Ray Kurzweil may not be a household name, but the blind know who he is. He invented the first reading machine and then reduced its size to a hand-held gadget. Kurzweil will be remembered more as a man on a mission to tell the world what life will be like in the age of technology. Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates said he is the best in the world at predicting the future, and what a world he predicts. (Religion & Ethics News Weekly)

Is it necessary first to enhance in order to decide whether or not enhancing is a good idea? (IEET)

If we are to believe transhumanists, people who bill themselves as champions of superlongevity and artificial human enhancement, 2045 should be a very good year. (The Boston Globe)

Reason, Theology, and the Genome: A Conference on the Ethics of Human Enhancement
Christ Church, University of Oxford
October 9, 2010

What is the place of theology in the growing debate over genetic engineering and human enhancement? Are theological reasons of interest only to believers? Or, as Michael Sandel and Jürgen Habermas have both suggested, might they be important for society generally, for secular and religious alike? Reason, Theology and the Genome brings together a distinguished international panel of speakers, representing many different disciplines and points of view, to consider the relevance of theology to one of the most important questions of our time.

For more information or to register

Authors such as Francis Fukuyama, the President’s Council on Bioethics, and George Annas have argued that biotechnological interventions that aim to promote genetic enhancement pose a threat to human nature. This paper clarifies what conclusions these critics seek to establish, and then shows that there is no plausible account of human nature that will meet the conditions necessary to support this position. Appeals to human nature cannot establish a prohibition against the pursuit of genetic enhancement. [Abstract (Journal of Medicine and Philosophy)]

Wallach is a pioneer in the nascent field of robot ethics and has captured the imaginations of futurists with his theories on artificial moral agents and computational ethics. In fact, he designed the world’s first course on the subject at Yale, and he published a book last year entitled, Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. (ZDNet)

IN PURSUIT of a long life, expect the dismal prescriptions of clean living: exercise, moderation and a healthy diet. Indeed, such choices may help people exceed average lifespans by up to a decade. But when it comes to the oldest of the old, new research emphasises the biological rather than environmental factors behind longevity, suggesting that distinct genetic characteristics animate most centenarians. (The Economist)

“I don’t ever want to die… It wouldn’t suit me,” said Innokenty Osadchy. Fortunately, the 35-year-old investment banker is certain he has found a loophole out of death. Osadchy is ready to pay a small fortune to freeze his brain until future technology allows him to continue his life — after being transplanted into a new body and resuscitated. (AFP)

In this paper, I focus on the concept of human dignity and critically assess whether such a concept, as used in the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, is indeed a useful tool for bioethical debates. However, I consider this concept within the context of the development of emerging technologies, that is, with a particular focus on transhumanism. The question I address is not whether attaching artificial limbs or enhancing particular traits or capacities would dehumanize or undignify persons but whether nonbiological entities introduced into or attached to the human body contribute to the “augmentation” of human dignity. First, I outline briefly how the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights uses the concept of dignity. Second, I look at the possibility of a universal bioethics in relation to the concept of human dignity. Third, I examine the concept of posthuman dignity and whether the concept of human dignity as construed in the declaration has any relevance to posthuman dignity. [Premium AJOB]

Since the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artifact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of fetal sex via ultrasound along with the option of termination, means that we now have the power to choose the sex of our children. An influential contemporary line of thought about medical ethics suggests that we should use technology to serve the welfare of individuals and to remove limitations on the opportunities available to them. I argue that, if these are our goals, we may do well to move towards a “post sex” humanity. Until we have the technology to produce genuine hermaphrodites, the most efficient way to do this is to use sex selection technology to ensure that only girl children are born. There are significant restrictions on the opportunities available to men, around gestation, childbirth, and breast-feeding, which will be extremely difficult to overcome via social or technological mechanisms for the foreseeable future. Women also have longer life expectancies than men. Girl babies therefore have a significantly more “open” future than boy babies. Resisting the conclusion that we should ensure that all children are born the same sex will require insisting that sexual difference is natural to human beings and that we should not use technology to reshape humanity beyond certain natural limits. The real concern of my paper, then, is the moral significance of the idea of a normal human body in modern medicine. [Premium AJOB]

The American Journal of Bioethics (Volume 10, Issue 7, 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles Include:

