Abstract

If we can enhance ourselves genetically, should we? A plague of recent works in bioethics insist that we should not. Bill McKibben, for example, joins a chorus of theorists who oppose enhancement efforts not because they might harm individuals or undermine social practices, but because they imperil a human nature that is already “good enough,” and threaten to catapult us into a “post-human” world. But what’s wrong, exactly, with being post-human? These positions never answer that question. They fail biologically, sociologically, and ethically, I argue, because just as ethics aims to improve us, bioethics aims properly to direct biotechnologies to enhance human life prospects. To refuse that injunction is to assert that we can, but will not, improve ourselves. It is to undercutany basis for bioethics, and for human progress, moral or material. It is, to re-work Leon Kass’s singularly apt phrase, moral hubris run amok.