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Evaluating the Posthuman Future – Some Philosophical Problems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2016

Søren Holm
Søren Holm*
Affiliation:
Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, School of Law, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK Center for Medical Ethics, HELSAM, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Institute for Health Science and Technologies, University of Aalborg, Aalborg, Denmark. Email: soren.holm@manchester.ac.uk
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Abstract

Imagining a future scenario where human beings have evolved in ways so that they are no longer human but post- or transhuman has been a recurrent trope in science fiction literature since the very inception of the genre. More recently, the possibility of a future including posthumans has received significant philosophical attention due to the emergence of activist ‘transhumanism’. This paper will analyse some of the philosophical problems in evaluating whether a posthuman future is a good future that we ought to pursue. It will first briefly describe the transhumanist conception of the posthuman, and the different routes envisaged from the current human condition to the future posthuman condition. The second part will then present and analyse some fundamental philosophical problems we encounter when we try to assess whether and to what extent the posthuman future is good and/or desirable; and it will be concluded that assessing the ethical desirability of the posthuman future is close to impossible.

Type
Erasmus Lecture
Information
European Review , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 131 - 139
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2016 

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References

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