Inquiring into Human Enhancement

Abstract

This book proposes a critical inquiry into concept of human enhancement, a term that has become so popular that it hardly seems to need clarification. And yet this is precisely issue we raise in this book: definition, scope and limits of human enhancement are as vague as term is salient. A number of books explicitly devoted to human enhancement have already been published mainly by philosophers.1 Most of these books deal with ethical and political aspects of human enhancement, such as: Is it good and desirable or bad and dangerous? What moral criteria can help us shape our judgements? Less attention, however, is devoted to questions about what exactly is being studied and how it should be approached. What is human enhancement all about? What does the improvement of human abilities mean? Is it relevant to distinguish current practices meant to restore health, compensate disabilities or improve appearance from enhancement practices? What practices today could be labelled as effective or potential forms of human enhancement? Are they comparable to human enhancement practices envisioned by global projects or utopias such as transhumanism? In contrast with recent literature, distinctive characteristic of present inquiry is to bring together scholars from varied disciplinary backgrounds in an attempt to clarify concept of enhancement in multiple contexts within which it is currently used.