UC Irvine

Discussions of the ethics of human enhancement are frequently complicated by competing understandings of enhancement. Enhancement has been variously defined as treatments that go beyond therapy, as improvements in the biological state, as the addition of novel capacities, and as biological changes that improve well-being. To help clarify the ethical debate surrounding enhancement, enhancement must be properly characterized and understood.In this dissertation, I examine enhancement as a theoretical concept, eventually offering my own definition. To create a broadly-acceptable account, I seek to develop a descriptive and non-circular framework of enhancement that relies on as little human arbitration and evaluation as possible. The intension of enhancement should not be determined solely by what phenomena we believe should comprise the extension. In order to gain sufficient epistemic clarity, a definition of enhancement must instead cohere with a reasonable understanding of biology. In this dissertation, I develop an account of enhancement that fits these criteria—the Improved Fitness account of enhancement. To do so, I first examine the beyond therapy definition of enhancement, which provides the groundwork for understanding health. Properly understood, health and disease are not dichotomous states. Instead, I argue that when correctly characterized, health is a continuum of biological states. With this understanding of health in place, I propose to define enhancement as increased health. This requires a principled account of how to differentiate improved health from reduced health, and I propose to use fitness as the relevant measurement. In my Improved Fitness account, an organism has been enhanced when its fitness improves, and it has been harmed when its fitness declines. After developing this account and offering relevant clarifications, I examine the final three accounts of enhancement. I argue that my account supersedes these accounts in epistemic value. Mine is a reductionist account of enhancement in which enhancement is neither novel nor particularly exciting. I conclude that when enhancement is understood through my account, the ethics of enhancement turn into the ethics of any other source of improvement. The only ethically-relevant topics within enhancement are safety and distributive justice.