My illustration entitled: “The Healer of Worlds” – A transhuman with bionic legs, genetically adapted skin and multiple organic arms kneels in a damaged landscape. Their hands and coordinated machines restore soil and plant trees; a recovering forest stretches toward the horizon.
Imagine a person who communicates through an assistive device, relies on another person to position it and needs a specialist to maintain it. With that support, she directs her work, friendships and daily life. Without it, expressing even a simple preference becomes difficult.
Is she less sovereign because her freedom depends on others?
Only if sovereignty is confused with self-sufficiency.
Human Sovereignty Transhumanism must reject a definition of freedom that belongs only to people who can function without visible assistance. A person’s authority over their life should not diminish because exercising that authority requires caregivers, clinicians, interpreters or infrastructure.
The central question concerns how support is governed: does it help the person direct their life, or give someone else unchecked power to direct it?
The Myth of the Independent Individual
Almost everyone depends on systems they cannot personally reproduce. Food distribution, electricity, communication networks and medical services sustain ordinary choices.
Some dependencies are simply more visible than others.
A person using a wheelchair may depend on accessible transport. Someone using an implanted device may depend on maintenance. Neither relationship establishes that their purposes matter less than those of a person whose dependencies remain in the background.
Complete independence would be an impossible standard for most people and an exclusionary standard for human enhancement.
Sovereignty should concern the person’s standing within relationships of dependence, including the authority to make decisions and challenge how assistance is provided.
Dependence Becomes Domination Through Power
A relationship becomes dominating when another party can interfere substantially in a person’s life without effective limits or accountability.
Imagine a caregiver threatening to withhold communication assistance unless someone abandons an unwanted friendship. Or a device provider making essential service conditional on unrelated commercial permission.
The problem is not that assistance exists. It is that essential assistance becomes leverage over choices outside the provider’s legitimate role.
Even an unexercised threat can shape behaviour. Someone may stop complaining because they fear losing the support on which everyday functioning depends.
A benevolent provider can still occupy an inadequately constrained position. Protection should not depend entirely on whether the person currently holding power happens to be kind.
Autonomy Can Be Supported
Supported decision-making begins with a practical commitment: help the person understand, communicate and act on their own choices.
Support might involve accessible explanations, additional time, communication tools, trusted discussion or assistance comparing alternatives. Its form should reflect the individual’s circumstances and preferences.
The supporter helps make judgment possible without automatically acquiring authority to determine its outcome.
This distinction matters when a person communicates differently, requires help reading information or experiences fluctuating difficulties. The presence of assistance should not itself count as evidence that the resulting decision belongs to somebody else.
Equally, an apparently fluent answer should not excuse pressure or manipulation. Assessment should examine whether support enables the person’s participation rather than merely producing convenient agreement.
Assistance Must Not Become Substitution
A supporter may believe that a particular choice is unwise. That concern deserves discussion, but disagreement does not automatically justify taking over.
People retain room to make decisions others would reject, including decisions involving ordinary risk. Independence of judgment cannot be measured by agreement with caregivers or professionals.
Supporters should explain concerns, identify alternatives and check understanding without making essential assistance conditional on compliance.
Difficult cases remain where a person cannot communicate a choice despite appropriate support. These require careful, proportionate processes that attend to known wishes and circumstances, rather than assuming unlimited authority for whoever provides care.
The aspiration remains participation to the greatest practicable extent, with restrictions requiring specific justification and review.
Make the Provider’s Authority Explicit
Every consequential support relationship should distinguish assistance from authority.
What may the provider decide? What remains for the individual? Which actions require permission? What happens when there is disagreement?
A clinician may properly identify limits on what they can safely provide. A technician may explain that a requested modification exceeds their competence. Neither limitation grants a general right to govern the person’s relationships, beliefs or ambitions.
Necessary boundaries should be understandable, proportionate and open to appropriate challenge.
For enhancement providers, this means distinguishing maintenance responsibilities from unrelated demands concerning information, employment or personal conduct. Integrating technology into someone’s life should not expand institutional authority beyond what its justified purpose requires.
My illustration “The Healer of Worlds” work-in-progress. The art shows that greater capability can serve the flourishing of life.
