People have always shared information through chains and networks of testimony. It’s arguably part of what makes us human and enables us to live in cooperative communities with populations greater than the Dunbar number. The invention of the Internet and the rise of social media have turbo-charged our ability to share information. In this chapter, we develop a normative framework for sharing information online. This framework takes into account both ethical and epistemic considerations that are intertwined in typical cases of (...) online testimony. We argue that, while the current state of affairs is not entirely novel, recent technological developments call for a rethinking of the norms of testimony, as well as the articulation of a set of virtuous dispositions that people would do well to cultivate in the capacity as conduits (not just sources or receivers) of information. (shrink)

Transhumanism at once embodies our most modern thinking and our biggest longstanding problems. Transhumanism aims to enhance human core capacities: health-span, lifespan, and cognition. The thesis answers the following ethical challenges arising from transhumanist aims. First, whether transhumanism can be an ethical endeavour if it relies on authoritarian intervention by governments and governing bodies to change, generate and enforce behaviour, or to influence and enforce the uptake of medical procedures. Second, the thesis answers the challenge that it is unethical deliberately (...) to encourage the uptake of and pursuit of medical transhumanism given the extent of accessibility and distributive issues that remain unresolved in existing medicine. Finally, the thesis addresses a particular mental health crisis that is often predicted for transhuman beings, namely loss of meaning from loss of death and vulnerability, resulting in widespread loss of social cohesion. The thesis argues that the right solution to the first two problems is a libertarian paternalist approach, viz. nudging, and that this approach will also neutralise the risk of widespread and inevitable boredom or alienation that might otherwise result from the widespread introduction of human enhancement if people are nudged to engage more and more reflectively in their enhancement choices. Additionally, lifestyle issues like obesity, heart disease, cancers, and inaccessibility of vaccines and birth control pose unresolved problems for existing general medicine, killing millions every year worldwide. As a result, another serious challenge for enhancement medicine, which I propose would be addressed by the nudge approach, is to justify its place in the professional domain of medicine. (shrink)