How to enhance the enhancement debate? – A multi-methodological approach

In November 2018 a Chinese scientist announced that he had used CRISPR/Cas genome editing techniques to create the world’s first genetically edited babies. This announcement (re)stimulated a broad public debate about the risks and ethical pitfalls of biomedical enhancement.

This workshop will address the following pressing questions about human enhancement that reach beyond the debate about the pros and cons of particular biomedical techniques:  

• Ethical limits and regulations:
  • Which ethical limits should be defended with regard to different techniques of enhancement – and, more specifically, on which philosophical grounds?
  • How shall we define the limits and relations of the moral responsibility of individual scientists, the scientific community, policy and legislation?
• Goals and ideals:
  • Shall we use cognitive enhancers in order improve our individual contribution to human progress – be it the progress of science, culture or morality?
  • Shall we aim at overcoming diseases and death or even create a new transhuman species? Is this a threatening perspective or just the logical extension of our natural pursuit of perfection?
  • Which philosophical, religious or (pop-)cultural ideals of the perfect human being are implied in the enhancement debate?

• Our self-understanding as human beings:
  • How do growing opportunities of enhancement change and challenge our self-understanding as human beings? How does the ideal of self-optimization change our bodily experience?
  • Is striving for perfection a natural feature of being human? And what makes the difference (if there is any) between the use of biomedical enhancement and the use of other, more traditional techniques of self-improvement, self-cultivation or self-optimization. 

Lecturers

Farah Focquaert (Ghent University)
Trijsje Franssen (Leiden University)
Caroline Harnacke (Tilburg University)
Pieter Lemmens (Radboud University Nijmegen)

Deadline for registration is august 1. For more information, visit the workshop's webpage.