Many philosophers consider character to be both morally and existentially important. Perhaps the most prominent example of this attitude can be found amongst virtue ethicists. According to them, the morally good life is the one that consists in the cultivation of valuable character traits such as honesty, courage, justice, and so on. If something were to disrupt or distort virtuous character it would be, from this perspective, a “bad thing”.
Given the prominence of this attitude, it should come as no surprise to learn that many a critic of human enhancement has launched a character-based attack on the idea. Chapter 5 of Allen Buchanan’s book Beyond Humanity
takes these critics to task and dismisses most of them with considerable vituperativeness. Over the next few posts, I want to see what Buchanan has to say. I begin in this post by looking briefly at some concepts that will help to frame the debate. I then move on to consider Michael Sandel’
s giftedness argument against enhancement.Bear in mind at the outset that a distinction is typically made in the enhancement debate between therapy or treatment and enhancement . This will crop up from time-to-time over the course of this series. How viable the distinction actually is, is a matter of some dispute: critics of enhancement usually think it is genuine; proponents of enhancement usually think it is not.
