Human Enhancement and Theosis
Amir Bishay
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
Human enhancement is a common trend that we are entering an era of what is known as post- humanism, where humans could get more capabilities that could exceed their limitations and give them a better life, we shall discuss the theories behind Enhancement, scientifically, and philosophically, the scientific and the moral arguments against them and the Christian view of deification as God’s plan for humanity.
Related papers
HUMAN ENHANCEMENT AND THE QUESTION OF HUMAN BEINGS
This article deals with the understanding of human beings in the project of human enhancement. It shows that, in the voices of some representatives of the latter, there is a naturalistic tendency to reduce human beings either to their environment or to virtual reality. In such cases, the resulting entity would lack interiority as well as the first-person perspective. In this paper, it is argued that the possibilities opened up by biomedical sciences cannot release us from employing a multi-dimensional and integral concept of human beings wherein interiority plays an important role. The human enhancement project is not only a matter of technical feasibility; it also fundamentally concerns the essence of humanness. Hence the question of the nature of human beings and their condition is an indispensable part of this enterprise. Keywords: Human enhancement – Human beings – Environment – First person perspective Introduction. In contemporary philosophy, discussions on human enhancement are well advanced. There is a huge body of literature on the topic with new subfields emerging. This debate is in tune with the constant longing of the human beings to improve their lives and wellbeing. Apart from appropriate personal efforts it has found expression in various educational and political programs and undertakings. Contemporary efforts to enhance the human being have the advantage of drawing on the latest discoveries in genetics , genetic engineering, pharmacology and even information technology. Although still at the beginning of their practical implementations and uncertain of how viable they are, relevant discussions between philosophers and futurologists are, by contrast, quite complex and nuanced. There are many aspects of these discussions which are worthy of examining. This paper however concentrates on one issue only, namely who or what is the subject of those enhancing procedures. In other words, what is the understanding of the essence of the human being which is the subject of improvement. This issue is complex and can be approached from many angles. In this paper, the attention is limited to current discussions between different representatives and adherents of human enhancement, and by default their implied understanding of the human being. Finally a critical assessment is offered together with postulates for further discussion. However, at the outset some light should be shed on why such discussions take place at all and how they can be structured in a relatively straightforward way.
Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits?
Global Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities, 2022
The biotechnological advances obtained in the last decades have configurated a particular scenario about the limits of what we can do with ourselves, especially by revealing that the human enhancement debate still is epistemologically confused and ethically naive. As we intend to discuss, that happens for two reasons: the first one is associated with the moral evaluation of enhancement concepts, in other words, whether or not we would be entitled to promote substantial changes that jeopardize the conservation of our own way of life; the second reason, intrinsically attached to the first one, is to neglect the evolutionary history of human beings and to claim, therefore, that human enhancement should be carefully evaluated because we would not be able to foresee the possible disastrous risks in our future. It is right into these arguments that the debate between bioconservatives and transhumanists becomes epistemologically confused and ethically weak.
Human Enhancement: Making the Debate More Productive
Erkenntnis, 2013
Human enhancement-the attempt to overcome all human cognitive, emotional, and physical limitations using current technological developments-has been said to pose the most fundamental social and political question facing the world in the twenty-first century. Yet, the public remains ill prepared to deal with it. Indeed, controversy continues to swirl around human enhancement even among the very best-informed experts in the most relevant fields, with no end in sight. Why the ongoing stalemate in the discussion? I attempt to explain the central features of the human enhancement debate and the empirical and normative shortcomings that help to keep it going. I argue that philosophers of science are especially well equipped to rectify these shortcomings, and I suggest that we may be deeply remiss if we don't do so. Section 1: "The Most Important Controversy in Science and Society" of the Twenty-First Century Human enhancement-the attempt to improve human cognitive, emotional, and physical capacities, especially through technological means-has been part of the human condition right from the beginning.
Inquiring into Human Enhancement - Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives
What is human enhancement all about? Why has it become a major concern in debates about the future of contemporary societies? This book is devoted to clarifying the underlying ambiguities of these major debates. It proposes novel ways of exploring what human enhancement means, what practices and technologies are involved, and what goals are invoked, with their respective justifications and criticisms. It calls on contributors from different countries and backgrounds—sociology, philosophy, bioethics, political science, engineering, medicine, literary studies, science fiction—to examine three fundamental aspects of human technological enhancement: firstly, what the concept of human enhancement means; secondly, what practices constitute human enhancement today, and; thirdly, what it might become in the future.
