To what extent is the use of human enhancements defended in international human rights legislation (original) (raw)
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Law, Innovation and Technology
Recently, attempts to shape the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) model according to human rights have been made by scholars (including by Ronald Leenes and his co-authors, see (2017) 9 LIT 1). Taking up this challenge, this article applies a version of the RRI framework, shaped by human rights, to the field of human enhancement. It does so in order to respond to the following question: what guidance can we derive from Europe's human rights system for the responsible development of performance-enhancing technologies? In this context, given the special link between performance-enhancing modifications and the human body, analysis of the right to bodily integrity shows that it is possible to build a human right as the 'normative anchor point' for the governance of human enhancement technologies. Drawing on both the European Convention on Human Rights (together with the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg Court) and the Oviedo Convention, it is argued that Europe's regime of human rights can efficaciously tackle the challenge of future 'enhanced societies'where the ECHR is not conclusive, the Oviedo Convention is decisive for solving hard cases related to human enhancement.
2019
This report will help readers better understand the international, EU and selected countries' legal developments and approaches to specific legal issues and human rights challenges related to human enhancement. The report broadly discusses the legal issues and human rights challenges of human enhancement. It analyses relevant international, EU and regional laws and human rights standards. It summarises and compares the results of the country studies on law and human enhancement. It also discusses the adequacy of existing norms and standards and gaps and presents some recommendations that will be further developed in the forthcoming SIENNA work.
Studies in Ethics , Law , and Technology Ethics of Human Enhancement : 25 Questions
2009
This paper presents the principal findings from a three-year research project funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) on ethics of human enhancement technologies. To help untangle this ongoing debate, we have organized the discussion as a list of questions and answers, starting with background issues and moving to specific concerns, including: freedom & autonomy, health & safety, fairness & equity, societal disruption, and human dignity. Each question-andanswer pair is largely self-contained, allowing the reader to skip to those issues of interest without affecting continuity.
Global Issues and Ethical Considerations in Human Enhancement Technologies
Global Issues and Ethical Considerations in Human Enhancement Technologies, 2014
Society is struggling with issues regarding rapid advancements in Human Enhancement Technologies (HET), especially in terms of definition, effects, participation, regulation, and control. These are global matters that legislators must sufficiently address, as was evidenced partly by debate within the 2008 European Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA), among other discussions; yet, relevance must not be relegated entirely to scientists, legislators, and lobbyists who may gain power and control at the expense of those parties most affected by these life-changing technologies. Since current and future HET initiatives should be in the best interests of those who will eventually participate, research into critical pragmatic elements of HET must expand beyond government and scientific experimentation for eventual societal adoption to incorporate deeper relevant inquiry from within the humanities.
Inquiring into Human Enhancement - Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives
What is human enhancement all about? Why has it become a major concern in debates about the future of contemporary societies? This book is devoted to clarifying the underlying ambiguities of these major debates. It proposes novel ways of exploring what human enhancement means, what practices and technologies are involved, and what goals are invoked, with their respective justifications and criticisms. It calls on contributors from different countries and backgrounds—sociology, philosophy, bioethics, political science, engineering, medicine, literary studies, science fiction—to examine three fundamental aspects of human technological enhancement: firstly, what the concept of human enhancement means; secondly, what practices constitute human enhancement today, and; thirdly, what it might become in the future.
Does the Human Right to Health Include a Right to Biomedical Enhancement
If we grant that there is a human right to health then we are committed to a human right to biomedical enhancement. In particular, I argue that the human right to health should be interpreted to include biomedical enhancements within its scope in the sense that there is a limited liberty right to pursue biomedical enhancements and a rights-based justification for limited entitlements to biomedical enhancements. I begin with a discussion of the human right to health in international law and practice and assume for the sake of argument that the legal human right to health is morally justified. After discussing the human right to health in international law, I argue that the underlying functions that we value when we value health are scalar and do not provide a threshold between therapy and enhancement. I go on to consider various principles philosophers and policy analysts have used to apply the human right to health equitably. None of principles provides a threshold between therapy and enhancement. I end by suggesting that if there is a moral human right to health it too must include biomedical enhancements within its scope.
"Equality of Acces to Enhancement Technology in an Posthumanist Society", Dilemata, n. 19, 2015
The possibility and justification of genetic ma- nipulations (like other forms of enhancements, such as implants, prosthesis and transgenesis) leading to in- crease our human capabilities creates problems relating to human rights and equality in a future society. I analyze prohibitionist and favorable positions to enhancements implementation, but I try to show the feasibility of a third position taking as basis the Rawlsian ideas of primary goods and the difference principle that would allow in a first phase an open access to genetic enhancements. In a second step, given some circumstances, these enhance- ments could be considered as compulsory.
The task of this article is to explore the current state of bioethical debates over enhancement technologies as articulated through its two dichotomous ideological camps. It aims to explain why the conservative and posthumanist movements have reached a point where they fail to engage with each other and how we can reconceptualize the bioethical endeavor in a way that does not force the public to adhere to a framing of enhancement technologies as either universally desirable or abhorrent. In order to do so, I turn to the work of Lacan and Deleuze to explain why attempts to define what is essentially human always enter what I call “tropological regress,” or the endless procession of linguistic tropes that are artificially linked to transcendental conceptions of “the good.” I aim to diagnose why conservative and posthumanist discourses on enhancement technologies find themselves irreconcilably opposed.
A decade of research on the ethics of human enhancement has produced a vast literature. This collection is an excellent contribution to the field; it fulfills and exceeds the promises of its two subsections: understanding and advancing the debate. Section 1, Understanding the Debate includes eight papers and section 2 Advancing the Debate includes seven. The collection also contains a concise introductory essay by Alberto Giubilini and Sagar Sanyal, providing a helpful overview of recent developments in the literature. It is a pleasure to read and is appropriate to use in postgraduate courses and advanced undergraduate seminars. The strengths of the collection are the papers' placement of issues in enhancement within broader debates in moral psychology, evolutionary ethics, political philosophy, and metaethics. Contextualizing in this way sheds light on the ways in which debates about novel technological innovations and their applications can provide broader insights into standing philosophical problems in other domains. The volume also strives for conceptual clarity and maps out a course through the topics, which help bypass some stubborn bottlenecks in the debate about human enhancement: 1) talking past each other, 2) conflicting methodologies, and 3) unquestioned assumptions. I highlight three sets of articles that provide ways to move past the aforementioned bottlenecks. I focus here on only a few papers for brevity, but it is worth noting that all other papers in this collection make significant contributions to dealing with bottlenecks or make worthwhile contributions to other issues in enhancement, such as the role of reason, sentiment, and emotion in moral judgments and action; disability theory; future persons; and mind-uploading and personal identity. Defenders of enhancement (and other biotechnologies) often face the objection, in both public discourse and in scholarly work, of playing god. In BPlaying God: What's the
Regulating Human Enhancement Technologies: How to Escape the Problem of Anarchy
Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 2021
This article provides a framework for the global regulation of human enhancement technologies. I argue that competition between states in the international sphere blocks the emergence of such a regulatory framework. The reason is international anarchy or the absence of powers that stand above the nation-state. After considering different ways to overcome anarchy-namely international institutions, more amenable relations between democracies and international norms-I rule them out as insufficient. Then, I argue that only a world state can effectively regulate human enhancement technologies. A world state is not a new idea and was already proposed as an answer to, for example, the threat of nuclear annihilation. However, regulating human enhancements entails an even larger necessity to overcome nationalism.