Technic Self-Determination

This chapter addresses concerns that the development and proliferation of Human Enhancement Technologies (HET) will be (a) dehumanizing and a threat to human dignity and (b) a threat to our autonomy and sovereignty as individuals. Contrarily, HET can be shown to constitute the most effective foreseeable means of increasing the autonomy and sovereignty of individual members of society. Furthermore, this chapter elaborates the position that the use of HET exemplifies—and indeed even intensifies—our most human capacity and faculty, namely the desire for increased self-determination (i.e., control over the determining circumstances and conditions of our own selves and lives), which is referred to as the will toward self-determination. Based upon this position, arguably, the use of HET bears fundamental ontological continuity with the human condition in general and with the historically ubiquitous will toward self-determination in particular as it is today and has been in the past. HET will not be a dehumanizing force, but will rather serve to increase the very capacity and characteristic that characterizes us as human more accurately than anything else.

Super Soldiers (Part 1)

After World War II, much debate unfolded about the ethical, legal, and social implications of military human enhancement, due in part to Adolf Hitler's war on the “genetically unfit” and the United States military's experimentation with psychedelic drugs such as LSD. Interest in that debate has waxed and waned since the 1940s. However, it would be foolish or perhaps even dangerous to believe that America and its modern allies have abandoned efforts to upgrade service members' bodies and minds to create the “super soldiers” necessary to match the increasing pace of modern warfare and dominate the strengthening militaries of China and North Korea. Slogans such as “be all that you can be and a whole lot more” still reign strong at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and, according to some military futurists, the so-called “War on Terror” has only proven that military superpowers need a new type of soldier that is independent, network-integrated, and more lethal than ever before. Patterns of public risk perception, military expenditure, and new technological developments suggest that it is now time to re-open or reinvigorate the original debate. The authors' contribution comes in two parts. In this chapter, they provide a brief background to military human enhancement before defining it carefully and exploring the relevant controversies. In the second, they more explicitly examine the relevant legal, operational, and moral challenges posed by these efforts.

Human Enhancement Technologies and Democratic Citizenship

This chapter articulates that scholars write about Human Enhancement Technologies (HET) in two ways. This is not a reflection of a reality in the literature but rather a heuristic designed to contextualize democratic citizenship within contemporary HET discussions. The first way is to write about HET as possible realities far off into the future. The second way is to write about HET that can be realised seemingly as soon as tomorrow. For democratic citizenship, writing in the first case is either utopian or dystopian. It is either the projection of democracy's total triumph or its utter collapse caused by the type of rots that lead to democide. But writing in the second case is stimulating and vibrant. There are, for example, numerous calls for HET-led reforms in the literature. These reforms are needed to help answer the crisis of the citizen's august discontent (the growing and increasingly legitimized political apathy and political abstention observed in, and performed by, the citizenry). The purpose of this chapter is to focus on this second case—this more developed body of literature—and to theorise the interface between democratic citizenship and HET.

Super Soldiers (Part 2)

This is the second chapter of two on military human enhancement. In the first chapter, the authors outlined past and present efforts aimed at enhancing the minds and bodies of our warfighters with the broader goal of creating the “super soldiers” of tomorrow, all before exploring a number of distinctions—natural vs. artificial, external vs. internal, enhancement vs. therapy, enhancement vs. disenhancement, and enhancement vs. engineering—that are critical to the definition of military human enhancement and understanding the problems it poses. The chapter then advanced a working definition of enhancement as efforts that aim to “improve performance, appearance, or capability besides what is necessary to achieve, sustain, or restore health.” It then discussed a number of variables that must be taken into consideration when applying this definition in a military context. In this second chapter, drawing on that definition and some of the controversies already mentioned, the authors set out the relevant ethical, legal, and operational challenges posed by military enhancement. They begin by considering some of the implications for international humanitarian law and then shift to US domestic law. Following that, the authors examine military human enhancement from a virtue ethics approach, and finally outline some potential consequences for military operations more generally.

Neurosurgery to Enhance Brain Function

The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the potential for neurosurgical strategies to enhance brain function. These developments are considered in the context of the history of psychosurgery, which has shaped the ethical landscape in which future invasive surgical interventions will be evaluated. Consideration is given to the ethical, moral, legal, and socioeconomic implications posed by existing electrical modulation technologies, including future neurosurgical strategies, such as deep brain stimulation for cognitive or mood enhancement. The potential demand for the non-therapeutic use of these surgical strategies poses economic and legislative problems.