Is human enhancement possible if it comes from the outside?
Scientia et fides, 2019
Throughout history, human beings have worked on their personal enhancement. Not only improving the living conditions, but also trying to improve the moral behavior of people, usually through education. The Transhumanist proposal of moral enhancement promises to make us better and understands it as a duty, also because of the ethical challenges that present to us. In the following article we explore if that is possible and to what extent, taking into account that humans are agents.
Is Human Enhancement also a Personal Matter?
Science and Engineering Ethics, 2013
Emerging technologies are increasingly used in an attempt to ''enhance the human body and/or mind'' beyond the contemporary standards that characterize human beings. Yet, such standards are deeply controversial and it is not an easy task to determine whether the application of a given technology to an individual and its outcome can be defined as a human enhancement or not. Despite much debate on its potential or actual ethical and social impacts, human enhancement is not subject to any consensual definition. This paper proposes a timely and much needed examination of the various definitions found in the literature. We classify these definitions into four main categories: the implicit approach, the therapy-enhancement distinction, the improvement of general human capacities and the increase of well-being. After commenting on these different approaches and their limitations, we propose a definition of human enhancement that focuses on individual perceptions. While acknowledging that a definition that mainly depends on personal and subjective individual perceptions raises many challenges, we suggest that a comprehensive approach to define human enhancement could constitute a useful premise to appropriately address the complexity of the ethical and social issues it generates.
Enhancement Technologies and the Person: Christian Perspectives
The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 2008
To Be or Not to Be Enhanced? Just ask the Moon – in Posthuman Terms
The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Human Enhancement, 2023
This chapter embraces the topic of human enhancement from a posthuman standpoint, in dialogue with different philosophies, such as posthumanism and transhumanism. Addressing topics such as radical life extension, cryonics, and biohacking, it highlights that enhancement is not a notion that can be conceived in isolation, but relationally and pluralistically: these changes will affect us all. This chapter takes into consideration the possible ripple effects of bio-technological enhancements from the individual perspective to the social, the species, and the planet. It possesses many open questions, including challenging hypothetical scenarios: from the Hitler paradox, which addresses the risks of crediting cryonics as a human right, to the possibilities of being hacked, once becoming a cyborg. The topic of enhancement is inscribed within the geological era of the Anthropocene, the economic paradigm of big data, and the call for existential awareness, according to which the most significant type of existential enhancement we can aim for is to know who we are. A posthuman understanding of enhancement nourishes an integral approach, mindful of the multitude of layers at play. Overall, a posthumanist approach to enhancement must rely on full existential awareness.
The ethics of doing human enhancement ethics
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.
Related papers
Human Enhancement: Perfection, Desire and Capabilities
Global Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities, 2023
Human enhancement theses are epistemologically confusing and ethically challenging; they have been triggering a wide variety of academic and public debates. The present paper is aimed at classifying the different types of arguments supporting the debate on human enhancement, which, in particular, have important implications for the concept of health. Therefore, contrary to a trend in human enhancement literature that points out perfection as the milestone to improve the lives of human beings, this study shows that this scenario is intrinsically linked to inconsistent, theoretically poor issues.
Human Enhancement, the Person, and Posthuman Personhood
This article examines the problem of enhancing human beings and the possibility of making them into posthuman persons. I begin by presenting the major ideas of the project and their corresponding implementations. Then I consider the significance of these ideas from two different conceptions of the person, namely the naturalist and the personalist. Finally, I review the ethical projects associated with naturalism and personalism in an attempt to determine the emergent moral questions that arise when the two confront the possibility of human enhancement. These positions differ substantially in terms of their assessment of various interventions as permissible or ethically praiseworthy. Despite the major advancements in genetic technology that can make such interventions possible, we are still divided by basic understandings of who we are, whom we want to become, and what human goods should be promoted. At any rate, we cannot sideline these important humanist considerations.
