Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): David Lawrence
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
This article asks whether enhancement can truly lead to something beyond humanity, or whether it is, itself, an inherently human act. The ‘posthuman’ is an uncertain proposition. What, exactly, would one be? Many commentators suggest it to be an endpoint for the use of enhancement technologies, yet few choose to codify the term outright; which frequently leads to unnecessary confusion. Characterizing and contextualizing the term, particularly its more novel uses, is therefore a valuable enterprise. The abuse of the term ‘Human’, especially in the context of the enhancement debate and the myriad meanings ascribed to it, could give ‘posthuman’ very different slants depending on one's assumptions. There are perhaps three main senses in which the term ‘human’ is employed: the biological, the moral, and the self-idealizing. In the first of these, ‘human’ is often conflated with Homo sapiens, and used interchangeably to denote species; in the second, ‘human’ (or ‘humanity’) generally refers to a community of beings which qualify as having a certain moral value; and the third, the self-idealizing sense, is more descriptive; a label denoting the qualities that make us who we are as beings, or ‘what matters about those who matter’. So, what might enhancement make us? A novel species or genus of hominid? Or, perhaps, a morally more valuable being than a regular human? Of course, there's a third option: that a posthuman is a being which embodies our self-ideal more successfully than we do ourselves – one ‘more human than human’. Which to choose?
Author(s): Lawrence DR
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Bioethics
Year: 2017
Volume: 31
Issue: 3
Pages: 171-179
Print publication date: 01/03/2017
Online publication date: 23/12/2016
Acceptance date: 06/09/2016
Date deposited: 19/01/2017
ISSN (print): 0269-9702
ISSN (electronic): 1467-8519
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12318
DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12318
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
