04.02.07
Prolegomena to any defence of human enhancement
Russel Blackford: Prolegomena to any defence of human enhancement
(»Any full-scale defence of human enhancement technologies first needs to clear away a lot of misunderstandings. Here’s an attempt to do so.
INTRODUCTION
As a species, we have reached a point in our history where we’ve developed sophisticated, and increasingly powerful, forms of technological intervention in the functioning of our own bodies. Existing possibilities include not only the array of modern techniques for combating disability and disease, but also cosmetic surgery, performance-enhancing or consciousness-altering drugs, the contraceptive pill, and genetically-based methods for the sex selection of children. That list is obviously not exhaustive, and nor does it represent an end point of human inventiveness: for example, there is the much-discussed prospect that we might develop radical new reproductive technologies, such as the asexual creation of embryos through somatic cell nuclear transfer (i.e. reproductive cloning). [...]«)