• “Disaster in the Gulf: Public Health and Public Responsibility” by Summer Johnson, 1-2.
• “Should Human Beings Have Sex? Sexual Dimorphism and Human Enhancement” by Robert Sparrow, 3-12.
• “The Risks of ‘Sexual Normalcy’” by Ronald M. Green, 13-14.
• “Humans Should Be Free of All Biological Limitations Including Sex” by James J. Hughes, 15.
• “Resisting Sparrow’s Sexy Reductio: Selection Principles and the Social Good’ by Thomas Douglas, Russell Powell, Katrien Devolder, Pablo Stafforini, and Simon Rippon, 16-18.
• “Sexual Dimorphism and the Value of Feminist Bioethics” by Nancy J. Matchett, 18-20.
• “Sex and Enhancement: A Phenomenological-Existential View” by Jenny Slatman, Annemie Halsema, and Guy Widdershoven, 20-22.
• “The Value of Sex in Procreative Reasons” by Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu, 22-24.
• “Sexual Dimorphism and Sexual Intermediaries” by Thomas Marino, 24-25.
• “Is There a Moral Obligation to Have Children of Only One Sex?: by Kalina Kamenova, 26-27.
• “This is What Happens When You Forget About Gender” by Dan O’Connor, 27-29.
• “Sex, Romance, and Research Subjects: An Ethical Exploration” by Timothy F. Murphy, 30-38.
• “No Sex Please, We’re Social Scientists?” by Michael Dunn and Mark Sheehan, 39-41.
• “On the Costly Compromises of Nonclinical Research Relationships” by Hallie Liberto, 41-42.
• “No Sex Please in Sexuality Research” by Bridget Haire, 43-44.
• “Human Dignity and Transhumanism: So Anthro-Technological Devices Have Moral Status?” by Fabrice Jotterand, 45-52.
• “Human Dignity, Transhuman Dignity, and All That Jazz” by Immaculada de Melo-Martin, 53-55.
• “Toward a ‘Post-Posthuman Dignity Area’ in Evaluating Emerging Enhancement Technologies” by Annelien L. Bredenoord, Rieke van der Graaf, Johannes J.M. van Delden, 55-57.
• “Dignity and Agential Realism: Human, Posthuman, and Nonhuman” by Linda MacDonald Glenn and George Dvorsky, 57-58.

The New York Times Sunday business section recently ran an enormous puff piece on Ray Kurzweil and the “Singularity” cult (my term, not the Times’s). Kurzweil is a successful inventor–entrepreneur best known lately for his sci-tech prophecies. He claims that advances in AI, nanotech, biotech, computer science and neuroscience are bearing us toward a radical transformation of our minds and bodies called the Singularity—aka “rapture of the geeks”. (Scientific American)

With the World Cup in South Africa underway, Wimbledon beginning next week, and London 2012 drawing ever closer, Oxford Online Debates continue this week with the launch of the latest discussion, ‘Performance enhancing drugs should be allowed in sport’. (PhysOrg)

Transhumanism is the idea of guiding and improving human evolution with intention through the use of technologies and culture. If those technologies are not robotic and cybernetic but, instead, genetic and organic, then so be it. (IEET)

ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen. (New York Times)

Your argument for a moral obligation to use new biotechnology to have the best children is founded on the best life (understood as the life with the most well-being) expected for them. Is then your theory utilitarian?

Utilitarians would embrace it but it is not intended to be nor derived from uti-litarianism. It is meant fall out of basic rational choice. If you are only going to have one child now, you should choose the better child, rather than leaving it to chance, just because it is better. You might have other reasons which outweigh this reason based on its value, but that is typical of all life choices. The point is that you have a good reason to choose it and absent some other reason, like health risk to you, cost to society, then you should choose the better child. This argument is not based on controversial values or theories but just on our existing approaches and attitudes to having children. Dilemata

The emergent course of our human bio-technological transition is leading toward a species transformation. In light of this, approaches to transhumanism are varied and some are without clear conceptual apparatus; people want to extol its far-out promise or decry its fearful premise. How can the forecasts of converging sciences and technologies be better understood? Discussions need to include how we might experience an enhanced existence. I suggest aesthetics as a means by which we can gaze onto the topography of human enhancement and into the core of transhumanist experience. (IEET)

Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading contaminated a computer chip which was then inserted into his hand. The device, which enables him to pass through security doors and activate his mobile phone, is a sophisticated version of ID chips used to tag pets. (BBC News)

That enigma will be part of a Food and Drug Administration committee’s deliberations next month when it considers endorsing the first pill designed to do for women what Viagra did for men: boost their sex lives. A German pharmaceutical giant wants to sell a drug with the decidedly unsexy name “flibanserin,” which has shown prowess for sparking a woman’s sexual desire by fiddling with her brain chemicals. (Washington Post)

The question of enhancement occupies a prominent place not only in current bioethical debates but also in wider public discussions about our human future. In all of these, the problem of enhancement is usually articulated via two sets of questions: moral questions over its permissibility, extent and direction; and technical questions over the feasibility of different forms of regenerative and synthetic alterations to human bodies and minds. This article argues that none of the dominant positions on enhancement within the field of bioethics is entirely satisfactory due to the limited, monadic, pre-technological and non-cultural conception of the human that is adopted in these models. Critically engaging with both opponents of enhancement (Habermas) and its advocates (Harris, Agar, Bostrom, Dworkin), Zylinska also takes some steps towards outlining a nonnormative ethics of enhancement. The latter sees its human and non-human subjects as always already enhanced, and hence dependent, relational and coevolving with technology. [Premium (Journal of Bioethical Inquiry)]

In recent years society’s attitude to various types of personal enhancement has shifted. Examples include the popularity of multivitamins and diet pills, the widespread use of caffeine (despite side effects such as anxiety, tremor, and tachycardia), and the unregulated off-label use of methylphenidate (Ritalin), fluoxetine (Prozac), and sildenafil (Viagra). (BMJ)