Philosophy Research Seminar - Emma Gordon

Emma Gordon (University of Edinburgh)

Well-Being and Enhancement

New and emerging developments in medicine and technology promise to offer us new ways to not only restore failing health, but—more controversially—to take us well beyond ordinary levels of human functioning in order to gain various kinds of advantages. According to some bioethicists (e.g., Savulescu (2001); Savulescu and Persson (2008)), such human enhancements are desirable to pursue, in particular, because enhancing, e.g., our cognitive, moral and emotional capacities straightforwardly promotes these dimensions of well-being. By contrast, bioconservatives (e.g., Harris (2011), Kass (2004), Sandel (2009)) maintain that by enhancing ourselves, we are actually making ourselves worse off in some important ways, and to the extent that enhancement is all-things-considered a hindrance to, rather than a promoter of, well-being. In this talk, I canvass several prominent bioconservative arguments and show them to come up short.