Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 35: 641–655, 2010

doi:10.1093/jmp/jhq053
Advance Access publication on November 12, 2010

Enhanced Humans versus “Normal People”:

Elusive Definitions

MICHAEL BESS*
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

*Address correspondence to: Michael Bess, PhD, Department of History, Vanderbilt University,
VU Station B #351802, Nashville, TN 37235-1802, USA. E-mail: michael.d.bess@vanderbilt.edu

A key aspect of transhumanist thought involves the modification

or augmentation of human physical and mental capabilities—a
form of intervention often encapsulated under the term “enhance-
ment.” This article provides an overview of the concept of enhance-
ment, focusing on six major areas in which usages of the term
become slippery and controversial: normal or species-typical func-
tioning, therapeutics or healing, natural functioning, human
nature, authenticity, and the ambiguity between “more” and “bet-
ter.” I argue that we need to be aware of the tendency to embed the
concept of enhancement within stark binary oppositions that seem
perfectly reasonable at first glance, but that in fact yield little more
than conceptual muddles if they are not handled carefully.
Keywords:  human nature, human trait enhancement, species-
typical functioning, transhumanism, treatment-enhancement
debate

“I know it when I see it.”

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart,
defining obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964)1

I. INTRODUCTION

As one launches into a discussion about the pros and cons of enhancing
human traits, it would be nice to be able to lay out a clear definition of what
“enhancement” means. Unfortunately, this word turns out to be one of
those slippery customers, like “obscenity,” “love,” or “freedom,” that stub-
bornly resists being pinned down, because it conveys a wide range of
meanings to different people under varying circumstances.2 Let us begin with

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“Exhibit A”—a remarkable article (Greely et al., 2008) published in the scien-
tific journal Nature, under the title “Towards responsible use of cognitive-
enhancing drugs by the healthy.” The authors (a distinguished group of
British and American scholars) note that the off-label use of pharmaceuti-
cals like Ritalin or Provigil to boost mental acuity in healthy persons is in-
creasing dramatically, not only on college campuses but in the business
world and the military as well. (Indeed, an informal survey conducted by
Nature among its readers earlier in 2008 [Maher, 2008] yielded the astonish-
ing revelation that fully 20% of the 1,400 respondents used such drugs—
many of them on a daily or weekly basis—to augment their own cognitive
performance.) Current laws in both the United Kingdom and United States
reflect a long-standing attitude of moral disapproval regarding these kinds
of chemical enhancements; accordingly, selling such drugs to another per-
son for off-label use carries the possibility of stiff fines and even prison
sentences. This is an unreasonable state of affairs, according to the article’s
authors. Boosting our cognitive capacities is a perfectly benign and logical
thing to do, they argue, and we need to stop criminalizing it and pushing it
underground:
Human ingenuity has given us means of enhancing our brains through inventions
such as written language, printing, and the Internet. . . . And we are all aware of
the abilities to enhance our brains with adequate exercise, nutrition, and sleep. The
drugs just reviewed, along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and
prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education,
good health habits, and information technology—ways that our uniquely innovative
species tries to improve itself (Greely et al., 2008, 702–5).
The conceptual move being deployed here is a rather straightforward one.
Because these authors wish to open the door for cognitive enhancements as
part of the legitimate everyday functioning of our society, they simply col-
lapse the distinction between such enhancements and other forms of bene-
ficial human activity. Even when I’m sleeping, according to them, I am in
one sense “enhancing” my ability to function better the next day. By this use
of the term, eating a peanut butter sandwich is not qualitatively different
from having a prosthetic hippocampus implanted in my brain: both “inter-
ventions” result in a net augmentation of my ability to think, as compared
with what would have been my ability if I had not undertaken them. (I can
never think clearly on an empty stomach.) This is unhelpful argumentation
at best—falling under Hegel’s famous category of “the night in which all
cows are black.” Whether or not we agree about the desirability of allowing
freer access to mind-boosting drugs (I happen to be among those who cau-
tiously support this position), we need to start with a frank assessment of the
qualitative differences that divide some forms of biotechnological interven-
tion from others. A Boeing 747 is qualitatively different from a pogo stick,
even though both devices render me temporarily airborne.

