Visions and Ethics in Current Discourse on Human Enhancement

A decade of research on the ethics of human enhancement has produced a vast literature. This collection is an excellent contribution to the field; it fulfills and exceeds the promises of its two subsections: understanding and advancing the debate. Section 1, Understanding the Debate includes eight papers and section 2 Advancing the Debate includes seven. The collection also contains a concise introductory essay by Alberto Giubilini and Sagar Sanyal, providing a helpful overview of recent developments in the literature. It is a pleasure to read and is appropriate to use in postgraduate courses and advanced undergraduate seminars. The strengths of the collection are the papers' placement of issues in enhancement within broader debates in moral psychology, evolutionary ethics, political philosophy, and metaethics. Contextualizing in this way sheds light on the ways in which debates about novel technological innovations and their applications can provide broader insights into standing philosophical problems in other domains. The volume also strives for conceptual clarity and maps out a course through the topics, which help bypass some stubborn bottlenecks in the debate about human enhancement: 1) talking past each other, 2) conflicting methodologies, and 3) unquestioned assumptions. I highlight three sets of articles that provide ways to move past the aforementioned bottlenecks. I focus here on only a few papers for brevity, but it is worth noting that all other papers in this collection make significant contributions to dealing with bottlenecks or make worthwhile contributions to other issues in enhancement, such as the role of reason, sentiment, and emotion in moral judgments and action; disability theory; future persons; and mind-uploading and personal identity. Defenders of enhancement (and other biotechnologies) often face the objection, in both public discourse and in scholarly work, of playing god. In BPlaying God: What's the

Futures, 2023

Human enhancement is one of the leading research topics in contemporary applied ethics. Interestingly, the widespread attention to the ethical aspects of future enhancement applications has generated misgivings. Are researchers who spend their time investigating the ethics of futuristic human enhancement scenarios acting in an ethically suboptimal manner? Are the methods they use to analyze future technological developments appropriate? Are institutions wasting resources by funding such research? In this article, I address the ethics of doing human enhancement ethics focusing on two main concerns. The Methodological Problem refers to the question of how we should methodologically address the moral aspects of future enhancement applications. The Normative Problem refers to what is the normative justification for investigating and funding the research on the ethical aspects of future human enhancement. This article aims to give a satisfactory response to both meta-questions in order to ethically justify the inquiry into the ethical aspects of emerging enhancement technologies.

Global Issues and Ethical Considerations in Human Enhancement Technologies, 2014

Society is struggling with issues regarding rapid advancements in Human Enhancement Technologies (HET), especially in terms of definition, effects, participation, regulation, and control. These are global matters that legislators must sufficiently address, as was evidenced partly by debate within the 2008 European Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA), among other discussions; yet, relevance must not be relegated entirely to scientists, legislators, and lobbyists who may gain power and control at the expense of those parties most affected by these life-changing technologies. Since current and future HET initiatives should be in the best interests of those who will eventually participate, research into critical pragmatic elements of HET must expand beyond government and scientific experimentation for eventual societal adoption to incorporate deeper relevant inquiry from within the humanities.

2020

This chapter introduces the discipline of applied ethics. The moral relevance of context, systemic power imbalances, and perspective are considered. Consultation, involving diverse voices in ethical decision-making, is emphasized. Readers are given an opportunity to identify their values and consider how these values influence their opinions about technology. Deontological, teleological, and virtue ethics theories are summarized. Building on the basics introduced, three ways of defining radical human enhancement are discussed: the therapy—enhancement continuum and how we make ourselves better, choice, and justice. Each of these three ways are considered through application of a religiously informed lens. The three ways of defining the issue are considered throughout the textbook. A hybrid precautionary and proactionary approach to radical human enhancement ethics is explored.

2008

Abstract Human enhancement, in which nanotechnology is expected to play a major role, continues to be a highly contentious ethical debate, with experts on both sides calling it the single most important issue facing science and society in this brave, new century. This paper is a broad introduction to the symposium herein that explores a range of perspectives related to that debate.

Neuro-enhancement can be broadly defined as the attempt to improve the brain's functioning in healthy individuals through the use of both pharmacological and non-pharmacological means. Although the rapid development of these technologies in the last decade has been received with enthusiasm by many, an increasing number of scholars have raised important ethical, moral, social and legal concerns associated with their use. In general lines, these issues can be grouped into six different classes: medical safety and effectiveness, enhancement vs. treatment, distributive justice, coercion, human authenticity, and fairness and the value of achievement. In this paper, I add some ideas to the previous categories and I try to contribute to the neuroethical debate by addressing three issues that have barely received attention on the literature: the re-stigmatization of people with mental health disorders, the depoliticization of sociocultural struggles and the "technocratization of the brain." The legal and policy implications of cognitive enhancers are discussed in the conclusion.

Revista de Filosofia Aurora, 2020

Human enhancement making use of technological incorporations in their biology-Ethical perspective Melhoria humana valendo-se de incorporações tecnológicas em sua biologia-Perspectiva ética

2012

Jebari, Karim A. 2012. Crucial Considerations: Essays on the Ethics of Emerging Technologies Theses in Philosophy from the Royal Institute of Technology 42. 79 + vi pp. Stockholm. ISBN 978-91-637-2006-2

The enhancement debate in neuroscience and biomedical ethics tends to focus on the augmentation of certain capacities or functions: memory, learning, attention, and the like. Typically, the point of contention is whether these augmentative enhancements are permissible for individuals with no particular ‘medical’ disadvantage along any of the dimensions of interest. Rarely addressed in the literature, however, is the fact that sometimes the diminishment of a capacity or function, under the right set of circumstances, could plausibly contribute to an individual’s overall well-being: more is not always better, and sometimes less is more. Such cases may be especially likely, we suggest, when trade-offs in our modern environment have shifted since the environment of evolutionary adaptation. In this article, we introduce the notion of “diminishment as enhancement” and go on to defend a welfarist conception of enhancement. We show how this conception resolves a number of definitional ambiguities in the enhancement literature, and we suggest that it can provide a useful framework for thinking about the use of emerging neurotechnologies to promote human flourishing.

Human enhancement, the idea that through biomedical technologies, human bodies and minds can be made faster, stronger and longer-lasting - better, in fact, than human - has emerged in recent years as a significant conceptual and cultural force. A wide range of existing biomedicines, including Prozac, human Growth Hormone, Ritalin and Botox are considered to be enhancing or to have enhancement uses. The idea of human enhancement is also shaping the development of new technologies aimed at improving human cognitive capacities or extending lifespan. This paper traces the origins of the idea of human enhancement, as something distinct from the standard therapeutic use of medical technology, to the bioethical debates on gene therapy. This original formulation draws heavily on the idea of an acultural, biological body described through instrumental measurement and acted upon by value-neutral technologies that can be put to good or bad uses by social actors. Drawing on the broadly constructionist approach of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the limitations in this framing of enhancement as a category for understanding technologies will be examined. The limitations of the current model of enhancement and the potential for novel insights provided by an approach paying greater attention to the social shaping of technologies will be illustrated using examples from the case of human Growth Hormone. I argue that these considerations are important because the concepts of enhancement and therapy are pertinent not only to the study of contemporary technologies, but also to the future development of novel biotechnologies.