Darian Meacham

The Subject of Enhancement: Augmented Capacities, Extended Cognition, and Delicate Ecologies of the Mind

Abstract This paper argues for an inflationary and capacity-relative understanding of human enhancement technology. In doing so it echoes the approach followed by Buchanan (2011a, 2011b). Particular emphasis is placed on the point that capacities themselves are relative to demands placed on the organism by its environment. In the case of human beings, this environment is to a very large extent institutionally structured. On the basis of the inflationary and capacity-relative concept of enhancement, I argue that the subject of enhancement must be understood in terms of a bundle of capacities that is both extended (Clark 1998) and ecological. This consequence of the inflationary enhancement concept has some surprising upshots, namely that the subject itself must be considered as a technological enhancement and not a ‘platform’ or subjectum upon which the enhancement enterprise builds. This conclusion clashes, I argue, with some of the presuppositions of liberal philosophy, which starts by assuming a reflective subject. The paper ends with some reflection on the desirability of reflective subjectivity for human flourishing and addressing the ecological crisis.

Outliers, Freaks, and Cheats: Constituting Normality in the Age of Enhancement

This chapter argues that uneasiness about enhancement in sport is linked to a sense of the normal that is inherent to perceptual experience itself. Using Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, I argue that normality is a structural component of our experience of the world and most significantly, others in the world. Nonetheless, what the normal is, its actual content, is a matter of historical contingency that is developed over time in social relations with others. On the basis of the phenomenological conception of normality, I argue that the possibility of sharing a world of common projects and goals with others is dependent on perceiving them as normal in the relevant sense. Normality, in this case, is based on the possibility of strong empathic relations with another: being able to imagine the structure and flow of another’s experiences as my own. On the grounds of this analysis, I argue that while some enhancements may stretch the ties of empathy, it is difficult to imagine them being broken completely. The concepts of normality and empathy ground what I call a phenomenological species concept that may exceed the boundaries of a biological species definition. I argue that it is the phenomenological species concept and not the biological one which holds ethical significance. Following from this, I hold that ethical arguments that appeal to the unity of the biological species as having an ethical significance are unfounded.

The Institutional Life

Some ten years ago I read for the first time the passage from which this contribution draws its title. It marks, for me, something like the beginning of an obsession–but one that only takes me in circles, back to those lines, where I find comfort alongside a certain sense of futility in a passage that I know I will never fully unravel. In this futile return there is a feeling of coming home, but also of a continuous departure which most often leads down familiar paths–all of them leading back to where I started–but also sometimes yielding a new route to travel both vainly, in the hope of a new discovery, and of course in vain, as these new paths always seem to take me back home; if I’m lucky a home that is somewhat altered, not necessarily rendered more or less clear to me but somehow deepened, given an added depth or dimension. But each departure is nonetheless accompanied by a marvelous sensation of quickening, a nervousness or jitteriness that pushes me to literally move, to get up from my desk and pace nervously, a sort of push that must be redirected back into the text from which it emerged.