Ethical Issues in Human Enhancement. Nick Bostrom Rebecca Roache [Published in New Waves in Applied Ethics, eds. Jesper Ryberg, Thomas Petersen & Clark Wolf (Pelgrave Macmillan, 2008): pp. 120-152] [pdf] www.nickbostrom.com What is Human Enhancement? Human enhancement has emerged in recent years as a blossoming topic in applied ethics. Enhancement is typically contraposed to therapy. First, we may note that the therapy-enhancement dichotomy does not map onto any corresponding dichotomy between standard-contemporary-medicine and medicine-as-it-could-be-practised-in-the-future. Second, it is unclear how to classify interventions that reduce the probability of disease and death. Third, there is the question of how to define a normal healthy state. Fourth, capacities vary continuously not only within a population but also within the lifespan of a single individual. Fifth, we may wonder how “internal” an intervention has to be in order to count as an enhancement (or a therapy).
Life Extension Physical Enhancement. 2012-11-06-Human-enhancement.pdf. Some wounded troops choose amputation. By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY Updated 4/19/2011 12:43 PM | WASHINGTON — Army 1st Sgt. William “Mike” Leonard found himself mourning the left leg that he had agonized for months about keeping. It was in December, just weeks before he would have doctors cut it off. By Garrett Hubbard, USA TODAY By Garrett Hubbard, USA TODAY “There were a couple of nights,” the company sergeant recalls, “where I sat in the shower and just kind of had some tears about losing it.” PHOTOS: Why this sergeant chose amputation But the bomb blast in Afghanistan that had taken his right leg on March 22, 2010, had so damaged the left one that bones stubbornly resisted mending. PHOTOS: Why one sergeant chose amputation Doctors amputated Leonard’s remaining leg on Jan. 10. “It’s nice to get up and get going finally,” says Leonard, 40. The vast majority involve removing legs rather then arms, the doctors say.
‘This can’t be happening’ Leonard doesn’t remember the blast. She was told that Mike had nearly died. More Than Human? The Ethics of Biologically Enhancing Soldiers - Patrick Lin. Our ability to "upgrade" the bodies of soldiers through drugs, implants, and exoskeletons may be upending the ethical norms of war as we've understood them.
If we can engineer a soldier who can resist torture, would it still be wrong to torture this person with the usual methods? Starvation and sleep deprivation won't affect a super-soldier who doesn't need to sleep or eat. Beatings and electric shocks won't break someone who can't feel pain or fear like we do. This isn't a comic-book story, but plausible scenarios based on actual military projects today. In the next generation, our warfighters may be able to eat grass,communicate telepathically,resist stress, climb walls like a lizard, and much more. Impossible? We only need to look at nature for proofs of concept. As you might expect, there are serious moral and legal risks to consider on this path.
Why Enhancements? Technology makes up for our absurd frailty. The use of human enhancement technologies by the military is not new. Superman 2.0: How human-enhancement technologies are giving us all superpowers. Photo by Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images In the summer of 1935, a pair of Bavarian climbers arrived in the Bernese Alps, hoping to become the first people ever to scale the monstrous north face of the mountain known as the Eiger. On their first day, they made good progress. On the second day, less so, and on the third, even less. Then a storm swept over the mountain and they froze to death. The next year, four more mountaineers attempted the face, and all four died. After a third failed attempt in 1937, a quartet of climbers finally reached the summit in 1938, taking three days to get there. Twelve years and many more fatalities later, a pair of climbers managed to surmount the Eiger in 18 hours. The Eiger hasn’t gotten any shorter or less steep, nor the conditions any gentler.
Granted, the ability to climb an Alp in less than three hours isn’t a particularly dramatic superpower by comic-book standards. The story of the Eiger reminds us that wearable technology isn’t an entirely new trend. The Autism Advantage. What they read, however, didn’t square with the Lars they came home to every day. He was a happy, curious boy, and as he grew, he amazed them with his quirky and astonishing abilities.
If his parents threw out a date — Dec. 20, 1997, say — he could name, almost instantly, the day of the week (Saturday). And, far more usefully for his family, who live near Copenhagen, Lars knew the train schedules of all of Denmark’s major routes. One day when Lars was 7, Thorkil Sonne was puttering around the house doing weekend chores while Lars sat on a wooden chair, hunched for hours over a sheet of paper, pencil in hand, sketching chubby rectangles and filling them with numerals in what seemed to represent a rough outline of Europe. The family had recently gone on a long car trip from Scotland to Germany, and Lars passed the time in the back seat studying a road atlas.
Sonne walked over to a low shelf in the living room, pulled out the atlas and opened it up. The boy grabbed Paulsen’s arm.