A provocative assessment of human thought and behavior, reissued with a new afterword, explores a range of conundrums from the ability of the mind to perceive three dimensions to the nature of consciousness, in an account that draws on ...

Cognitive enhancement takes many and diverse forms. Various methods of cognitive enhancement have implications for the near future. At the same time, these technologies raise a range of ethical issues. For example, they interact with notions of authenticity, the good life, and the role of medicine in our lives. Present and anticipated methods for cognitive enhancement also create challenges for public policy and regulation.

A provocative work by medical ethicist James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg argues that technologies pushing the boundaries of humanness can radically improve our quality of life if they are controlled democratically. Hughes challenges both the technophobia of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama and the unchecked enthusiasm of others for limitless human enhancement. He argues instead for a third way, "democratic transhumanism," by asking the question destined to become a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century: How can we use new cybernetic and (...) biomedical technologies to make life better for everyone? These technologies hold great promise, but they also pose profound challenges to our health, our culture, and our liberal democratic political system. By allowing humans to become more than human - "posthuman" or "transhuman" - the new technologies will require new answers for the enduring issues of liberty and the common good. What limits should we place on the freedom of people to control their own bodies? Who should own genes and other living things? Which technologies should be mandatory, which voluntary, and which forbidden? For answers to these challenges, Citizen Cyborg proposes a radical return to a faith in the resilience of our democratic institutions. (shrink)

Unfit for the Future argues that the future of our species depends on radical enhancement of the moral aspects of our nature. Population growth and technological advances are threatening to undermine the conditions of worthwhile life on earth forever. We need to modify the biological bases of human motivation to deal with this challenge.

The possibility of enhancing human abilities often raises public concern about equality and social impact. This chapter aims at one particular group of technologies, cognitive enhancement, and one particular fear, that enhancement will create social divisions and possibly expanding inequalities. The chapter argues that cognitive enhancements could offer significant social and economic benefits. The basic forms of internal cognitive enhancement technologies foreseen today are pharmacological modifications, genetic interventions, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and neural implants. Cognitive enhancements can influence the economy through (...) reduction of losses, individual economic benefits, and society‐wide benefits. The strongest objection to the introduction of any enhancement technology is that it will create inequality, injustice, and unfairness. While there are clear economic and social benefits to cognitive enhancement, there exist anumber of obstacles to its development and use. One obstacle is the present system for licensing drugs and medical treatments. (shrink)

What's wrong with designer children, bionic athletes, and genetic engineering.

In Beyond Humanity a leading philosopher offers a powerful and controversial exploration of urgent ethical issues concerning human enhancement.

The notion of Responsible Research and Innovation has increasingly attracted attention in the academic literature. Up until now, however, the literature has focused on clarifying the principles for which research and innovation are responsible and on examining the conditions that account for managing them responsibly. Little attention has been reserved to exploring the political-economic context in which the notion of RRI has become progressively more prominent. This article tries to address this aspect and suggests some preliminary considerations on the connections (...) between the specific understanding of responsibility in RRI and the framing of responsibility in what has been synthetically defined as ‘neoliberalism’. To do so, we try to illustrate how the idea of responsibility has evolved over time so that the specific characteristics of RRI can be better highlighted. These characteristics will then be discussed against the features of neoliberalism and its understanding of responsibility. Eventually, we reaffirm a view of RRI centred on fundamental rights as a possible point of departure between these two perspectives on responsibility. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel view of the concept of cognitive enhancement by taking a population health perspective. We propose four main modifiable healthy lifestyle factors for optimal cognitive functioning across the population for which there is evidence of safety and efficacy. These include i) promoting adequate sleep, ii) increasing physical activity, iii) encouraging a healthy diet, including minimising consumption of stimulants, alcohol and other drugs including nicotine, iv) and promoting good mental health. We argue that it is not ethical (...) to promote or sanction the use of pharmaceutical drugs as putative cognitive enhancers without acknowledging the adverse effects on population cognitive health of failing to encourage the pursuit of healthy behaviours. We conclude with recommendations to increase the public health relevance of bioethical analyses of the cognitive enhancement debate. (shrink)

The article explores some of the issues that have arisen in the discourse on pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement (PCE), that is, the use of stimulant drugs such as methylphenidate, amphetamine and modafinil by healthy individuals of various populations with the aim of improving cognitive performance. Specifically, we explore the presumed sizes of existing PCE user populations and the policy actions that have been proposed regarding the trend of PCE. We begin with an introductory examination of the academic stances and philosophical issues (...) involved in defining PCE. We then focus on an examination of the population sizes of presumed current PCE users that have been listed in the academic literature on PCE, on presuppositions, which have been problematized by some authors as based on anecdotal or misinterpreted survey data. We follow this with an empirical examination of a potential PCE user population in a national context (students at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia). We then proceed to examine the regulatory options proposed in the academic literature to address PCE, finally comparing them with an empirical overview of the policy recommendations on PCE produced in the multinational context of several national ethics advisory bodies (EABs) in Europe. Our main conclusion is that there is still little debate among the national EABs on what type of public policy responses, if any, are needed to address PCE in European countries, and that the issues they do address are similar to those discussed and proposed in the academic articles on PCE. (shrink)

Developing directly from Fuller's recent book Humanity 2.0, this is the first book to seriously consider what a 'post-' or 'trans'-' human state of being might mean for who we think we are, how we live, what we believe and what we aim to be.

Philosophy for Humanity 2.0 -- Political economy for Humanity 2.0 -- Anthropology for Humanity 2.0 -- Ethics for Humanity 2.0 -- Epilogue: General education for Humanity 2.0: a focus on the brain.