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 Enhanced Humans versus “Normal People” 643

I will begin by defining the term “enhancement” rather broadly, as fol-

lows: an intervention designed to modify a person’s traits, adding qualities
or capabilities that would not otherwise have been expected to characterize
that person. Such an intervention can vary in at least three dimensions:
Differences of degree: tweaking vs. transmogrifying
The word “enhancement” can cover a disconcertingly wide range of modifications.
Its purview ranges from minute adjustments in a person’s biochemistry (“I enhanced
my immune system with a zinc lozenge”) to wholesale redesign (“My latest en-
hancement package includes infrared vision, Google accessible by thought, perfect
photographic recall, and an ability to learn very quickly how to play the piano.”).
Differences of mode: boosting vs. adding vs. radical remolding
Enhancement can take three qualitatively different forms: modifying an existing trait
(“My memory has been far better since the doctors re-engineered my hippocam-
pus”), as opposed to adding a new capability that other humans possess but that
I never have possessed before (“I used to be completely tone deaf, but my new
bioelectronic implant has endowed me with perfect pitch.”). Finally, enhancement
can also mean adding a radically new trait that no human has ever possessed before
(“This somatic gene retrofit for skin chlorophyll allows me to absorb solar energy
directly by photosynthesis.”).
Differences of relative effect: competitive advantage vs. intrinsic benefit
Some enhancements are specifically designed to boost an individual’s performance
in competitive situations (“Steroids have allowed me to win more blue ribbons in
weight-lifting than I had ever dreamed.”). Others confer a form of intrinsic benefit
that is not primarily measured in relation to other people, but rather in relation to
one’s own prior condition (“Since I started taking Prozac, I have been more peaceful
and joyous than I ever thought possible.”). Many enhancements, of course, will be
found to confer both these kinds of goods simultaneously (“Since I started using
Ritalin to boost my concentration, I have not only outperformed many of my class-
mates in law school, but am now able to enjoy Mozart in a wholly new way.”).
Unfortunately, these three dimensions of variation in the meaning of the
word “enhancement” far from exhaust its elusiveness as a concept. What fol-
lows is a survey of six areas of irreducible tension or ambiguity surrounding
this remarkably slippery term.

II. ENHANCEMENT VERSUS NORMAL OR SPECIES-TYPICAL

FUNCTIONING

At one level, this seems like a perfectly reasonable distinction from which to
start. Humans do not have wings and cannot fly. Therefore, if we add wings
to some individuals through an ingenious application of bioengineering,
enabling them to flutter about over short distances, we are broadening the
normal human range of function for those persons. In other words, we are
taking a circumscribed area of capabilities—how humans move from place

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to place—and augmenting it by adding a new form of locomotion that is not

typical of the species. This constitutes, unambiguously, an enhancement.
So far so good. Some bioethicists rely heavily on this distinction as they
seek to draw a line between “bad” enhancements and “good” forms of inter-
vention that seek merely to restore normal or species-typical human func-
tion to someone who has lost it (Parens, 1998, 5–11). Unfortunately, the
example just given only works because humans have never possessed wings.
In many other domains, the act of enhancement is based on augmenting or
refining existing human traits and capabilities—and it is here that we run
into trouble.
It turns out that the concepts of the “normal” and “species typical” are
fraught with ambiguities. What is normal in one culture, or in one historical
era, becomes atypical or downright weird in another. A few years ago, for
example, I visited the Doge’s palace off Piazza San Marco in Venice. I kept
banging my head on the stone doorways, many of which were cut to a
height of about five-foot six. I am five-eleven, which is close to average for
an American male in 2008. In 16th-century Venice, I would have been re-
garded as a Titan among men. What is normal height? The answer clearly
depends on when you take your measurements to build your data set, and
on whom you include in the pool of the measured.
The same goes for mental capabilities. What is normal IQ? In the 1980s,
the political scientist James Flynn conducted a study of IQ test results from
14 nations, covering the period 1918–78 for the United States, and a variety
of other 20th-century time spans for the other countries (Flynn, 1987). The
results were striking: people in all the industrialized democracies seemed to
be getting steadily smarter (at least according to whatever it is that an IQ test
measures). Someone who took the test in 1918 and got a score of 100 (which
is by definition the average for any given year) would only have scored 75
in the 1978 test. Similar results manifested themselves overseas as well: the
raw scores went up an average of three points per decade in the nations
studied. Most importantly, these results applied not just to measurements of
factual knowledge such as vocabulary or scientific principles, but equally to
measurements of abstract reasoning and spatial skills. Flynn tentatively at-
tributed the rise in performance to the significant improvements in educa-
tion, literacy, and nutrition that characterized the 20th century.
The relevance for our present purposes is clear. What counted as statisti-
cally normal in 1918 became, by 1978, a score five points away from an of-
ficial status of “mild mental retardation!”3 Were most people really that much
dumber back then? I doubt it—and so does Flynn (1987, 187). But this ex-
ample only serves to underscore the extremely problematic nature of both
IQ tests in general and the concept of “normal” function in particular.
No one would wish to deny, of course, that a normal human body tem-
perature is 98.6° F. I was born with two feet, not zero or three, and even
though some individuals exist who do not match this bipedal characteristic,

