Limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment?

BACKGROUND: New technologies facilitate the enhancement of a wide range of human dispositions, capacities, or abilities. While it is argued that we need to set limits to human enhancement, it is unclear where we should find resources to set such limits. DISCUSSION: Traditional routes for setting lim...

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Autor principal: Hofmann, Bjørn
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5635529/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29017486
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12910-017-0215-8
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author Hofmann, Bjørn
author_facet Hofmann, Bjørn
author_sort Hofmann, Bjørn
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description BACKGROUND: New technologies facilitate the enhancement of a wide range of human dispositions, capacities, or abilities. While it is argued that we need to set limits to human enhancement, it is unclear where we should find resources to set such limits. DISCUSSION: Traditional routes for setting limits, such as referring to nature, the therapy-enhancement distinction, and the health-disease distinction, turn out to have some shortcomings. However, upon closer scrutiny the concept of enhancement is based on vague conceptions of what is to be enhanced. Explaining why it is better to become older, stronger, and more intelligent presupposes a clear conception of goodness, which is seldom provided. In particular, the qualitative better is frequently confused with the quantitative more. We may therefore not need “external” measures for setting its limits – they are available in the concept of enhancement itself. SUMMARY: While there may be shortcomings in traditional sources of limit setting to human enhancement, such as nature, therapy, and disease, such approaches may not be necessary. The specification-of-betterment problem inherent in the conception of human enhancement itself provides means to restrict its unwarranted proliferation. We only need to demand clear, sustainable, obtainable goals for enhancement that are based on evidence, and not on lofty speculations, hypes, analogies, or weak associations. Human enhancements that specify what will become better, and provide adequate evidence, are good and should be pursued. Others should not be accepted.
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spelling pubmed-56355292017-10-18 Limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment? Hofmann, Bjørn BMC Med Ethics Debate BACKGROUND: New technologies facilitate the enhancement of a wide range of human dispositions, capacities, or abilities. While it is argued that we need to set limits to human enhancement, it is unclear where we should find resources to set such limits. DISCUSSION: Traditional routes for setting limits, such as referring to nature, the therapy-enhancement distinction, and the health-disease distinction, turn out to have some shortcomings. However, upon closer scrutiny the concept of enhancement is based on vague conceptions of what is to be enhanced. Explaining why it is better to become older, stronger, and more intelligent presupposes a clear conception of goodness, which is seldom provided. In particular, the qualitative better is frequently confused with the quantitative more. We may therefore not need “external” measures for setting its limits – they are available in the concept of enhancement itself. SUMMARY: While there may be shortcomings in traditional sources of limit setting to human enhancement, such as nature, therapy, and disease, such approaches may not be necessary. The specification-of-betterment problem inherent in the conception of human enhancement itself provides means to restrict its unwarranted proliferation. We only need to demand clear, sustainable, obtainable goals for enhancement that are based on evidence, and not on lofty speculations, hypes, analogies, or weak associations. Human enhancements that specify what will become better, and provide adequate evidence, are good and should be pursued. Others should not be accepted. BioMed Central 2017-10-10 /pmc/articles/PMC5635529/ /pubmed/29017486 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12910-017-0215-8 Text en © The Author(s). 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Debate
Hofmann, Bjørn
Limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment?
title Limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment?
title_full Limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment?
title_fullStr Limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment?
title_full_unstemmed Limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment?
title_short Limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment?
title_sort limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment?
topic Debate
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5635529/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29017486
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12910-017-0215-8
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