Social Progress and Human Enhancement
Final Report Abstract
The most valuable academic advances initiated and realised by this project on ‘Human Enhancement and Social Progress’ are seen in the focal ‘shifts’ it defends. To start, the pairing of these two concepts, which are usually portrayed in the literature as having distinct (if not opposing) ‘targets’, is already novel. ‘Human enhancement’ is most often viewed as a supremely individual enterprise, where various human enhancements technologies (HETs) — understood broadly to include any and all biomedical, genetic, or pharmaceutical intervention into human bodies designed to amplify particular human traits and abilities beyond what is required for health — are to be applied to individuals, to be freely elected by individuals, and to benefit those individuals. Regardless of whether doing so is likely to have broader accumulative benefits for human societies writ large. Alternatively, talk of ‘social progress’ typically has an entirely different lean; concerned as it is with large-scale, deep-seated, positively valenced changes to the shared and collective living experience of groups. Indeed, investigations on social progress commonly note that such communal needs and benefits might often be at odds with those of discrete persons. Our project challenges whether an enterprise concerned with enhancing the lives of individuals is able to do so in good faith when it both considers them as abstract and isolated (i.e. divorced from their social surroundings) and limits its focus to only alterations to their physiological make-up (i.e. their bodies). This, we argue, is an underdeveloped, over-simplified, and ultimately problematically deterministic view of human experience, which provides a flawed ‘base’ on which to develop valuable interventions into the status quo. Specifically, it was shown that this risks HETs only ever amounting to tools capable of reifying existing — potentially morally suspect — social practices, values, and structures. Importantly, by seeking to articulate human enhancement as a socially progressive venture it became clear that existing proposals for HETs could be seen to track — and therefore serve as a heuristic — for those concerning features of society. An insight that is likely to make the question of human enhancement far more interesting to a far more diverse range of academics. To overcome this identified problem, the project develops a ‘new’ basis for the human project founded on the insights of Dewey’s pragmatic social philosophy. Most briefly, it describes and defends the idea that individual experience is best conceived of as being “socially embedded”, which means that it is in meaningful and significant ways shaped and defined by features not contained inside individuals but vital to that individuals own experience of their lives. Enhancing the life of an individual therefore requires that one also take into account those features of their milieu that bear on it. It is this, the development and illustration of the so-called “embedded approach” to the human enhancement project that is the major contribution of the project, and is likely to have far reaching consequences for the ongoing philosophical debate.
Publications
- (2018). Die Grenzen des Menschen. In B. f. p. Bildung (Ed.), Der neue Mensch (pp. 97–106). Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung
Heilinger, J.-C.
- (2019). Cyberhate against academics. In S. K. Kehoe, E. Alisic, & J.-C. Heilinger (Eds.), Responsibility for Refugee and Migrant Integration (pp. 205–225). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter
Branford, J., Grahle, A., Heilinger, J.-C., Kalde, D., Muth, M., Parisi, E., . . . Wild, V.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110628746-015) - ‘Enhancing Human Lives: Toward an Embedded Approach to the Human Enhancement Project’
Branford, Jason Charles
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.5282/edoc.29399)
