Format:
1 Online-Ressource (25 p)
Content:
New biotechnologies promise to revolutionize human existence — not only by delivering therapeutic treatments and cures, but also by offering physical and mental “enhancements”: creating stronger bodies and more powerful minds for ourselves and for the children we will carefully select. Biotechnology will offer us the option of controlling our genetic composition in ways that were previously unimaginable, as we — in British bioethicist John Harris's formulation — replace “natural selection with deliberate selection, Darwinian evolution with ‘enhancement evolution.'”Those bioethicists who, like Harris, express great enthusiasm for our “post-human future” often dismiss the reservations of critics concerned about biotech enhancement — calling those reservations arbitrary, or irrational religious superstitions, or, as Dartmouth professor Ronald M. Green has put it, mere “status quo bias.” But as the President's Council on Bioethics showed in its 2003 report Beyond Therapy, it is in fact possible to make a reasoned case against certain enhancement technologies.In this essay, we attempt to formulate a natural law theory for appraising possible biotechnological enhancements. We begin with a twofold account of the nature of the human person. The first part is descriptive: human persons must be shown to be human animals — bodily organisms of the species Homo sapiens. The second part is normative: a reflective critical account of the practical horizons of human wellbeing, an account that grounds an understanding of human benefits, harms, and moral obligations. We then seek to address the questions of enhancement in three steps. First, the means of enhancement must be scrutinized to determine whether they respect the truths — descriptive and normative — about the human person. Second, the ends of enhancements must then be investigated: Do these ends threaten our nature, as descriptively and normatively understood? Finally, more general questions of culture and prudence must be raised: What sort of a people is it desirable for us to be, and how is it desirable for us to become such a people?
Note:
In: The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society, Number 20, Spring 2008, pp. 79-103
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Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments May 1, 2008 erstellt
Language:
English
