Enhancing Justice?

This account of human enhancement leaves as an open question whether enhancement of a particular capacity is beneficial/valuable or not. It is, however, worth exploring whether this should be the case, or whether enhancement should be conceptualized the same way as adaptation, i.e., as something that has a positive valence, indexed to particular environments/circumstances.

The ‘in this respect’ qualification is necessary because there are other domains or principles of justice that also are relevant to whether human enhancement technologies are likely to be justice promoting or justice impairing. For example, widespread dissemination of human enhancement technologies are likely to be socially transformative, so decisions regarding them (which to implement and how to do it) have a procedural justice dimension: To what extent should decision be made by “elite” actors in science and industry communities? To what extent (and how) should they be made more “democratic”? What is the appropriate role of the marketplace and of governmental bodies? Each of these has justice components that are distinct from the largely distributive justice issues that are the focus of this article.

A similar response is appropriate to the second formulation of the argument from cognitive enhancement, i.e., that even those who do not have access to the enhancements (including the world’s socially and economically worst off) will be better off if the enhancements are developed and disseminated, since they will benefit from what those who are enhanced are able to accomplish (for example, improvements in agricultural, energy, and environmental remediation technologies). Human enhancement technologies are not necessary to develop these technologies. The lack of pro-poor technology research and dissemination is not due to a lack of technological capabilities, but to social and political factors (e.g., incentive structures, funding priorities, and governance). Moreover, addressing those factors is more immediate, likely to succeed, and addresses an already urgent social problem (independent of human enhancement technologies), and is therefore preferable to an approach mediated through the implementation of human enhancement technologies.