ABSTRACT
This chapter is limited to analysing the connections between three aspects of human beings: (a) human bodies, (b) human personhood, and (c) human enhancement. Is ‘personhood’ exclusive to members of homo sapiens? Is enhancement in contradiction with humanity? The text concentrates on three authors: Lynne Rudder Baker, Christian Smith and I, Margaret Archer. We are all self-designated Realists, emergentists and essentialists, but are not consensual in answering the above questions. The propositions advanced are: (1) ‘bodies’ (not necessarily fully or partially human) furnish the necessary but not the sufficient conditions for personhood (Baker and Archer agree; Smith does not); (2) personhood is dependent upon the subject possessing the First-Person Perspective, FPP. But this requires supplementing by reflexivity and concerns in order to delineate personal identity (Baker insists on the FPP alone, Archer on all three, and Smith advances a longer list); (3) both the FPP and Reflexivity require concerns to provide traction in determining – and thus explaining – subjects’ courses of action (Archer). The chapter concludes that personhood is not, in principle, confined to those with a human body and is thus compatible with human enhancement. Social consequences of the latter will be both positive and negative.
