Virtue Ethics and Human Enhancement

Virtue Ethics and Human Enhancement
Author: Barbro Fröding
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2012-10-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400756712

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This book shows how pressing issues in bioethics – e.g. the ownership of biological material and human cognitive enhancement – successfully can be discussed with in a virtue ethics framework. This is not intended as a complete or exegetic account of virtue ethics. Rather, the aim here is to discuss how some key ideas in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, when interpreted pragmatically, can be a productive way to approach some hot issues in bioethics. In spite of being a very promising theoretical perspective virtue ethics has so far been underdeveloped both in bioethics and neuroethics and most discussions have been conducted in consequentialist and/or deontological terms. ​

The Ethics of Human Enhancement

The Ethics of Human Enhancement
Author: Steve Clarke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2016
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 019875485X

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An international team of ethicists refresh the debate about human enhancement by examining whether resistance to the use of technology to enhance our mental and physical capabilities can be supported by articulated philosophical reasoning, or explained away, e.g. in terms of psychological influences on moral reasoning.

Religion and Human Enhancement

Religion and Human Enhancement
Author: Tracy J. Trothen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2017-09-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319624881

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This collection vigorously addresses the religious implications of extreme human enhancement technology. Topics covered include cutting edge themes, such as moral enhancement, common ground to both transhumanism and religion, the meaning of death, desire and transcendence, and virtue ethics. Radical enhancement programs, advocated by transhumanists, could arguably have a more profound impact than any other development in human history. Reflecting a range of opinion about the desirability of extreme enhancement, leading scholars in the field join with emerging scholars to foster enhanced conversation on these topics.

Technology and the Virtues

Technology and the Virtues
Author: Shannon Vallor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2016-08-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190498536

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The 21st century offers a dizzying array of new technological developments: robots smart enough to take white collar jobs, social media tools that manage our most important relationships, ordinary objects that track, record, analyze and share every detail of our daily lives, and biomedical techniques with the potential to transform and enhance human minds and bodies to an unprecedented degree. Emerging technologies are reshaping our habits, practices, institutions, cultures and environments in increasingly rapid, complex and unpredictable ways that create profound risks and opportunities for human flourishing on a global scale. How can our future be protected in such challenging and uncertain conditions? How can we possibly improve the chances that the human family will not only live, but live well, into the 21st century and beyond? This book locates a key to that future in the distant past: specifically, in the philosophical traditions of virtue ethics developed by classical thinkers from Aristotle and Confucius to the Buddha. Each developed a way of seeking the good life that equips human beings with the moral and intellectual character to flourish even in the most unpredictable, complex and unstable situations--precisely where we find ourselves today. Through an examination of the many risks and opportunities presented by rapidly changing technosocial conditions, Vallor makes the case that if we are to have any real hope of securing a future worth wanting, then we will need more than just better technologies. We will also need better humans. Technology and the Virtues develops a practical framework for seeking that goal by means of the deliberate cultivation of technomoral virtues: specific skills and strengths of character, adapted to the unique challenges of 21st century life, that offer the human family our best chance of learning to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

How to be Good

How to be Good
Author: John Harris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2016-04-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191017248

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'How to be Good?' is the pre-eminent question for ethics, although one that philosophers and ethicists seldom address head on. Knowing how to be good, or perhaps (more modestly and more accurately) knowing how to go about trying to be good, and the ways in which it is pointless or self-defeating to try to be good, is of immense theoretical and practical importance. And what goes for trying to be good oneself, goes also for trying to provide others with ways of being good, and for trying to make them good whether they like it or not. This is what is meant by 'moral enhancement'. There are many proposed methodologies or technologies for moral enhancement. Some of them are ancient and/or familiar: we may attempt moral enhancement by setting a good example, by good parenting, by education or training, by peer pressure, by telling stories with a moral, in words or in pictures, and so on. We can imbibe substances with mood changing or motivational effects. We can also use medical, biological, or other scientific means; we can search for and deploy chemicals, or biological or molecular agents, which we believe will change people for the better; and we can modify the environment to make bad outcomes of all sorts less likely. We can experiment with political and social systems, institutions, and arrangements designed to make the world a better place or people better people. The question whether and to what extent moral enhancement is possible is the subject of this book.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology
Author: Shannon Vallor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 697
Release: 2022
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019085118X

