments radio, "Superlongevity"