Teaching and Learning Guide for: the Ethics of Human Enhancement

The notion of ‘human enhancement’ refers to the use of technologies, biotechnologies and medicine to improve humans’ capacities – in a way that increases the enhanced individual’s wellbeing – even when there is no pathology to be treated. For example, giving ‘smart drugs’ to people who do not have any cognitive impairment might improve their cognitive performances within or even above normal levels. Human enhancement is more controversial when practiced at the genetic level, e.g. pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and selection of embryos, or insertion or deletion of gene sequences. Often the term ‘human enhancement’ is associated with the idea of super-humans, or ‘post-humans’, but whether enhancement will lead to the creation of a new breed of humans depends on how enhancing technologies will be used and distributed. Many people think that enhancement will create justice issues and/or exacerbate current ones, adding a biological or genetic aspect to social and economic inequalities. But there are other types of objections to enhancement, such as critiques of the attempt to ‘play God’with human nature or the risk of reviving (old) eugenic practices. Enhancement advocates typically base their arguments on liberal values, but also stress that enhancement could be used to promote equality among human beings – in other words, the problem is not enhancement per se, but how enhancements will be distributed. The current debate raises important philosophical issues such as the normative value of our idea of ‘human nature’, the meaning and value of equality among humans and, more generally, whether we should put limits on human striving to better ourselves.