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The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology gives readers a view into this increasingly vital and urgently needed domain of philosophical understanding, offering an in-depth collection of leading and emerging voices in the philosophy of technology. The thirty-two contributions in this volume cut across and connect diverse philosophical traditions and methodologies. They reveal the often-neglected importance of technology for virtually every subfield of philosophy, including ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and political theory. The Handbook also gives readers a new sense of what philosophy looks like when fully engaged with the disciplines and domains of knowledge that continue to transform the material and practical features and affordances of our world, including engineering, arts and design, computing, and the physical and social sciences. The chapters reveal enduring conceptual themes concerning technology's role in the shaping of human knowledge, identity, power, values, and freedom, while bringing a philosophical lens to the profound transformations of our existence brought by innovations ranging from biotechnology and nuclear engineering to artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and robotics. This new collection challenges the reader with provocative and original insights on the history, concepts, problems, and questions to be brought to bear upon humanity's complex and evolving relationship to technology.

Creating Future People

Creating Future People
Author: Jonathan Anomaly
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 100076978X

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Creating Future People offers readers a fast-paced primer on how new genetic technologies will enable parents to influence the traits of their children, including their intelligence, moral capacities, physical appearance, and immune system. It deftly explains the science of gene editing and embryo selection, and raises the central moral questions with colorful language and a brisk style. Jonathan Anomaly takes seriously the diversity of preferences parents have, and the limits of public policy in regulating what could soon be a global market for reproductive technology. He argues that once embryo selection for complex traits happens it will change the moral landscape by altering the incentives parents face. All of us will take an interest in the traits everyone else selects, and this will present coordination problems that previous writers on genetic enhancement have failed to consider. Anomaly navigates difficult ethical issues with vivid language and scientifically informed speculation about how genetic engineering will transform humanity. Key features: Offers clear explanations of scientific concepts Explores important moral questions without academic jargon Brings discoveries from different fields together to give us a sense of where humanity is headed

Beyond Virtue

Beyond Virtue
Author: Hayden Ramsay
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781349258109

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Virtue ethics or natural law? Most contemporary accounts treat these as rival approaches. This book argues both are necessary since virtue is commitment to objective human goods. It also argues integrity is planning one's life by commitment to reasonableness, rejects traditional natural law and virtue ethics for more deontological accounts of the human good and virtue, and explains human personhood accordingly. Part 2 then analyzes Aquinas's accounts of emotion, the body and happiness in terms of integrity.

Human Enhancements for Space Missions

Human Enhancements for Space Missions
Author: Konrad Szocik
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2020-08-07
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3030420361

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This book presents a collection of chapters, which address various contexts and challenges of the idea of human enhancement for the purposes of human space missions. The authors discuss pros and cons of mostly biological enhancement of human astronauts operating in hostile space environments, but also ethical and theological aspects are addressed. In contrast to the idea and program of human enhancement on Earth, human enhancement in space is considered a serious and necessary option. This book aims at scholars in the following fields: ethics and philosophy, space policy, public policy, as well as biologists and psychologists.

The Ultimate Enhancement of Morality

The Ultimate Enhancement of Morality
Author: Vojin Rakić
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2021-04-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030724735

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This book deals with good, evil, happiness and morally enhanced post-humans. It offers a succinct historical elaboration of philosophical stances towards morality and happiness, focusing on Kant's ideas in particular. Human augmented ethical maturity in a futuristic version of Kant’s Ethical Commonwealth implies, among else, voluntary moral bio-enhancement (VMBE); consequently, more happiness – as morality and happiness are in a circularly supportive relationship; ultimate morality (UM). UM is in its own way a universal morality. In line with the contention that Kant’s vision of the (not immediate but more distant) future of humanity is one of a cosmopolitan moral order in which humans act virtuously in the broadest possible community, that is, humanity, it is justified to conclude that successful VMBE is conducive to Kant’s vision. In this context the book is of great interest to a broad audience, such as those interested in VMBE and novel conceptions of morality, and those with an interest in the historical development of morality and happiness, in philosophy (specifically, ethics) and in post-humanity.