Relation to oneself· Body and lifedifficulty
Enhancing human nature
Should we use technology to enhance human nature beyond healing?
Healing repairs what falters, but should we go further, and make ourselves stronger, smarter, all but immortal? To refuse is perhaps to accept limits and sufferings we could lift; to accept is to risk dissolving what makes us human and opening a gulf between enhanced human beings and ordinary ones. To take a position is to say what, in us, must remain untouchable.
Transhumanism
1Human nature is not sacred: it is a transitional state that we have the right, and perhaps the duty, to improve. Through biotechnology, we could expand our physical and cognitive capacities, push back aging and death, and reduce suffering.
Explore this position →Transhumanismexplicit
Where bioconservatism sees in human nature a limit to be respected, transhumanism treats the body and mind we are given as a contingent starting point, shaped by blind evolution. Nothing sanctifies this inheritance: to forbid medicine, genetics or cognitive enhancement from extending our capacities in the name of "nature" would be a superstition. Enhancement is merely the deliberate continuation of what culture and technology have always done.
More, 'Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy' · Bostrom, 'In Defense of Posthuman Dignity'
Bioconservatism
0Technologically altering human nature is a dangerous transgression: it threatens personal dignity, equality between generations, and our relation to what is given. Fragility and finitude are not flaws to be fixed, but conditions of a meaningful human life.
Explore this position →No figure stands here, in this slice.
See the problem map in the Atlas →
Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- PrescriptiveExistentialDefeating death?
What if death were no longer a fate but a disease to cure: should we push back our limits endlessly through technology, or is there a wisdom in consenting to our mortal condition?
the mortal conditionDeath - PrescriptiveVitalDoing away with suffering
Should we aim at the abolition of all suffering, whether by the spiritual cessation of the desire that breeds it or by an engineering that would erase it from our bodies? Would a life with no pain at all still be human, still desirable?
sentient existenceThe meaning of suffering - PrescriptiveMoralRepairing or enhancing the human
When technology no longer transforms the world but its author, healing shades into enhancing: that threshold is a question in its own right.
the human bodyRelation to technology