John Basl

State neutrality and the ethics of human enhancement technologies

Robust technological enhancement of core cognitive capacities is now a realistic possibility. From the perspective of neutralism, the view that justifications for public policy should be neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good, only members of a subset of the ethical concerns serve as legitimate justifications for public policy regarding robust technological enhancement. This paper provides a framework for the legitimate use of ethical concerns in justifying public policy decisions regarding these enhancement technologies by evaluating the ethical concerns that arise in the context of testing such technologies on nonhuman animals. Traditional issues in bioethics, as well as novel concerns such as the possibility of moral status enhancement, are evaluated from the perspective of neutralism.

The good of non-sentient entities: Organisms, artifacts, and synthetic biology

Synthetic organisms are at the same time organisms and artifacts. In this paper we aim to determine whether such entities have a good of their own, and so are candidates for being directly morally considerable. We argue that the good of non-sentient organisms is grounded in an etiological account of teleology, on which non-sentient organisms can come to be teleologically organized on the basis of their natural selection etiology. After defending this account of teleology, we argue that there are no grounds for excluding synthetic organisms from having a good also grounded in their teleological organization. However, this comes at a cost; traditional artifacts will also be seen as having a good of their own. We defend this as the best solution to the puzzle about what to say about the good of synthetic organisms.

Transhumanism, Human Dignity, and Moral Status

Ronald Sandler John Basl In “Human Dignity and Transhumanism: Do Anthro-technological Devices Have Moral Status?” Fabrice Jotterand argues that transhumanism is incompatible with human dignity--i.e. that technologically augmented individuals (transhumans) would not possess the dignity that non-technologically augmented human beings possess. In this commentary we argue that Jotterand’s case against the possibility of transhuman dignity is unsound. We then sketch a positive argument for the view that it is possible for transhuman individuals to have the same sort of dignity possessed by human beings.

The Ethics of Agricultural Animal Biotechnology

In this chapter, Robert Streiffer and John Basl consider the potential for biotechnology to address two prominent ethical concerns regarding concentrated animal agriculture: its detrimental ecological impacts and the amount of animal suffering that is involved. With respect to animal welfare, they focus on capacity diminishment — e.g. engineering blind chickens or microencephalic pigs. Streiffer and Basl raise significant doubts about whether diminishment would in fact decrease animal suffering and improve the quality of animal lives. With respect to the environment, they focus on the case of Enviropig — the attempt to engineer pigs that have less phosphorous in their manure. They argue that if Enviropigs were engineered successfully, they would have lower environmental impacts than non-engineered pigs on a per-pig basis. However, whether they would be ecologically beneficial overall depends on several other factors, including whether they enabled an increase in the number of animals used. Therefore, Enviropigs (and other animals engineered to reduced ecological impacts) may not in the end be ecologically beneficial.