Enhancement: A Short Comment

There is a long tradition that the point of morality is to respond to certain features of the human condition: limitations in resources, limitations in knowledge, limitations in sympathies and limitations in wisdom (Warnock 1971). Addressing the first of these is subject to external conditions, but the associated problems can be ameliorated by the application of principles of fair resource allocation. Other moral principles help us to overcome limitations in sympathies, by drawing our attention to the nature, needs and interests of other human beings. Limitations in sympathies, knowledge and wisdom, however, are internal to humans — so might not human enhancement be a good thing? Immanuel Kant, for one, argued that humanity is something we should try to perfect, by developing our own talents and furthering the ends of others. It is far from clear, however, that a Kantian argument would endorse cognitive, moral or even physical enhancement. I want to draw a distinction between the concepts of human “enhancement” and “advancement”, by which I mean the furtherance of the flourishing of human beings, given the nature of the human condition. Enhancement is, I suggest, a less helpful concept.

Even in the case of physical enhancement, the concept is extremely difficult to pin down. The London Olympics and Paralympics afforded considerable material for thinking about the concept of enhancement and its use. Both athletes with disabilities (whether using enhancement technologies, as in the case of Oscar Pistorius, or not), and those without disabilities, surpassed by a long way the abilities of most people, and indeed the UK television trailers for the Paralympics introduced the competitors as “superhumans”. This one example makes it clear some of the complexities in teasing out the concept of enhancement and its ethical aspects. In Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, which I co-edited with Bert Gordijn (Chadwick), I discussed a number of interpretations of the concept of “enhancement”. I now wonder if the concept is more unhelpful than not in addressing some contemporary issues, for it is not always clear that people are talking about the same thing. It may be more useful simply to talk about specific changes or interventions.

In some socio-political contexts, where there are urgent issues of poverty and limited life expectancy, to focus bioethical discussion on the ethics of human enhancement may appear to be beside the point and a luxury that cannot be afforded. Of course, there may be an analogy here with discussions on income distribution — it might be argued that just as attempted justifications are made for large differentials in income on the basis of a trickle-down effect, so also putting efforts into human enhancement may lead to technological developments which will be potentially useful to all in the long run. The first of these claims is, however, notoriously open to criticism. Science and Technology Studies have drawn attention to the ways in which the trajectories that emerging technologies take are difficult if not impossible to predict. They may lead to developments that are helpful in ways which was not foreseen by their inventors.

It seems, however, that we need to distinguish between the concept of enhancement as such, and specific interventions that could count as enhancements. The Wellcome Trust exhibition “Superhuman: Exploring Human Enhancement from 600BCE to 2050”, employed a wide definition of enhancement.

… we are already living enhanced lives, and have been for a long time. Some devices are so familiar that we barely think of them as enhancements at all, such as spectacles or hearing aids

(Wellcome Collection 2012: 8).

This quotation makes it clear that the exhibition did not use a definition of enhancement as going “beyond therapy” (which is one definition that has enjoyed a certain amount of popularity) — for these examples are remedies for people whose sight or hearing are failing in some way. And indeed the “beyond therapy” view is difficult to defend, as where therapy ends and enhancement begins is a contested boundary. As the exhibition showed, some proposed modifications (“enhancements”) to human anatomy were not successful and were rejected by their “users” — notably prosthetic limbs for children born in the UK, as a result the thalidomide...