Are we good enough? If not, how may we improve ourselves? Must we restrict ourselves to traditional methods like study and training? Or should we also use science to enhance some of our mental and physical capacities more directly?
Over the last decade, human enhancement has grown into a major topic of debate in applied ethics. Interest has been stimulated by advances in the biomedical sciences, advances which to many suggest that it will become increasingly feasible to use medicine and technology to reshape, manipulate, and enhance many aspects of human biology even in healthy individuals. To the extent that such interventions are on the horizon (or already available) there is an obvious practical dimension to these debates. This practical dimension is underscored by an outcrop of think tanks and activist organizations devoted to the biopolitics of enhancement.
Already one can detect a biopolitical fault line developing between pro-enhancement and anti-enhancement groupings: transhumanists on one side, who believe that a wide range of enhancements should be developed and that people should be free to use them to transform themselves in quite radical ways; and bioconservatives on the other, who believe that we should not substantially alter human biology or the human condition. There are also miscellaneous groups who try to position themselves in between these poles, as the golden mean. While the terms of this emerging political disagreement are still being negotiated, there might be a window of opportunity open for academic bioethicists to influence the shape and direction of this debate before it settles into a fixedly linear ideological tug-of-war.
Beyond this practical relevance, the topic of enhancement also holds theoretical interest. Many of the ethical issues that arise in the examination of human enhancement prospects hook into concepts and problems of more general philosophical significance—concepts such as human nature, personal identity, moral status, well-being, and problems in normative ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. In addition to these philosophical linkages, human enhancement also offers thoughtfodder for several other disciplines, including medicine, law, psychology, economics, and sociology.
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