Enhancement and Identity

Abstract

Advances in human enhancement technologies raise the prospect that people's identities may be altered so radically by enhancement that they will be essentially a different person after enhancement. To illustrate, some scholars of enhancement claim that individuals are unlikely to “survive” enhancement, in the sense that they continue to exist as one and the same person. Yet, others claim that enhancement is dehumanizing. Common to these claims is the assumption that enhancement affects a discontinuity between an individual's pre- and post-enhancement selves. Although extant analyses of the relationship between enhancement and identity have yielded many useful insights into the possible effects of human enhancement technologies on identity, progress in our understanding is marred by conceptual imprecision, the use of excessively thin conceptions of identity, and the conflation of distinct senses of identity. With respect to the latter, the conflation of numerical and narrative identity is particularly problematic. However, although these senses of identity are distinct, the fact that they are conflated is nevertheless informative about how people untutored in the metaphysics of identity—that is, the vast majority of people—reason about the effects of enhancement on identity. In this chapter, the authors draw on psychological research into self-continuity and dehumanization, respectively, to offer insights into why numerical and narrative identity are conflated, and they argue that future analyses of the relationship between enhancement and identity must be more deeply grounded in psychological and neuroscientific research than has been evidenced to date.