ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a multifaceted analytical framework of human enhancement, the technologies that fuel it, and the philosophical, sociological, and legal implications raised by this socio-cultural-technical phenomenon. For the whole of biological evolution and for a large part of cultural evolution, human enhancement was not the primary goal of such processes. This finality is morally significant because it places moral responsibility on the individual or group that makes decisions about the moral permissibility of a certain enhancement in a certain context. Current attempts at human enhancement involve multiple functional domains, from locomotion to physical strength, from sensory perception to cognition, from emotional states to morality. Today's human enhancement processes and technologies operate at multiple levels of scale: from the very small to the very large, i.e., from the atomic level to the molecular, macromolecular, cellular, tissue, organ, organ system, whole organism, and even at the level of populations of organisms.
