Clipping the Angel's Wings: Why the Medicalization of Love May Still Be Worrying

publication-status: Acceptedtypes: ArticleN/

Humanism and the Mediated Self: On Tamar Sharon's Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology

publication-status: Acceptedtypes: ArticleN/

Automatic Sweethearts for Transhumanists

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from MIT Press via the link in this record.In this chapter I will primarily address three questions. First, if we assume, as several futurists profess to believe (Kurzweil 1999, 142-148; Levy 2008, 22; Pew Research Center 2014, 19), that within a few decades we will be able to build robots that do all the things that we would normally expect a real human lover and sexual companion to do, and that do them just as well, will they then also be, as lovers and companions, as satisfying as a real person would - or will we have reason to think or feel that something is amiss, that they are, in some way, not as good? To answer this question, I shall assume that those robots will not be real persons, by which I mean that although they may give the impression of being a person, they are in fact not persons. A person, as I am using the term here, is a being that is both self-aware and self-concerned. A being is self-aware if there is (to use Nagel’s felicitous phrase) something it is like to be that being, and it is selfconcerned if it matters to it what happens in the world, and especially what happens to it. A real person is a being that does not merely appear to be self-aware and self-concerned, by showing the kind of behaviour that we have learned to expect from a self-aware and self-concerned being, but one that really is self-aware and self-concerned. A being that only behaves as if it were a person, without being one, I shall call a pseudo-person. [...

Diagonal convergences: genetic testing, governance, and globalisation

Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Knowing New Biotechnologies: Social Aspects of Technological Convergence, March 2015, available online: http://www.tandfebooks.com/isbn/9781315776781The actual and sometimes quite unexpected uses to which individuals put new technologies can undermine social norms. Governments therefore often try to control access to new technologies. Beyond that, the notion of Converging Technologies (CT) stands for government programmes that not only monitor and regulate a new technology but plan and steer the convergence of emerging technologies and their future potential uses. In the early 2000s the U.S. and Europe set up government programmes to induce and configure the convergence of the nano-, bio-, information- and cognitive sciences (NIBC) into technologies that will alter humanity’s ways of being. CT is a form of meta-level governance that aims to control not only individual technological developments but also the ways in which scientific and technical innovations might intersect and cause social and economic change. This paper treats CT as an especially ambitious and precarious instance of governance because it aims to predetermine future science, future technologies, their intersections and resulting societal changes. Drawing on examples of a convergence that is well underway, I aim to demonstrate some of the problems of such prospective policy-making and argue that it draws on an understanding of the power and means of national governments that is already technologically overcome. National or local CT policies represent what Foucault called governmentality, an overreliance on manageability, regarding the formation of new platforms for decision-making that is happening alongside and irrespective of such government programmes. This situation demands new ways of policy-making of certain social values are to be protected

Can harmonized regulation overcome intra-European differences? Insights from a European Phase III stem cell trial

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Future Medicine via the DOI in this record.Harmonized regulation of research with human stem cells in Europe has shaped innovation in regenerative medicine. Findings from a Phase III academic clinical trial of an autologous cell procedure illustrate the obstacles a multinational trial faces. A typology of the obstacles encountered, may help other teams embarking upon trials. The findings throw light on the situation of clinician-scientists in clinical innovation, as the expertise to run scientific trials is very complex. The innovation route of clinical translation takes insufficient account of the interdependencies between multiple social and cultural factors from outside the laboratory and the clinic. For ethical reasons, however, academic and business routes to stem cell treatments ought to be enabled by the regulators. Suggestions arise: how academics can prepare for trials, that academic research needs better institutional support, and that new models of medical innovation may need to be developed for regenerative medicine.This research was funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme, HEALTH, Grant agreement number 278967

A Cure for Humanity: the Transhumanisation of Culture

This paper examines the increasing integration of the radical human enhancement project into the cultural mainstream. The tacit identification of enhancement with therapy is no longer contested, but widely accepted. Transhumanism leads the way by pointing out the deficiencies of our nature and presenting radical human enhancement as the urgently needed cure. The paper traces this particular self-conception, which I call the enhancement-therapy identity thesis, and how it is reflected in our culture. I look at what I consider the two main arguments in support of the identity thesis, namely the moral argument, which was made by John Harris, and the biological argument, which was made by Allen Buchanan. According to the moral argument there is no relevant moral distinction between repairing a dysfunction and enhancing a function, so that if the former is a duty, then the latter is too. According to the biological argument we have been so poorly constructed by nature that we can only survive by radically enhancing ourselves. The analysis of these two arguments is followed by examples of public discourse that rely on or otherwise make use of the enhancement-therapy identity thesis. The chosen examples cover the four main areas of human enhancement: emotional enhancement, cognitive enhancement, moral enhancement, and life extension. In each of these cases I identify a diagnosis relating to the supposedly intrinsically pathological human condition and a proposed cure that consists in the successful execution of some form of capacity enhancement. I conclude with a brief reflection on the change in our normative attitude that the endorsement of the enhancement-therapy identity thesis induces

Human Enhancement and the Giftedness of Life

types: ArticleMichael Sandel's opposition to the project of human enhancement is based on an argument that centres on the notion of giftedness. Sandel claims that by trying to 'make better people' we fall prey to, and encourage, an attitude of mastery and thus lose, or diminish, our appreciation of the giftedness of life. Sandel's position and the underlying argument have been much criticised. In this paper I will try to make sense of Sandel's reasoning and give an account of giftedness that defends its relevance for the ethical assessment of the human enhancement project. In order to do so, I will also look at virtue-related notions, such as gratitude and humility, and distinguish the gifted from the merely given. The failure to acknowledge this distinction gives rise to one of the most common objections to Sandel's argument. Other objections will be shown to rest on similar misunderstandings

No Philosophy for Swine: John Stuart Mill on the Quality of Pleasures

types: ArticleI argue that Mill introduced the distinction between quality and quantity of pleasures in order to fend off the then common charge that Utilitarianism is “a philosophy for swine” and to accommodate the (still) widespread intuition that the life of a human is better, in the sense of being intrinsically more valuable, than the life of an animal. I argue that in this he fails because in order to do successfully he would have to show not only that the life of a human is preferable to that of an animal on hedonistic grounds, but also that it is in some sense nobler or more dignified to be a human, which he cannot do without tacitly presupposing non-hedonistic standards of what it means to lead a good life

My Brain, my Mind, and I: Some Philosophical Assumptions of Mind-Uploading

publication-status: Publishedtypes: Articl