Wonderful, Enhanced … Darian Meacham (UWE, Bristol)

ME!

The political economy of the enhancement enterprise

What is Enhancement…

…Everything (is that a problem?)

Four questions for today

!   What is enhancement?

!   What is being enhanced?

!   Should we be concerned about enhancement per se?

!   What particular concerns should we have about the “enhancement enterprise”?

!   Human Nature =

What is “Enhancement”

!   Problem with the term “Enhancement” !   OED Definition: “An increase or improvement in quality, value, or extent.”

!   Just a little value laden!

!   Too coarse!

!   French Philosopher Jérôme Goffette prefers the term “anthropotechnie”: « l'art ou la technique de transformation extra-médicale de l'être humain par intervention sur son corps »

!   Maybe better to think about the “technological transformation of the human being by intervention in or on the body”

!   Intervention that restores an individual or population norm (medical intervention)

!   Intervention that makes us more than normal (enhancement)

!   Blurry line between the two

!   Georges Canguilhem ‘health is being more than normal’

Enhanced auto?

A “capacity” approach

!   We’ll stick with “enhancement”, but enhancement ≠ improvement or making us better overall

!   Interventions in, on or around the body…but where does the body stop.

!   Enhancement ≅ improvement of a specific capacity through an intervention that impacts upon the human body.

!   Enhancement ≅ improvement of a specific capacity through an intervention that impacts upon the human body relations between the human organism and its environment.

Some questions for the capacity approach

!   How to judge whether an alteration of a function is indeed the improvement of a capacity or a diminishment? !   Capacities only exist relative to demands made upon an

organism (the human being) by its environment.

!   It is the environment that determines what capacities we have.

!   Human environments are social as well as natural: the demands of our environment, the capacities the environment requires are our own doing. !   They are also the result of previous enhancements

!   Conflict between environmental demands vis-à-vis capacities and our conception of the good life? Or our understanding of what it is for a human being to flourish?

A few more questions about capacities

!   What is the “subject” of these capacities? Is there an essential “organism” that acquires capacities? !   What could that be since the organism and its constituent parts

are foremost understood in terms of what they do, their capacities.

!   Or is the organism itself simply a bundle of capacities that has as its consequence the development of other capacities. Nature particularizes, therefore, to acquire further capacities.

The trap door: I am an enhancement

!   Capacities approach to the question of enhancement is the right one.

!   But it leads to some surprising conclusions: self-consciousness is a technological enhancement

!   Why technological? !   Self-Consciousness most likely arose in communities of

language using primates

!   It’s a capacity made possible by another capacity/enhancement: language – a kind of technology

!   A capacity that allows us to ask ourselves ‘What am I doing?’

Should we be concerned about “enhancement” generally

speaking?

The harshest criticisms of biomedical enhancements appear to apply to enhancements per se, whether biomedical or not. […] if we accept that view, we would not only have to reject cognitive enhancement drugs, but must also regard literacy, institutions, and the agrarian revolution in a highly unfavourable light as well.

- Allen Buchanan, Beyond Humanity, p. 26

Some particular concerns

“We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

- Dr Michael Anderson (child psychiatrist), Canton, Georgia, USA (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/health/attention-disorder-or-not-children-prescribed-pills-to-help-in-school.html?pagewanted=all)

“modifying the kid” !   The enhancement gap already exists

!   Vaccination (rich vs. poor countries)

!   Language and cognition (within unequal rich countries) !   “By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in

his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school.”

!   Flattening out of capacities !   Liberal approach does not fear this – an enhancement market

!   From “everyone’s enhanced” to “everyone is impaired” !   “Normal” humans cannot cope with socially structured

demands of the environment: “it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment”

Thank You!

More on enhancement

www.darianmeacham.com

On the current research projects page under the philosophy tab

Amateur food blogging

www.filetamericain.wordpress.org