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Visions and Ethics in Current Discourse on Human Enhancement

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Abstract

Since it is now broadly acknowledged that ethics should receive early consideration in discourse on emerging technologies, ethical debates tend to flourish even while new fields of technology are still in their infancy. Such debates often liberally mix existing applications with technologies in the pipeline and far-reaching visions. This paper analyses the problems associated with this use of ethics as “preparatory” research, taking discourse on human enhancement in general and on pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement in particular as an example. The paper will outline and discuss the gap between the scientific and technological state of the art and the ethical debates, pointing out epistemic problems in this context. Furthermore, it will discuss the future role of genuine ethical reflection in discourse on human enhancement, arguing also that such discourse needs to include a technology assessment—in the broad sense of the term—which encompasses, inter alia, anthropological perspectives and aspects of social theory.

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Notes

  1. http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml

  2. The second example regards the increasingly important role played by scientific expertise in decision making, possibly under conditions of extremely high uncertainty.

  3. Jasanoff defines sociotechnical imaginaries as “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects” (Jasanoff & Kim, p. 120). In her analysis, Jasanoff refers to sociotechnical imaginaries as attainable and prescribed futures in policy-making, i.e. in publicly supported science and technology research, which then differ depending on the countries. In this article, by contrast, we are discussing the ethical dimensions of technological visions in academic literature, which develops general patterns of argumentation independently of the concrete cultural national context.

  4. The concept of emerging irreversibilities was developed by Rip and Kemp [65] to indicate the fluidity and open-endedness of sociotechnical developments and was integrated into the Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA) approach. Irreversibility—the idea that developments cannot be undone once they have occurred—was analysed in connection with new and emerging technologies as a phenomenon which reduces complexities: as a matter of fact, if promising results in a technological field are obtained they shape expectations, research agendas and demand. These decisions, for their part, reduce progressively the available choices and render technology part of the accepted landscape [65]. In their paper, Rip and Kemp [65] argue that measures sometimes need to be taken, due to the evolutionary character of sociotechnical change, to counter emerging irreversibilities and focus their discussion on the role of governments in research policy and on possible ways of shifting sociotechnical regimes. As already noted with respect to Jasanoff’s analysis, our paper focuses on the academic ethical debate on new and emerging technologies and on the need to disentangle the normative force of technological visions.

  5. Paper presented at the S.Net conference 2011 in Tempe, Arizona and personal communication.

  6. Greely and his colleagues called for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in CE using drugs; for an evidence-based approach to the evaluation of the risks and benefits of CE; for enforceable policies in the use of CE drugs to support fairness, protect individuals from coercion and minimise enhancement-related socioeconomic disparities; for a programme of research into the use and impacts of CE drugs by healthy individuals; for physicians, educators, regulators and others to collaborate in developing policies that address the use of CE drugs by healthy individuals; for information about the risks, benefits and alternatives to pharmaceutical CE to be broadly disseminated; for careful and limited legislative action to channel CE technologies into useful paths [27].

  7. For example, a 2004 study reported the following past-year prevalence rates of illicit amphetamine use among high school seniors: 2.3 % Ritalin, 1.9 % methamphetamine, 0.7 % Dexedrine, 0.2 % Benzedrine, 0.2 % Methedrine, 0.1 % Preludin, and 0.1 % Dexamyl [35].

  8. Franke and his group investigated a sample of pupils (1035) in small and big cities and university students from three departments (medicine, pharmacy, economics) (512) and found that the prevalence of the illegal use of prescription drugs was not as high as was previously discussed at the national level, especially in the media [23]. In Germany, the use of illicit drugs (amphetamines, cocaine, ecstasy) for cognition enhancement is higher than the nonmedical use of prescription stimulants: 2.42 % of pupils and 2.93 % of students in the former versus 1.55 % of pupils and 0.78 % of students in the latter case, where a lifetime illicit use of stimulants for cognitive enhancement with lower last-year and last-month rates was reported. Prevalence was higher among male pupils, pupils from vocational schools and pupils with bad marks. In a follow-up paper which looks more closely at the content of interviews with students, it has emerged that information about neuroenhancement is disseminated in a somewhat selective and underhand manner among students, who tend to avoid critical discussions [24]. For these reasons, the authors involved in the investigation point out that the potential risks associated with stimulant use require early awareness and intervention strategies.

  9. In the media it was sometimes reported that between 800,000 and two million people in Germany use these substances, based on a superficial extrapolation of this percentage to the entire workers’ population in Germany.

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Acknowledgments

This article was written with the support of the European Commission FP7 Science in Society funded project, Ethics in Public Policy Making: The Case of Human Enhancement (EPOCH), grant number SIS-CT-2010-266660 (http://epochproject.com). We would like to warmly thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and Hannah Weinhardt for her important support in a recent update of EPOCH results concerning the state of the art in PCE.

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  1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute for Technology Assessment and System Analysis (ITAS), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Arianna Ferrari, Christopher Coenen & Armin Grunwald

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Ferrari, A., Coenen, C. & Grunwald, A. Visions and Ethics in Current Discourse on Human Enhancement. Nanoethics 6, 215–229 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-012-0155-1

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