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 Enhanced Humans versus “Normal People” 645

it nonetheless remains quite useful to describe it as species typical. Shoe

factories are banking on it. Nevertheless, even in medicine, the word “nor-
mal” can convey a bewildering variety of meanings, some of them mutually
contradictory. According to the scholars Phillip Davis and John Bradley:
“normal” can refer to “a defined standard,” such as normal blood pressure; a “natu-
rally occurring state,” such as normal immunity; “free from disease,” as in a normal
pap smear; “balanced” as in a normal diet; “acceptable” as in normal behavior; or
it can be used to describe a stable physical state (Quoted in Silvers, 1998, 104–5).
Moreover, the caveats implicit here apply even more strongly when we shift
our focus from basic body functions and consider instead the realm of more
ethereal human traits. What is the species-typical degree of kindness to
strangers? How much intuitive sensibility is normal? What level of musical
talent or literary flair typifies the human species? These are, as the scholar
Eric Juengst points out, limitlessly beneficial psychosocial traits: there exists
no “normal” level beyond which we should stop seeking to cultivate—and
yes, enhance—them (Juengst, 1998, 29–47). The more the merrier. Indeed, it
is perfectly normal (!) to seek to boost these kinds of core human traits to
ever-higher degrees.
It will not do, therefore, to conceptualize human enhancement as an al-
teration measurable against some sort of alleged universal benchmark of
normal humanity. In some cases, as with the addition of wings, we can con-
fidently assert that this is indeed a deviation from the species typical. The
same would be true if we decided to engineer a human with a body tem-
perature of 55° F. But with a great many enhancements taken up in the
bioethics literature—chemical tools of mood control, memory chips, and
genetic alterations of physique or personality—the concept of “the normal”
needs to be treated with a great deal of circumspection. It can prove useful
in certain limited contexts, but it can also lead us badly astray.

III. ENHANCEMENT VERSUS THERAPEUTICS OR HEALING

We all know the difference between when we feel healthy and when we are
sick. Experience has presumably also taught us that health and sickness are
relative concepts, describing a range of mental states and physical conditions
spread out along a spectrum. Somewhere along that spectrum, our condition
deteriorates to a point at which we say to ourselves, “Dang, I’m catching a
cold.” A little further along, we hit the trigger point for visiting the doctor. If
we have a car accident on the way to the doctor, we may pass the threshold
for accepting hospitalization.
Some bioethicists have sought to use this easily accessible concept of
“a state of health” as a benchmark for discussing human enhancement
(Parens, 1998, 5–11). According to this view, doctors and practitioners of bio-
technology are justified in seeking to restore people to their customary state of

