Is Human Enhancement Unnatural and Would This Be an Ethical Problem?
This chapter examines the implications of the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’ for human enhancement and doping. In public discussions, the natural often seems to have a moral bonus. However, this bonus is far from self-evident, because the natural can be se
- PDF / 162,745 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 118 Downloads / 168 Views
Is Human Enhancement Unnatural and Would This Be an Ethical Problem? Christian Lenk
3.1
Introduction
With the advent of human gene therapy at the start of the 1980s the enhancement of the human body and mind became an issue for medical ethics. We can say today that, after three decades of this discussion, we have extensive knowledge on many kinds of enhancement interventions and also on the connected ethical problems. Right from the start, the discussion on the improvement of human functions and traits raised some concerns regarding a possible violation of the limits and boundaries of human nature. However, despite this clear moral intuition, there were no explicit ethical or legal principles known which would exclude interventions with the purpose of enhancing or improving human nature. The existing principles of medical ethics focused instead on the respect for the patient’s autonomy, which was sufficient to protect the patients against malpractice in the medical setting. On the other hand, the improvement of human nature with the aim of individual and collective health (i.e., therapy) has always been seen as a legitimate goal of medicine. Therefore, it was not clear, whether the perceived unnaturalness of enhancement interventions was problematic from the ethical point of view. One can also add that from the side of philosophy – as the classical mother discipline of ethics in general and medical ethics in particular – there is and always was an attitude critical of ethical values which flow directly out of nature (like it is the case in the natural law tradition). Ethical values have to be discussed and justified, and the natural as such – be it positive or negative – cannot give us ethical
C. Lenk (*) Institute for History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine, Ulm University, Frauensteige 6, D-89075 Ulm, Germany e-mail: [email protected] J. Tolleneer et al. (eds.), Athletic Enhancement, Human Nature and Ethics, International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine 52, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5101-9_3, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
45
46
C. Lenk
orientation for human actions. However, such a statement is maybe not entirely uncontested, where many citizens see human action in the technical and industrial sphere as potentially dangerous and want to preserve nature and keep the environment as natural as possible. But what does this mean for human nature, for our body and our mind? For example, aesthetic surgery is unnatural – but is it therefore also unethical? Why should we force somebody to show his or her wrinkles as signs of biological age when the person could avoid this by a medical intervention? What is the ethical problem in such a case? Human nature has many positive qualities, but it also has negative qualities – it can be empathetic and intellectual, but also brutal and nasty. We can conclude from these thoughts, that it is indeed not fully self-evident to preserve human nature as it is. The examination of this question is therefore the aim of the present article.
3
Data Loading...
