The Philosophical Debate upon Human Enhancement and the Question of Public Interest

Abstract

The ethical debate on human enhancement is one of the major topics of bioethics. In this article I dealt with a twofold bioethical point of view, scholarly bioethics and "bioethics in the making". I focus on the ethical claim that arises from "bioethics in the making" that calls for the inclusion of the moral reasons that are matter of concern for the public in order to enrich scholarly bioethics with more reflexivity. In so doing, I outline three philosophical approaches: speculative ethics within posthumanism, the philosophical anthropology of "being at-risk" of Coeckelbergh, and the ethics of enhanced warfighters of Lin, Mehlman and Abney. I then analyze several philosophical arguments present in those works that do not allow to reflect in-depth the role of public interest within scholarly bioethics.