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well-being—repairing their wounds, healing their diseases, and reversing the

myriad of malfunctions to which the human body is prone. But if they try
to push their patients beyond that baseline state—tweaking or augmenting
their physical or mental functions to levels higher than that person has ever
experienced—they are entering a moral danger zone. Restoring wellness is
good; seeking a condition “better than well” is wrong (Kass, 2003).
Unfortunately, this treatment/enhancement distinction is fraught with seri-
ous conceptual problems. To begin with, the idea itself of “health” reflects
many of the same ambiguities as the concept of normality. Some theorists
define health negatively as a condition of freedom from disease; others (in-
cluding the World Health Organization) adopt a positive definition: “a state
of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.”4 These competing defi-
nitions bear direct consequences for discussions of enhancement: the nega-
tive meaning leads to an emphasis on restoration of lost function, whereas
the positive meaning opens the door for ongoing and potentially limitless
improvements in a patient’s state.
Consider for example the following case.5 Two 10-year-old boys, Johnny
and Billy, arrive in a doctor’s office; both are short for their age, and both are
seeking growth-hormone treatment to boost their height. The doctor care-
fully studies both boys, subjecting them to a battery of tests, and ultimately
reaches the conclusion that they have exactly the same predicted adult
height: five feet, three inches. The doctor, who feels a strong moral commit-
ment to the treatment/enhancement distinction, declares that he is willing to
prescribe the hormone to Johnny but not to Billy. Why? Because Johnny’s
shortness is caused by a deficiency in growth hormone brought on several
years earlier by a brain tumor: it therefore falls under the category of a dis-
ease. Billy’s shortness, however, has nothing to do with his hormone levels,
which are normal; his stature simply reflects the fact that both his parents are
also very short people, and he has inherited their genes. Since Billy has no
disease, giving him growth hormone would amount to enhancing the height
of a perfectly healthy person, and the doctor balks.
Unfair and unreasonable? Absolutely. These two boys will probably face
equal amounts of social stigma, anxiety, and lost opportunities, in a society
that (justifiably or not) prizes height in males. Why should they not be enti-
tled to equal treatment? Yet these are the consequences of hypostatizing a
concept of “ideal health” and then drawing a rigid line to say, “Here, but no
further.” Such examples could be multiplied with regard to all manner of
physical, mental, and emotional conditions.
The more sophisticated the practice of medicine becomes, the more often
we (and our doctors) are likely to encounter these kinds of quandaries. As
biotechnology increasingly allows doctors to intervene in fundamental biologi-
cal processes, the act of healing becomes ever harder to dissociate from the
possibility of enhancing. A psychiatrist prescribing Prozac, a neurologist wiring
up a brain-computer interface that allows a paralyzed man to communicate,

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 Enhanced Humans versus “Normal People” 647

and an immunologist using gene therapy to cure a patient afflicted by auto-

immune deficiency—all these health professionals are deploying techniques
and technologies that unavoidably open up the door to ever more potent
forms of human enhancement. The same serotonin-reuptake mechanisms
targeted by Prozac can be used to heal a chronically depressed individual or
to augment the sense of well-being experienced by a healthy person. A
brain-machine interface that allows stroke victims to control computers by
thought can be readily adapted to allow healthy persons to control other
machines (cars, warplanes, prostheses, robots) in exactly the same way. The
techniques of somatic gene therapy can be used to reverse genetic diseases,
but nothing in those techniques dictates an inherent restriction on which
types of genes (and traits) we choose to modify. Where we can heal, we can
also tweak, boost, and augment. Where we can repair, we can also modify,
redesign, and reengineer.
The treatment/enhancement distinction, therefore, presents us with a
moving target because it is pegged to the concept of “health”—and the
meanings of this latter word tend not only to vary between the positive and
negative definitions but also to shift from culture to culture and epoch to
epoch (Macklin, 1999). This is not to argue, once again, that the distinction
between treatment and enhancement is necessarily a worthless one. Far
from it: there exists a real qualitative difference between repairing my bro-
ken arm and surgically installing a bionic implant that allows me to throw a
bocce ball 300 yards. Nevertheless, we need to remain acutely aware that, in
using this distinction, we do not always stand on perfectly solid ground. In
some instances, the distinction proves meaningful and useful, but in many
other cases, we will find ourselves amid the gray areas exemplified by the
story of Johnny and Billy.

