Abstract
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.
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Notes
See the picture of one from the Welcome Collection exhibition Superhuman at http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/superhuman/image-galleries/missing-parts.aspx?view=prosthetic-toe.
Allhoff et al. (2009), in agreement with the assessment of physician and Stanford University bioethics professor William Hurlbut in his opening remarks at the “Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights” conference, Stanford University Law School, May 26–28 2006.
Former Reason editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie’s description. See Gillespie (2006).
Vanderbilt University historian of science Michael Bess. See Bess (2008).
The benign exceptions: therapies that take people beyond species-typical levels of mental or physical ability when restoring them to their exceptional pre-pathology states, and enhancements that leave people below species-typical levels when their original unenhanced states were especially low. .
In China in 2005, for example, between 120 and 130 males were born for every 100 females, and in India the number of “vanished” females has now reached 700,000. See UN News Centre 2007 and UN News Service 2008 for more details and the expected social effects.
It has also been said that such enhancements could have important civilian applications: that the exoskeletons and human–machine interfaces could help the disabled; that the pain vaccine could revolutionize pain management in cancer patients; that methods to accelerate wound healing could help people with spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease, and brain tumors; that the modifications of metabolism could reshape the weight loss industry; and that memory augmentation could help people with Alzheimer’s, stroke, and brain damage, to say nothing of college students. But these are not the aims of the research.
It is interesting to note in this connection that US public opinion polls show those less advantaged to be more interested in a variety of human enhancement technologies and more accepting of them than others in the population (Williams and Frankel 2006).
Cf. note 8 above. Surely it is more efficient (saving of time, saving of resources), for example, to research pain management for cancer patients directly than to research pain management for wounded soldiers on the battlefield and then apply it later to cancer patients.
Whether there is such a thing as “human nature,” whether the pursuit of human enhancement perfects this nature or perverts it, is ethically admirable or ethically pernicious, will be a benefit or a liability, etc.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Texas, Dallas (in the “Exploring Human Enhancement” lecture series, January 2011), Bielefeld University, Germany (at the “Agnotology: Ways of Producing, Preserving, and Dealing with Ignorance” Conference, May 2011), the University of Quebec, Canada (at the “Science, Philosophie, Société” Conference, June 2012), as well as at the University of Cincinnati (at the “Socially Engaged Philosophy of Science” Conference, October 2012). I am grateful to audiences at all these universities as well as to two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful questions, comments, and suggestions.
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Kourany, J.A. Human Enhancement: Making the Debate More Productive. Erkenn 79 (Suppl 5), 981–998 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9539-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9539-z