Choice Requires Continuity
Telling someone to leave an abusive arrangement is inadequate when departure would interrupt essential support.
A meaningful alternative requires practical continuity: another qualified provider, accessible arrangements, necessary records and help managing transition. These conditions may take time and resources to establish.
Where alternatives are scarce, stronger protections within the existing relationship become especially important.
A provider should not retaliate against complaints by withdrawing unrelated essential assistance. Disputes about optional services should not casually endanger basic functioning.
Continuity does not require every individual worker to remain indefinitely available. Institutions should organise staffing and transitions so a person’s freedom does not depend on one exhausted caregiver or one inaccessible specialist.
Remedies Must Be Usable
A right offers limited protection if invoking it requires the cooperation of the person accused of abuse.
Complaint processes should therefore provide accessible routes outside the immediate support relationship. Depending on the setting, these might include an independent advocate, an accountable institution or an external review body.
The person should be able to communicate privately, receive assistance preparing a complaint and understand what happens next.
Remedies should address immediate safety and support continuity as well as later accountability. A successful complaint arriving after avoidable loss of essential functioning may offer insufficient repair.
Fair procedures should also hear the provider’s account. Accountability depends on evidence and proportionate responses, rather than automatic acceptance of either party’s claims.
Support Must Protect Privacy
People receiving assistance may need to disclose intimate information. That necessity should not become unlimited permission to observe, record or circulate their lives.
A caregiver’s access to communication equipment does not establish a right to read every message. A maintenance provider’s need for technical information does not justify unrelated profiling.
Support arrangements should identify what information is necessary, who can access it and how inappropriate use can be challenged.
Private opportunities to seek advice matter particularly where coercion is suspected. Constant monitoring can make an apparently available complaint channel practically unusable.
Sovereignty includes space to communicate, reflect and disagree beyond the immediate supervision of the people who provide assistance.
The Burden on Supporters
A serious objection is that these expectations place excessive demands on caregivers and small providers already working under pressure.
That concern should shape institutional design. Respecting a recipient’s authority cannot depend on denying supporters reasonable working conditions, training, rest or safety.
Public and private arrangements should distribute responsibility fairly. Clear roles, adequate resources and access to advice can protect everyone involved.
A worker should not be forced to provide unsafe assistance. Equally, resource shortages should not be concealed by presenting the recipient as unreasonable for wanting ordinary control over life.
Supporting sovereignty requires support for the relationships that make it possible, while keeping the recipient’s personhood central.
Test Support Through Disagreement
Return to the woman using communication equipment. Suppose she wants to attend an event that her supporter considers impractical. A supportive response would help her understand transport options, costs, timing and relevant risks. It would give her a way to express priorities and explore workable arrangements.
A dominating response would hide the invitation, refuse to position the device or claim that needing assistance disqualifies her from deciding.
The difference becomes clearest when preferences diverge. Agreement during easy moments tells us little about how authority operates under strain. An institution should ask whether the person can obtain another independent opinion, communicate a complaint and keep receiving essential assistance while the disagreement is examined.
Practical limits may prevent the preferred outing. Yet an honest account of unavailable resources differs from disguising the supporter’s preference as the recipient’s incapacity. Where the obstacle is institutional, responsibility for explaining and addressing it should remain institutional.
The same reasoning applies to an enhanced person requesting a different maintenance arrangement. Their dependence creates a need for supported negotiation, not an obligation to accept every demand. Sovereignty becomes tangible when someone can question the terms of assistance without having the means of questioning taken away. That protection should be planned before conflict arises, with accessible procedures and responsibilities that neither party must invent during a crisis.
Enhancement Within Human Relationships
Human Sovereignty Transhumanism should evaluate enhancement by asking how its surrounding relationships distribute authority.
Does assistance help the person express choices? Are provider powers limited? Can disagreement occur without retaliation? Are remedies accessible, and can support continue while a dispute is resolved?
These questions apply whether assistance comes from a person, an institution or a technological network.
The objective is freedom within the relationships people actually need. Greater capability becomes valuable when it supports a life the person can meaningfully direct.
Depending on others does not make someone less sovereign. Leaving those dependencies subject to unchecked power does. Our task is to make support answerable to the person whose life it sustains.