This paper presents the principal findings from a three-year research project funded by the US National Science Foundation on ethics of human enhancement technologies. To help untangle this ongoing debate, we have organized the discussion as a list of questions and answers, starting with background issues and moving to specific concerns, including: freedom & autonomy, health & safety, fairness & equity, societal disruption, and human dignity. Each question-and-answer pair is largely self-contained, allowing the reader to skip to those issues of (...) interest without affecting continuity. (shrink)

Rosemarie Garland Thomson examines disabled figures in sentimental novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, and the popular cultural ritual of the freak show.

Dans la biomedecine contemporaine, les connaissances technoscientifiques qui sous-tendent les nouvelles therapeutiques aboutissent souvent, presque inevitablement, a des techniques permettant d'envisager l'amelioration de certaines fonctions corporelles ou cognitives de l'individu. La question de la medecine d'amelioration a attire l'attention des philosophes et des bioethiciens. Depuis une dizaine d'annees, aux Etats-Unis d'abord puis en Europe, de nombreux auteurs se sont penches sur le theme des technologies d'amelioration. Si leur interet pour la question est lie aux plus anciennes et plus connues de (...) ces technologies, comme la chirurgie esthetique, les steroides anabolisants, les hormones de croissance, la Rilatine, le Prozac, il l'est davantage encore aux pouvoirs actuels et futurs de ces biotechnologies - recombinaison genetique somatique ou germinale, nouvelles protheses intracorporelles, ingenierie cerebrale - qui laissent entrevoir la possibilite de changer durablement le corps et l'intellect, de transformer l'etre humain. Meme si les applications cliniques de certaines de ces technologies semblent encore incertaines ou eloignees dans le temps, il est important d'etudier des aujourd'hui leurs consequences potentielles sur la medecine, la societe et l'avenir de l'etre humain. C'est ce que propose ce volume d'essais qui analysent de maniere critique la philosophie et l'imaginaire des pratiques et speculations associees a l'amelioration des performances de l'etre humain. (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)