The Ethics of Seeking Body Perfection, with Continual Reference to Heidi Montag

In an increasingly visual society, beauty may seem only skin deep. This chapter considers the ethics of cosmetic surgery through the lens of posthumanism, a stance that suggests that defects of the body can be overcome through technology. Cosmetic surgery, with its reliance on prostheses and promise of reshaping the body, is, at its heart, a posthuman enterprise. Although many have engaged in cosmetic surgery, actress Heidi Montag became an exemplar of reshaping the body by undergoing ten different plastic surgery procedures in one day. Using Montag as foil, this chapter examines four ethical dimensions of cosmetic surgery: the ethics of the medical professionals who perform and advertise these procedures, the ethics of the individual making the decision, the ethics of the media structures that promote a homogenous ideal of beauty, and the ethics of those who tacitly approve of such procedures.

Mapping Human Enhancement Rhetoric

This chapter raises ethical questions about the relationship between HET and the discourse of human enhancement technologies. Specifically, it explores some problems in mapping human enhancement rhetoric. In the first section, human enhancement rhetoric is defined. Questions are raised about the rhetorical act of re-defining “human enhancement” as a problem of self-descriptive narrative and performance measurement. In section two, various approaches and terms for mapping are presented as a way of underscoring the slippery qualities of human enhancement as a dynamic, expanding discourse. Section three explains the changing ethical positions for enhancement technology users through the concepts of “over claim,” “reacting to technology,” and “ethos.” In section four, boundary changes for HET users are discussed as a complex mapping of shifting concepts, discourse, and communities. In conclusion, the transition from human enhancement to transhuman enhancement is emphasized with suggestions for future research.

Human Enhancing Technologies and Individual Privacy Right

This chapter provides a legal perspective on the application of Human Enhancing Technologies (HET), in particular on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), emphasizing threats they bring to individual privacy. The author discusses the geographical, political, and cultural differences in understanding the individual right to privacy, as granted by human rights treaties and customary international law, and confronts them with the threats brought about by HET. The era of globalized services rendered by transnational companies necessitates an answer to the question on the possible and desired shape of effective individual protection of human rights from the threats brought about by advancing HET. Be it biomedical or geolocalisation data, when fueled through the Big Data resources available online, individual data accompanying the HET becomes a powerful marketing tool and a significant national and international security measure. The chapter aims to identify the privacy threats brought about by the HET and proposes a business-ethics based solution.

Enhancement and Identity

Advances in human enhancement technologies raise the prospect that people's identities may be altered so radically by enhancement that they will be essentially a different person after enhancement. To illustrate, some scholars of enhancement claim that individuals are unlikely to “survive” enhancement, in the sense that they continue to exist as one and the same person. Yet, others claim that enhancement is dehumanizing. Common to these claims is the assumption that enhancement affects a discontinuity between an individual's pre- and post-enhancement selves. Although extant analyses of the relationship between enhancement and identity have yielded many useful insights into the possible effects of human enhancement technologies on identity, progress in our understanding is marred by conceptual imprecision, the use of excessively thin conceptions of identity, and the conflation of distinct senses of identity. With respect to the latter, the conflation of numerical and narrative identity is particularly problematic. However, although these senses of identity are distinct, the fact that they are conflated is nevertheless informative about how people untutored in the metaphysics of identity—that is, the vast majority of people—reason about the effects of enhancement on identity. In this chapter, the authors draw on psychological research into self-continuity and dehumanization, respectively, to offer insights into why numerical and narrative identity are conflated, and they argue that future analyses of the relationship between enhancement and identity must be more deeply grounded in psychological and neuroscientific research than has been evidenced to date.

Technology and the Memetic Self

This chapter provides an overview of current theories in philosophy of mind as they relate to cultural and technological evolution. The focus is to examine the influence of technology on identity formation by introducing the concept of “narrative consciousness,” the process of constructing a memetic self model, or “selfplex.” The human capacity to construct a “selfplex” evolved from an imitation-based system of memetic replication, enabled by and coevolved with technology over the last 50,000 years. The chapter examines the following four points: (1) an introduction of the idea of “narrative consciousness”; (2) a reframing of technology as “tools that enable imitation and sharing,” thereby facilitating the development of memes and the selfplex; (3) societal implications of narrative consciousness; and (4) the cultural influence of Human Enhancement Technologies (HET) on the selfplex and practical considerations for practitioners.