Celem artykułu jest krytyka kilku popularnych argumentów przeciwko wykorzystywaniu współczesnych osiągnięć biomedycznych do poprawiania ludzkiej kondycji fizycznej lub umysłowej. Na przykładzie prac Habermasa, Sandela, Fukuyamy omówię trzy argumenty tego typu odwołujące się do: 1) autonomii; 2) życia jako daru; 3) naturalnej równowagi. Na koniec pokażę, że sprzeciw względem niektórych propozycji biomedycznego polepszenia kondycji ludzkiej może być wynikiem swoistego błędu poznawczego, który psychologowie określają jako efekt status quo.

Abstract:An integrated and principled neuroethics offers ethical guidelines able to transcend conventional and medical reliance on normality standards. Elsewhere we have proposed four principles for wise guidance on human transformations. Principles like these are already urgently needed, as bio- and cyberenhancements are rapidly emerging. Context matters. Neither “treatments” nor “enhancements” are objectively identifiable apart from performance expectations, social contexts, and civic orders. Lessons learned from disability studies about enablement and inclusion suggest a fresh way to categorize modifications to the body (...) and its performance. The term “enhancement” should be broken apart to permit recognition of enablements and augmentations, and kinds of radical augmentation for specialized performance. Augmentations affecting the self, self-worth, and self-identity of persons require heightened ethical scrutiny. Reversibility becomes the core problem, not the easy answer, as augmented persons may not cooperate with either decommissioning or displacement into unaccommodating societies. We conclude by indicating how our four principles of self-creativity, nonobsolescence, empowerment, and citizenship establish a neuroethics beyond normal that is better prepared for a future in which humans and their societies are going so far beyond normal. (shrink)

Bioethics as a distinctive field is undergoing a critical turn. It may be a quiet revolution, but a growing body of scholarship illustrates a perceived need for a rethink of the scope of the field and the approaches and priorities that have carried bioethicists through many heady years of success. Few areas of bioethical practice have been left unexamined, ranging from questions as to the sustainability of the discipline in its current form to the “expertise” of its practitioners; the legitimacy (...) of bioethics in the realms of policymaking; its relationship to philosophy; the purchase of empirical and interdisciplinary method; the relationship of bioethics to the real world; bioethical understandings of the concept of “health” ; its agenda, priorities, and inclusiveness right up to what might be the overarching question: “What is bioethics all about?” Unsurprisingly, these questions elicit varied responses. Scholars from various disciplines have critiqued fundamental tenets of the “ethics” business, albeit as claims of its “conservatism,” “corruption,” and its questionable “usefulness” suggest, not always with a charitable or constructive eye. But quite crucially and often overlooked, bioethics itself has not shied away from the question as to what bioethics is and what it should become; increasingly apparent is that this kind of self-conscious and reflexive theorizing is regarded as a key priority for taking contemporary ethics forward. (shrink)

Human improvement is epistemologically challenging and has awakened a wide range of academic and public debates, especially considering the possible ethical and political consequences of its regulation. This article focuses on a selection of conceptual questions about cognitive enhancement and defends, through the discussion, the role of cognitive artifacts and the insufficiency of a strictly materialistic vision of enhancement techniques. The article approaches 3 specific questions: first, that the concept of enhancement should not be linked only with biotechnological artifacts; second, (...) that the most potent technologies of the near future will be those that offer user integration and transformation with machines without the need for implants or surgery; and third, that cognitive artifacts, i.e. non-biological material devices coupled to cognitive system functions, are responsible for the course of human enhancement throughout history. Thus, we do not need a moral compass to evaluate all dimensions and risks that human enhancement can elicit, since traditional conservatism about enhancement limits itself to the idea that the growth of our powers would make our values unsustainable and put the current way of human life at risk. (shrink)

Human enhancement technologies raise serious ethical questions about health practices no longer content simply to treat disease, but which now also propose to “optimize” human beings’ physical, cognitive and psychological abilities. These technologies call for a reassessment of our relationship to health, the human body and the body's organic, identity and social functions. In nursing, such considerations are in their infancy. In this paper, we argue for the relevance of critical phenomenology as a way to better understand the ethical issues (...) related to human enhancement technologies (HET). In so doing, we seek to problematize HET and assess their influence on the future development of nursing science and practice. It is difficult to anticipate the concrete effects of HET, we suggest, because these practices reconfigure the meaning of normativity and disorient our conventional ethical landscape. In this context, we argue that the later work of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault invites a critical perspective into how techno‐scientific discourses modify our relationship to care, to health and to our own social and corporeal identities. Despite the traditional philosophical opposition between phenomenology and critical theory, we maintain that a hybrid critical phenomenological approach opens new ways to assess the integration of technology and practice. Our analysis understands HET as a process of “hybridization” between technological objects and human subjects. Critical phenomenology thus effectively questions anthropocentric definitions of technology, challenges the dichotomy between curative treatment and enhancement and, finally, prompts valuable reflection on the implications of HET for nursing theory and practice. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

An intellectual and cultural movement advocating a radical enhancement of human performance via technoscientific and biomedical advances, transhumanism has grown in notoriety in recent years. Grouping engineers, philosophers, sociologists, and entrepreneurs, the movement and its ideals of enhanced humans have a strong social resonance, be it doping in sport, the use of smart drugs, or the biomedical battle against aging. This article sheds theoretical and critical light on transhumanism through the lens of human perfectibility. It particularly aims to show how (...) the movement marks a significant reversal of the humanist conception of human perfectibility inherited from the Enlightenment. Far from working for the social and political emancipation of humans and the human condition, transhumanism is emblematic of a depoliticized conception of human perfectibility focused on the technoscientific adaptation of the human being. Transhumanism thus marks a major rupture with the modern democratic project of autonomy. (shrink)

Sports physicians are continuously confronted with new biotechnological innovations. This applies not only to doping in sports, but to all kinds of so-called enhancement methods. One fundamental problem regarding the sports physician's self-image consists in a blurred distinction between therapeutic treatment and non-therapeutic performance enhancement. After a brief inventory of the sports physician's work environment I reject as insufficient the attempts to resolve the conflict of the sports physician by making it a classificatory problem. Followed by a critical assessment of (...) some ideas from the US President's Council on Bioethics, the formulation of ethical codes and attempts regarding a moral topography, it is argued that the sports physician's conflict cannot be resolved by the distinction between therapy and enhancement. Instead, we also have to consider the possibility that the therapy-based paradigm of medicine cannot do justice to the challenges of the continuously increasing technical manipulability of the human body and even our cognitive functions as well. At the same time we should not adhere to transhumanist ideas, because non-therapeutic interventions require clear criteria. Based on assistive technologies an alternative framework can be sketched that allows for the integration of therapeutic and non-therapeutic purposes. After a thorough definition of standards and criteria, the role of the sports physician might be defined as that of an assistant for enhancement. Yet the process of defining such an alternative framework is a societal and political task that cannot be accomplished by the sports physicians themselves. Until these questions are answered sports physicians continue to find themselves in a structural dilemma that they partially can come to terms with through personal integrity. (shrink)