Inquiring into Human Enhancement: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives

What is human enhancement all about? Why has it become a major concern in debates about the future of contemporary societies? This book is devoted to clarifying the underlying ambiguities of these major debates. It proposes novel ways of exploring what human enhancement means, what practices and technologies are involved, and what goals are invoked, with their respective justifications and criticisms. It calls on contributors from different countries and backgrounds—sociology, philosophy, bioethics, political science, engineering, medicine, literary studies, science fiction—to examine three fundamental aspects of human technological enhancement: firstly, what the concept of human enhancement means; secondly, what practices constitute human enhancement today, and; thirdly, what it might become in the future.