ABSTRACT
This chapter considers transhumanist proposals about radical enhancement in the light of understanding how we make choices about the future. We should consider ourselves to be entering an age of human enhancement. The age of human enhancement isn’t limited to a future when super-beings walk among us. Rather it commences when we have technologies that credibly enhance some human capacities. Agar argues that the age of human enhancement demands different forms of philosophical evaluation from those appropriate before the age of human enhancement. Outlandish thought experiments were appropriate when addressing the very idea of enhancing humans but misleading when deciding to use a particular enhancement technology. The author argues that we should consider most transhumanist proposals as little more than moral marketing. Their purpose is to boost uptake of an enhancement technology, not to seriously morally evaluate it. The author concludes by applying this chapter's approach to a case of inadvertent enhancement, enhancement resulting from an intervention whose stated purpose is something other than enhancement.
