ABSTRACT
The “posthuman” in bioethics has been strongly linked to the discourse over human enhancement and the idea of radical species transformation produced by technological improvements on the human condition. In contrast to many other posthumanist perspectives, which aim to critically interrogate and de-centre the concept of “the human,” bioethical accounts of the posthuman as the end-product of human enhancement re-centre the human, as simultaneously that which the posthuman goes beyond, and the prototype for functioning on which the posthuman improves. While many of the technological possibilities that both sceptics and enthusiasts of posthuman enhancement envision remain hypothetical and speculative, such discourses nevertheless re-embed normative assumptions about the human condition and the category of “human” that exert real and present influence, including in the sphere of health and biomedical policy and practice. This chapter provides a critique of posthuman enhancement ethics through a broader “posthumanist” lens, using the example of human heritable genome editing to illustrate how the values implicit in enhancement discourse can assume salience in a policy setting, and the potential issues this may raise.