IV. ENHANCEMENT VERSUS NATURAL FUNCTIONING

Some opponents of enhancement claim we should avoid it because it vio-

lates the natural order of things—either as given by God (Cole-Turner, 2008)
or (in a secular variant) as shaped through eons of evolutionary trial and
error (Fukuyama, 2002; Sandel, 2007). Either way, they argue, we should not
be tampering with the complex equilibrium that nature has bequeathed to
us; we will pay dearly for our hubris if we do.
The main problem with this position is that hardly anything remains “nat-
ural” in this rigorous sense in today’s world: one is hard pressed to find a
single biological process going on anywhere on the planet (including within
our bodies) that has not been altered in some substantial way by human
intervention. From the ozone layer to the enzymes in my liver, the reach of
human actions—and of the unintended but massive side effects of human
behaviors—has saturated the biosphere. This increasing “artificialization of

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the world” is an issue that environmentalists have been forced to confront

over the past couple decades, and it arguably applies just as strongly to the
human body as well (Bess, 2003, chs 13–15). What we eat and drink, the air
we breathe, how we shelter ourselves, how we move around, and how we
communicate with each other—all these basic functions are permeated by
artifice from start to finish.
Confronted with this observation, the proponents of natural functioning
tend to fall back on a modified version of their argument. We have already
done enough tampering with our world and our bodies, they argue: we
should stop now and leave things as they currently stand (McKibben, 2003).
There is wisdom in this conservative position, but I would argue that it is
better to abandon the language of “nature” and “the natural” in pursuing this
line of argument, for those are idealized concepts that bear little relevance
to current physical and social realities. We live in a world permeated
by natural-artificial hybrids of myriad varieties and stripes, and we may as
well make our peace with this ineluctable fact. Therefore, this conservative
position can be far more effectively framed as an argument about what kind
of semi-artificial world we wish to inhabit, and which values we wish our
intertwined machines and bodies and social networks and ecosystems to
embody. When recast in this way, as a moral argument about preserving
certain valuable forms of human relationships, certain precious aspects of
human dignity, the caution and humility of the conservative position make
good sense and should be taken seriously.

V. ENHANCEMENT VERSUS HUMAN NATURE

Is there or is there not a definite set of traits setting humans apart from other
sentient beings—and if so, what are those traits? This is a question that has
vexed philosophers, poets, and other humanists ever since the time of the
ancient Greeks (and no doubt before that as well) (Pinker, 2002). It bears di-
rect relevance to the debates over human enhancement because, if such a core
set of characteristics exists, then any major alteration of that core through the
re-engineering of its contents threatens our fundamental identity as a species.
This is precisely the position adopted by a conservative school of thinkers
whose ideas are best articulated in the works of the scholars Kass (2003) and
Fukuyama (2002). Since both these eminent social theorists were appointed
by President George W. Bush to the President’s Council on Bioethics in 2001
(with Kass serving as chairperson), their stance has acquired a semi-official
imprimatur and has been widely influential. Although both Kass and Fuku-
yama acknowledge the difficulty of pinning down any precise set of uniquely
human traits, they nonetheless share a passionate belief that such a core
does exist and that it is under serious threat. Biotechnology, they argue, is
gathering powers that will allow it to distort beyond recognition the essential

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features making us who we are. We need to mobilize all the resources we

can—legal, economic, and cultural—to stop it from doing so.
Opponents of this position have marshaled two main lines of argument to
make their countervailing case. One line is simply to summon up the long
list of eminent thinkers who, since the time of the Enlightenment, have
concluded that there is no such thing as a fixed and definable human nature
at all. This is the tradition of the “blank slate” or tabula rasa, going back to
John Locke. It holds that humans are born with few (if any) innate charac-
teristics and that most of our traits are generated, shaped, and honed
through our experiences after birth. This Lockean tradition emphasizes the
immense plasticity of human beings when they are born and the powerful
role that rearing, socialization, and education play in determining who we will
become (Pinker, 2002).
Seen from the perspective of the blank slate, human enhancement is not
necessarily problematic at all. Since there is no fixed “human nature” to start
with, we run no danger of violating any putatively sacrosanct core of human
identity. On the contrary, we humans have always possessed the option of
making ourselves into most anything we choose. Therefore, if contemporary
science and technology provide us with new tools with which to shape our
own selfhood and that of our offspring, so much the better. The modification
of human traits through chemical, bioelectronic, or genetic means is merely
an extension of the potent social and cultural shaping processes that humans
have been applying to themselves and their children all along.
A rather different line of argument against the conservative school of Kass
and Fukuyama has been articulated by the transhumanists.6 These enthusias-
tic proponents of enhancement technologies do accept the notion of human
nature, but primarily in regard to a single trait, which they hold to be quin-
tessentially characteristic of our species. It is the trait of Promethean restless-
ness, the insatiable desire for higher and more exalted forms of experience,
the irresistible inner drive that propels us to push beyond our current limita-
tions (Naam, 2005). Here, for example, is an excerpt from the Web site of the
World Transhumanist Association:
Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning
that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the
endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science,
technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become post-
human, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.7
The transhumanist position, in other words, is something of a hybrid: it ac-
cepts the idea that humans possess certain deeply “hardwired” predisposi-
tions, but it rejects the notion that these traits are—or should be—sacrosanct
and immutable. For the transhumanists, the defining feature of human nature
is precisely its ability to reshape itself over time, through deliberate processes
of self-transformation that range from education to genetic intervention.

