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Building Better Brains? Anthropology, Ethics, and the Posthuman Future

Bioethics & the Body
Plenary Address
June 26, 2021

Audio Recording

Video Recording

There are those who claim that we must morally bioenhance the human due to existential threats (e.g., climate change and the looming possibility of cognitive enhancement) and a failure in the moral will. Technology is evolving at a rate faster than human evolution, and thus we must design human morality into human beings technologically. By moral bioenhancement, they mean that we must intervene technologically in the biology of the human animal in order to get it to behave morally to reverse these existential threats. I will bring the idea of moral bioenhancement into conversation with several philosophers of technology. Bernard Stiegler has argued that technology and culture, and thus technology and human beings, have always coevolved hand in hand. Peter-Paul Verbeek notes that we have always designed morality into technology, and thus he sees technology as mediating human morality, avoiding the pitfalls of humanism. By offloading human intentionality onto technology, Verbeek argues, technological objects and systems participate in shaping the moral subjectivity of the human actor. I will show that modern technological bioenhancement obliterates human being. Whereas in the past, human culture was handed from generation to generation through the mediation of technology, in the modern era, the human becomes the raw material upon which a technological will (imperative) rides.

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