On the (Non-)Rationality of Human Enhancement and Transhumanism
Science and Engineering Ethics, 2022
The human enhancement debate has over the last few decades been concerned with ethical issues in methods for improving the physical, cognitive, or emotive states of individual people, and of the human species as a whole. Arguments in favour of enhancement defend it as a paradigm of rationality, presenting it as a clear-eyed, logical defence of what we stand to gain from transcending the typical limits of our species. If these arguments are correct, it appears that adults should in principle be able to make rational and informed decisions about enhancing themselves. In this paper, however, we suggest that a rational and informed choice to enhance oneself may in some cases be impossible. Drawing on L. A. Paul's work on 'transformative experience', we argue that some enhancementssuch as certain moral or cognitive modificationsmay give rise to unbridgeable epistemic gaps in key domains. Importantly, such gaps could prove to be not merely contingently unbridgeable due to a lack of information at a given moment, but radically unbridgeable, making someone in a non-enhanced state inherently unable to conceive of what it would be like to be enhanced in a particular way. Where this experience is key to understanding what values are being pursued by the enhancement itself, it may prove impossible for a person to be sufficiently informed, and to make a rational decision about whether or not to enhance herself. This poses a challenge for human enhancement proponents in general, and for transhumanists in particular.
Human Enhancement, Prosthesis and Transhumanism
Human enhancement by medical means, especially prosthetic surgery, aims at what is known as a "posthuman condition" that will hopefully transgress the given state of our biological human nature surpassing its bounds. Transhumanism is a loosely-held social, philosophical and scientific movement that campaigns in its favor. Such enhancement, covering all aspects of the human organism, has the purpose of producing significantly improved human beings by a wholesale alteration of their bodily, mental and even emotional abilities (e.g. 'affective computing'), including longevity, with a view to the attainment of the 'perfectibility of the human species' beyond strictly therapeutic purposes. A wide gamut of possible future states of such perfectibility are foreseen and urged on, such as our being interfaced with computer machines or fused with animals, gaining prosthetic devices, receiving neural transplantations or undergoing a continuous 'mind-uploading' or even being wired up with a permanent exocortex system (i.e. an outside brain).
The ethics of human enhancement
Philosophy Compass, 2014
Ethical debate surrounding human enhancement, especially by biotechnological means, has burgeoned since the turn of the century. Issues discussed include whether specific types of enhancement are permissible or even obligatory, whether they are likely to produce a net good for individuals and for society, and whether there is something intrinsically wrong in playing God with human nature.We characterize the main camps on the issue, identifying three main positions: permissive, restrictive and conservative positions. We present the major sub-debates and lines of argument from each camp. The review also gives a flavor of the general approach of key writers in the literature such as Julian Savulescu, Nick Bostrom, Michael Sandel, and Leon Kass.
Human Enhancement Study
Abstract The study attempts to bridge the gap between visions on human enhancement (HE) and the relevant technoscientific developments. It outlines possible strategies of how to deal with HE in a European context, identifying a reasoned pro-enhancement approach, a reasoned restrictive approach and a case-by-case approach as viable options for the EU. The authors propose setting up a European body (temporary committee or working group) for the development of a normative framework that guides the formulation of EU policies on HE.
Against Unrestricted Human Enhancement
2008
Abstract The defining debate in this new century will be about technology and human enhancement, according to many across the political spectrum. Our ability to use science to enhance our bodies and minds���as opposed to its application for therapeutic purposes���is one of the most personal and therefore passionate issues in an era where emerging technologies seduce us with new and fantastic possibilities for our future. But in the process, we are forced to rethink what it means to be human or, essentially, our own identity.
Human Enhancement Technologies, Transhumanism and Religion
nb.vse.cz
The advent of new biotechnologies has heralded the growth of the philosophy called transhumanism. Transhumanism is a school of thought which contends that future humans will be radically different due to technological forays into the human body and brain. However, transhumanism has yet to answer human rights concerns by ethicists and philosophers. To what extent will the emergence of human enhancement technologies change human societies and the way in which we define our humanity? On what grounds does the development of human enhancement technologies pose a threat to human rights? Such questions demand the emergence of a wisdom ethic which will hopefully be promulgated by the world's religions. The use of a wisdom ethic may also be enjoined by scientists in their engagement with theologians and laypeople who are uneasy with biotechnologies and needing to become better informed.
Steve Clarke, Julian Savulescu, Tony Coady, Alberto Giubilini, and Sagar Sanyal: the Ethics of Human Enhancement: Understanding the Debate: Oxford University Press, 2016. Hardcover (IBSN: 0191816353, 9,780,191,816,352) €64,32. 320 pp.
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
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.