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These three conceptions of human nature—the essential core, the blank

slate, and the work-in-progress—arise repeatedly in moral debates over the
technologies of enhancement. All three can claim a long and respectable
tradition of intellectual forebears, and all three have passionate advocates
both inside and outside of academia today. The issues they raise cut across
some of the thorniest questions in the humanities, so they cannot readily be
adjudicated. Nonetheless, it is useful to have a clear sense of the distinctions
among them as we survey the technologies of enhancement.

VI. ENHANCEMENT VERSUS AUTHENTICITY

In the summer of 1996, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt did a little experi-
ment on himself: he went on Paxil, a mood-altering drug similar to Prozac.
He was not suffering from depression or any other seriously debilitating
condition, but he was curious to see what all the fuss over these kinds of
drugs was about:
For the first few weeks I had only side effects: some nausea, difficulty sleeping
through the night. . . . But then one day in week five, the world changed color. I
woke up one morning and no longer felt anxious about the heavy workload and
uncertain prospects of an untenured professor. It was like magic. A set of changes I
had wanted to make in myself for years—loosening up, lightening up, accepting my
mistakes without dwelling on them—happened overnight. However, Paxil had one
devastating side effect for me: it made it hard for me to recall facts and names, even
those I knew well. . . . I decided that as a professor I needed my memory more than I
needed peace of mind, so I stopped taking Paxil. Five weeks later, my memory came
back, along with my worries. What remained was a first-hand experience of wearing
rose-colored glasses, of seeing the world with new eyes (Haidt, 2006, 39–40).
Haidt’s experience raises one of the most common questions arising out of
human enhancement through pharmaceuticals: Which fellow is the real me?
If Haidt had not encountered the side effect of poor memory and had there-
fore stayed on the drug (as he unabashedly affirmed he would have done),
which man would have been the more authentic one: the anxious fellow
coping as best he could with his tenure worries, or the cheery young profes-
sor heartily enjoying the early years of his career? Is there something inher-
ently phony or disreputable about a state of light heartedness attained
through chemicals—even if that state is something to which a man has as-
pired all his life, and even if that state feels to him like a liberating release,
a chance to enjoy work and personal relationships much more fully and
deeply?
Implicit here are four very different meanings of personal authenticity:
Pristine Me. A condition or state in which I have remained pharmaceutically unmod-
ified, in the sense that I have ingested no mood-altering chemicals beyond those
contained in my customary diet.

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Potential Me (not yet realized). A condition or state of heightened wellness, fulfill-

