Paul Root Wolpe, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
With the advent of brain imaging, implantable brain chips, neural tissue transplants, brain-computer interfaces, and psychopharmaceutical advances, human beings will soon be able to micromanage their moods, enhance cognitive and affective skills and traits, "mind-read" through brain scanning, and replace brain functions with brain prostheses. The ability to read and alter brain function is an incursion into the seat of our personhood, our sense of identity, and the locus of that which makes us most human.
A literature has emerged that talks of the modern human as a nascent cyborg, a being that integrates technology into its flesh and becomes a hybrid of organic and information technologies. Humans are demonstrating an emerging capacity for self-design that is the harbinger of a new stage of human evolution, where we ourselves are the shapers of species morphology and functioning. The transformation of the human being into a hybrid of organic and technological parts has implications for questions such as the nature of selfhood, the politics of the body, the modification of free will, and the proper limits of human enhancement, among others.
What are the implications of this new, radical evolution for the future of the human organism? What are the ethical challenges that confront those who see a compelling case for human technological transformation? What are the ethical arguments of those who see danger in altering the human form? The international reaction to the cloning of Dolly, the stem cell controversy, and other high profile biotechnologies show that these questions may very well form the core of the ethical debates of the coming decades. |
