Publication date:
07 December 2016Length of book:
192 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498533485
In a critical intervention into the bioethics debate over human enhancement, philosopher Melinda Hall tackles the claim that the expansion and development of human capacities is a moral obligation. Hall draws on French philosopher Michel Foucault to reveal and challenge the ways disability is central to the conversation. The Bioethics of Enhancement includes a close reading and analysis of the last century of enhancement thinking and contemporary transhumanist thinkers, the strongest promoters of the obligation to pursue enhancement technology. With specific attention to the work of bioethicists Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu, the book challenges the rhetoric and strategies of enhancement thinking. These include the desire to transcend the body and decide who should live in future generations through emerging technologies such as genetic selection. Hall provides new analyses rethinking both the philosophy of enhancement and disability, arguing that enhancement should be a matter of social and political interventions, not genetic and biological interventions. Hall concludes that human vulnerability and difference should be cherished rather than extinguished.
This book will be of interest to academics working in bioethics and disability studies, along with those working in Continental philosophy (especially on Foucault).
This book will be of interest to academics working in bioethics and disability studies, along with those working in Continental philosophy (especially on Foucault).
In The Bioethics of Enhancement, Melinda Hall powerfully argues that disability underpins debates over genetic enhancement, and in turn these debates anchor contemporary bioethics, making disability, and questions over which lives are worth living, the fulcrum of bioethics. Bringing Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower to bear on the transhumanist discourses of Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom (among others) this book is a game changer, and a must read for anyone interested in enhancement literature, disability studies, or bioethics more generally.