ment, or virtue, implicit in me, and not yet attained by me. This is the self I aspire
to become someday.
Hard-earned Me (‘potential me’ realized through diligent work). After years of
therapy, self-scrutiny, disciplined reform of my mental habits, I attain a state much
closer to the self I have always wanted to be.
Pharmacological Me (‘potential me’ realized through pharmaceuticals). Shortly after
going on medication, and without any major side effects, I suddenly discover that I
have attained a state much closer to the self I have always wanted to be.
Even most opponents of enhancement technologies, such as Kass and Fuku-
yama, would no doubt accept a, b, and c as legitimate meanings of personal
authenticity. Pristine Me constitutes the baseline of the self given to me by
God or nature. Potential Me represents the aspiration most people feel to
become better persons over time, both in their relations with others and in
their own internal state of mind. Hard-earned Me embodies the successful
actualization (at least in part) of one’s human potential, achieved through
self-sacrifice and long struggle.
It is with Pharmacological Me that the problems begin. Leon Kass articu-
lates the conservative moral objection to this life path very well:
We want to perform better in the activities of life—but not by becoming mere crea-
tures of our chemists or by turning ourselves into bionic tools designed to win and
achieve in inhuman ways. . . . We want to be happy—but not by means of a drug
that gives us happy feelings without the real loves, attachments, and achievements
that are essential for true human flourishing (Kass, 2003, xvii).
The vivid image that Kass seems to have in mind here is Huxley’s Brave New
World, with its blandly homogeneous masses placated by soma, their lives
repulsive to us in their drudgery and meaninglessness. Two concepts lie at
the heart of the awful existence depicted by Huxley: the surrender of sover-
eignty over one’s life, and the experiential vacuity of work and relationships.
The people in Huxley’s dystopia are nothing but objects of emotional and
spiritual manipulation by their overseers, who regard them as so many func-
tional pawns, to be shaped and controlled at will. The drug soma is a power-
ful tool for that purpose. At the same time, although these people declare
themselves to be subjectively fulfilled, their lives give no grounds for such
fulfillment. Their loves and friendships are superficial; their thoughts and
impulses are channeled by conditioning; and their work is routinized and
unchallenging. It is this dual alienation that leads Kass, with justification, to
hold this up as a canonical exemplar of inauthentic existence.
But here’s the rub: Huxley’s dystopia is, by design, an extreme portrayal.
Why should we believe that all chemical interventions for mood control
necessarily lead down a path to the Brave New World? Jonathan Haidt’s
experiment with Paxil, described above, suggests a very different set of

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 652 Michael Bess

questions. What if the drugs, in some cases, end up rendering the life of an
already healthy person even more meaningful than before? What if, instead
of closing down possibilities for rich experience out in the real world, they
open up such possibilities in new ways? What if they are not a cheap substi-
tute for life’s adventures and misadventures, but rather a device allowing
people to broaden the range of their undertakings and interactions? What if
they enable people to have more enduring and engaging relationships, bet-
ter and more challenging work, and more imaginative and satisfying play?
What if, instead of alienating our sovereignty over ourselves, the chemicals
allow us to gain a greater measure of control over destructive psychological
patterns that have defeated all our past efforts to reorient them?
It will not do, therefore, to issue a blanket condemnation of all chemical
interventions for human enhancement, tarring them indiscriminately with
the same brush of inauthenticity. The quality of authenticity comes into our
lives through many paths, and some of those paths may well pass through
the doorway of pharmaceuticals. Just because we have modified our lives in
such a way, this does not necessarily mean that our experiences will be less
meaningful, less valuable, and less “real,” as a result. The very opposite may
sometimes be the case.

VII. ENHANCEMENT: THE AMBIGUITY BETWEEN “MORE” AND

“BETTER”

In the bioethics literature, we commonly encounter two meanings of the

word “enhancement.” One usage is quantitative and synonymous with “aug-
mentation,” as in the following sentence: “The drug Paxil greatly enhanced
the serotonin levels in specific sets of synapses in Jonathan Haidt’s brain.”
The other usage is evaluative and synonymous with “improvement,” as in
the following sentence: “Jonathan Haidt felt that the drug Paxil greatly en-
hanced his emotional state.”
The problem is that these two meanings are often used interchangeably,
which results in confusion, because not all augmentations necessarily lead to
improvements. In tuning a guitar, for example, there is a clear point at which
the correct state of a string’s tension has been reached, and any further aug-
mentation of its tightness will degrade rather than improve the instrument’s
performance. More is not always better.
This may seem like an obvious point, but it can easily lead to trouble in
the midst of a complex discussion of trait modification. To thinkers like Kass
and Fukuyama, for example, to speak of chemical enhancement of human
emotional states is, in one important sense, to prejudge the central moral
issue through the very terminology we use to frame the discussion. The
point they wish to call into question, in cases like Haidt’s use of Paxil, is
precisely whether such usage of a pharmaceutical truly constitutes a bettering

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 Enhanced Humans versus “Normal People” 653

of that person’s existence. It may be an augmentation in the person’s sense

of well-being, but is it really an improvement in the quality of the person’s
life path?

