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"Hauskeller, Michael"
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Better humans? : understanding the enhancement project
Michael Hauskeller poses some challenging questions about human enhancement, interrogating the logic behind its processes and examining the justifications behind its criteria. The book provides a rigorous approach to the topic which systematically and consistently explores assumptions about human enhancement and its effects.
Book
Do Animals Have a Bad Life?
It has been argued that, due to our commitment to distributive justice and fairness, we have a moral obligation toward animals to enhance, or “uplift,” them to quasihuman status, so that they, too, can enjoy all the intellectual, social, and cultural goods that humans are capable of enjoying. In this article, I look at the underlying assumption that the life of an animal can never be as good as that of a human (can be), not because of any external circumstances that may be changed, but simply because of the restrictions imposed on him by his animal nature. This assumption is only plausible if there are objective goods that animals have no access to. Yet even if there are objective goods, they are best understood as species-relative, so that each kind of animal has its own set of goods, which are determined by its specific nature. It follows that we have no moral obligation to uplift animals on the grounds that their life is necessarily worse than ours.
Journal Article
Better Humans?
Developments in medical science have afforded us the opportunity to improve and enhance the human species in ways unthinkable to previous generations. Whether it's making changes to mitochondrial DNA in a human egg, being prescribed Prozac, or having a facelift, our desire to live longer, feel better and look good has presented philosophers, medical practitioners and policy-makers with considerable ethical challenges. But what exactly constitutes human improvement? What do we mean when we talk of making \"better\" humans? In this book Michael Hauskeller explores these questions and the ideas of human good that underpin them. Posing some challenging questions about the nature of human enhancement, he interrogates the logic behind its processes and examines the justifications behind its criteria. Questioning common assumptions about what constitutes human improvement, Hauskeller asks whether the criteria proposed by its advocates are convincing. The book draws on recent research as well as popular representations of human enhancement from advertising to the internet, and provides a non-technical and accessible survey of the issues for readers and students interested in the ethics and politics of human enhancement.
eBook
When Death Comes Too Late: Radical Life Extension and the Makropulos Case
Famously, Bernard Williams has argued that although death is an evil if it occurs when we still have something to live for, we have no good reason to desire that our lives be radically extended because any such life would at some point reach a stage when we become indifferent to the world and ourselves. This is supposed to be so bad for us that it would be better if we died before that happens. Most critics have rejected Williams’ arguments on the grounds that it is far from certain that we will run out of things to live for, and I don't contest these objections. Instead, I am trying to show that they do not affect the persuasiveness of Williams’ argument, which in my reading does not rely on the claim that we will inevitably run out of things to live for, but on the far less contentious claim that it is not unthinkable we will do so and the largely ignored claim that if that happens, we will have died too late.
Journal Article
Introduction: Death and Meaning
[...]that debate is complex and touches on many different aspects of the human condition. Yet it is claimed that without such a sense of personal value our (individual) lives must lack true meaning, for what gives our lives (true) meaning is ‘the continuation of the process of improvement and transformation of ourselves into ever higher forms’ (More, 1990, p. 10). Since this process is understood as open-ended, it is clear that death, by bringing it to an end, destroys not only the meaning that any individual life can have up to the point of its termination, but the very possibility of meaning. According to this view, it is mortality that makes life matter in the first place. Kass also stresses the importance of the natural life cycle, which must necessarily include a phase of rise, a peak, and a phase of decline if our lives are to have (a humanly understandable) meaning: ‘A flourishing human life is not a life lived with an ageless body or untroubled soul, but rather a life lived in rhythmed time, mindful of time's limits, appreciative of each season and filled first of all with those intimate human relations that are ours only because we are born, age, replace ourselves, decline, and die – and know it’ (Kass, 2003, p. 27).
Journal Article
Is It Desirable to Be Able to Do the Undesirable? Moral Bioenhancement and the Little Alex Problem
It has been argued that moral bioenhancement is desirable even if it would make it impossible for us to do what is morally required. Others find this apparent loss of freedom deplorable. However, it is difficult to see how a world in which there is no moral evil can plausibly be regarded as worse than a world in which people are not only free to do evil, but also where they actually do it, which would commit us to the seemingly paradoxical view that, under certain circumstances, the bad can be better than the good. Notwithstanding, this view is defended here.
Journal Article
Being good enough to prevent the worst
[...]once we have figured all that out, we also need to consider what we would be willing to sacrifice in order to achieve our goals. Because there is always a price to be paid, and we need to be sure that it is really worth paying. Possible concerns range from the metaphysical-will it compromise our autonomy or agency?-to the more mundane. [...]we may well wonder whether by changing people in such a way that they become capable of solving certain problems, we will also make it harder, or even impossible, for them to solve other problems, which at the moment do not appear so pressing, but which may become so in the future.
Journal Article
Reinventing Cockaigne: UTOPIAN THEMES IN TRANSHUMANIST THOUGHT
Transhumanism, defined as the belief that the human species can and should transcend itself \"by realizing new possibilities\" of and for human nature, is supported by a growing number of natural scientists and philosophers who advocate the development and use of new technologies that promise to help us overcome familiar biological limitations and become what we allegedly have always wished to be. A radical transformation of human nature is sought and demanded, in the name of reason, science, and progress, and in the spirit of enlightenment and humanism. These claims are couched, moreover, in an exuberant rhetoric that reveals a conspicuous proximity to utopianism. Understanding the utopian rhetoric is important for assessing the arguments offered on behalf of transhumanism. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article