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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Human enhancement and supra-personal moral status
Philosophical Studies 162 (3):473-497 (2013)
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In the Dune universe, humans relied on computers for thousands of years. Their immense capacity for mathematical calculations made space travel possible, until the Butlerian Jihad ended that era. Humans found the means to cognitively and physically enhance themselves to replace and outmatch intelligent machines by using nootropic drugs, revolutionary training methods, artificial selection, and genetic engineering. There are also moral and social problems that come along with human enhancement technologies. In a society where enhancement is popular, the poor would (...) |
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In the last two decades, there has been a blossoming literature aiming to counter the neglect of plant capacities. In their recent paper, Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Paco Calvo begin by providing an overview of the literature to then question the mistaken assumptions that led to plants being immediately rejected as candidates for sentience. However, it appears that many responses to their arguments are based on the implicit conviction that because animals have far more sophisticated cognition and agency than plants, and (...) |
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A central question in contemporary ethics and political philosophy concerns which entities have moral status. In this article, I provide a detailed analysis of the view that moral status comes in degrees. I argue that degrees of moral status can be specified along two dimensions: (i) the weight of the reason to protect an entity’s morally significant rights and interests; and/or (ii) the rights and interests that are considered morally significant. And I explore some of the complexities that arise when (...) |
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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, (...) |
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Biomedical engineering technologies such as brain–machine interfaces and neuroprosthetics are advancements which assist human beings in varied ways. There are exciting yet speculative visions of how the neurosciences and bioengineering may influence human nature. However, these could be preparing a possible pathway towards an enhanced and even posthuman future. This article seeks to investigate several ethical themes and wider questions of enhancement, transhumanism and posthumanism. Four themes of interest are: autonomy, identity, futures, and community. Three larger questions can be asked: (...) |
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It is widely held that there is an asymmetry between our access to our minds and our access to others’ minds. Philosophers in the literature tend to focus on the asymmetry between our access to our mental states and our access to those mental states of others that are not shared by us. What if a mental state can have multiple subjects? Is there still an asymmetry between our access to our mental states and our access to those mental states (...) |
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The use of the concept of moral status is commonplace today in debates about the moral consideration of entities lacking certain special capacities, such as nonhuman animals. This concept has been typically used to defend the view that adult human beings have a status higher than all those entities. However, even those who disagree with this claim have often accepted the idea of moral status as if it were part of an undisputed received way of thinking in ethics. This paper (...) |
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Many controversies in bioethics turn on questions of moral status. Some moral status issues have received extensive bioethical attention, including those raised by abortion, embryo experimentation, and animal research. Beyond these established debates lie a less familiar set of moral status issues, many of which are tied to recent scientific breakthroughs. This review article surveys some key developments that raise moral status issues, including the development of in vitro brains, part-human animals, “synthetic” embryos, and artificial womb technologies. It introduces the (...) |
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Ratio, Volume 35, Issue 3, Page 181-193, September 2022. |
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Nicholas Agar argues, that enhancement technologies could be used to create post-persons—beings of higher moral status than ordinary persons—and that it would be wrong to create such beings.1 I am sympathetic to the first claim. However, I wish to take issue with the second.Agar's second claim is grounded on the prediction that the creation of post-persons would, with at least moderate probability, harm those who remain mere persons. The harm that Agar has in mind here is a kind of meta-harm: (...) |
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:Many critics of bioenhancement go to considerable lengths to establish the existence of reasons against pursuing bioenhancements but do little to establish the absence of reasons in favor. This suggests that they accept what Allen Buchanan has called the conclusive reasons view. According to this view, our reasons against bioenhancement are obviously decisive, so there is no need to balance them against countervailing reasons. Buchanan criticizes the CRV by showing that the reasons most commonly adduced against bioenhancement are not decisive, (...) |
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Thaddeus Metz’s groundbreaking book A Relational Moral Theory provides a sophisticated moral theory hailing from the Global South. In this book, one of the theses he defends is that biotechnological enhancement is generally morally impermissible. This article, written for a book symposium on A Relational Moral Theory, primarily demonstrates how Metz’s criticisms presented in his book fail to convince. Furthermore, we explore some possible objections from Metzian deontology against enhancement and also show that these do not imply that enhancement is (...) |
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A key feature of Buchanan is emphasis put on the social impact of biomedical enhancement. This social turn enables Buchanan to reframe the question of the desirability of enhancers. The fundamental question is no longer an individual question but a social question: what would be the advantages and the drawbacks of X in our society? The individual question, in Buchanan’s analysis, is second to the social question. Now, if one accepts that an enhancer may have secondary effects, or drawbacks, the (...) |
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This chapter reviews recent philosophical and neuroethical literature on the morality of moral neuroenhancements. It first briefly outlines the main moral arguments that have been made concerning moral status neuroenhancements. These are neurointerventions that would augment the moral status of human persons. It then surveys recent debate regarding moral desirability neuroenhancements: neurointerventions that augment that the moral desirability of human character traits, motives or conduct. This debate has contested, among other claims (i) Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu’s contention that there (...) |
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Advocates of the Respect Model of moral status have expressed skepticism about the possibility that radically enhanced persons will have a higher threshold of moral status over non-radically enhanced persons. While several philosophers have already argued that advocates of the Respect Model of moral status should recognize such a possibility in a world with radically enhanced persons, I make room for a stronger claim: advocates of the Respect Model of moral status should not only recognize the possibility of higher thresholds (...) |
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Should we cognitively alter animals in ways that might change their moral status? There has been some discussion of this question. For example, Chan (2009) and Chan and Harris (2001) consider whether we should radically enhance the cognitive capacities of animals, while Thompson (2008) and Shriver (2009) argue that we should in fact substantially disenhance some animals to protect them from suffering. More controversially, some have countenanced radical and possibly moral status-altering transformations of human persons. ... One question relevant to (...) |
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Most philosophical accounts of human rights accept that all persons have human rights. Typically, ‘personhood’ is understood as unitary and binary. It is unitary because there is generally supposed to be a single threshold property required for personhood. It is binary because it is all-or-nothing: you are either a person or you are not. A difficulty with binary views is that there will typically be subjects, like children and those with dementia, who do not meet the threshold, and so who (...) |
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