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

My purpose in this article has been to show why we need to use the word
“enhancement” with a certain amount of circumspection. In particular, we
need to be aware of the tendency to embed this concept within stark binary
oppositions that seem perfectly reasonable at first glance, but that in fact
yield little more than conceptual muddles if they are not handled carefully.
The idea of enhancement is often played off against concepts like “normal,”
“healthy,” “therapeutics,” “species typical,” “natural,” and “authentic” as foils
through which to define it. There is nothing inherently wrong with this;
indeed, it is probably unavoidable because these concepts form the neces-
sary basis on which most discussions of medicine, technology, and human
nature tend to take place.
The main problem, I have argued, lies in overestimating the clarity and
fixity of these basic concepts. They are not worthless ideas, because in a
great many cases they convey potent and useful meaning. A forest meadow
is a more natural place than a city. A person with pancreatic cancer is less
healthy than a person whose chief complaint is a tension headache. Wings
are not part of the species-typical profile of humans. Nevertheless, it is im-
portant to be aware of the gray areas that characterize all these concepts,
and to bear in mind the fact that, in many cases, we are really describing
broad, relative spectra of variation rather than straightforward, binary oppo-
sitions. Some of the resulting distinctions will be abundantly clear and pos-
sess a quality of intuitive absoluteness that leaves us trenchantly confident;
others will elude all our best efforts to pin them down, and leave us with
little more than a toss-up, a relative weighing of qualities irreducibly in ten-
sion with each other. The “authenticity” of Jonathan’s Haidt’s emotional
states, before and after taking Paxil, stands as a case in point: thoughtful
people who have carefully considered the implications of his story can still
end up in sharp disagreement.
We find ourselves, therefore, in an epistemological “middle zone.” On one
side, we have the misguided clarity of the binary oppositions. At the other
extreme lies the shapeless relativism that results if we simply throw out all
these concepts because of the aporias they unavoidably entail. We need to
reject both extremes, and acknowledge that some distinctions will wind up
relatively straightforward and satisfying, whereas others will leave us with a
frown of nervous compromise and approximation. One thing is clear: we
cannot let this epistemological instability stop us from proceeding with our
analysis. These topics are too important for that. But it nonetheless helps to
know where the main pitfalls lie.

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 654 Michael Bess

NOTES

1. Justice Stewart’s opinion is cited on the following Web site: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct

/html/historics/USSC_CR_0378_0184_ZC1.html. (Accessed May 20, 2010).
2. The scholarly and popular literature on human biological enhancement is voluminous and
growing rapidly. For a thematically organized bibliography (presently comprising some 500 titles and
counting), see the author’s project Web site at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/michaelbess
/Currentbookprojects (Accessed May 20, 2010).
3. For a definition of retardation, see the Web site of the American Association for Mental Retarda-
tion, http://www.aamr.org/content_100.cfm?navID=21 (Accessed May 20, 2010).
4. Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International
Health Conference, New York, June 19 to 22 July, 1946. The definition is available on the following Web
site: http://www.who.int/suggestions/faq/en/index.html (Accessed May 20, 2010).
5. I am adapting this vignette from the one given by David Allen and Norm Fost, quoted in Parens
(1998, 5–6).
6. Since the literature on transhumanism is vast (and growing rapidly), see the section on the topic
in the bibliography on the author’s project Web site at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/
michaelbess/Currentbookprojects (Accessed May 20, 2010).
7. The quotation comes from the site of the World Transhumanist Association: http://transhumani
sm.org/index.php/WTA/more/transhumanist-values/ (Accessed May 20, 2010).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the following institutions for supporting the research project from which
this article derives: the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned
Societies, the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications program of the National Human Genome Research
Institute, the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University, and the endowment for the Chancellor’s
Chair in History at Vanderbilt.

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