A World Enhanced
A Review on Allen Buchanan’s “Better Thank Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves”
Introduction to Ethics
Keith Sherman
Allen Buchanan is a well-educated professor at Duke. He has received B.A., Magna cum laude, Columbia University, 1970 and went on to obtain a PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1975. He specializes in Bioethics, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of International Law and Social Moral Epistemology (Buchanan, 2014). In his book “Better Than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing ourselves” he takes an in depth look at biomedical enhancement and although he claims to not take sides he does seem to argue for enhancement throughout the book.
Outline
Buchanan follows along with “Darwin’s big point that nature doesn’t exhibit intelligent design”. He provides us with multiple arguments, for instance, the urinary tract in males passes through the prostate gland, the birth canal passes through the pelvis, he uses these points to show favor to biomedical enhancements. The point being that since nature did a poor job of jumbling together humans and since we do have many medical advancements that give us advantages and longevity we will soon need to use biomedical enhancements in order to cope with the unintended consequences we have already created with our medical advancements. It’s too late to turn back now. He goes on over the course of seven chapters to explain many points on biomedical enhancement.
Buchanan brings up a good point about throwing the baby out with the bath water. He shows us he believes in biomedical enhancement but he also states it needs to be brought on carefully taking into consideration the detriment unintended consequences. We have made leaps and bounds in the medical field and humans are living a lot longer and yet our quality of life for our last 20 years has declined. A few ways he brings up that we can better our quality of life is by...