Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford Oxford, UK ; Faculty of Philosophy, Institute for Science and Ethics, University of Oxford Oxford, UK ; Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, University of Oxford Oxford, UK.
Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford Oxford, UK ; Faculty of Philosophy, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford Oxford, UK.
Front Syst Neurosci. 2014 Feb 4;8:12. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2014.00012. eCollection 2014.
The enhancement debate in neuroscience and biomedical ethics tends to focus on the augmentation of certain capacities or functions: memory, learning, attention, and the like. Typically, the point of contention is whether these augmentative enhancements should be considered permissible for individuals with no particular "medical" disadvantage along any of the dimensions of interest. Less frequently addressed in the literature, however, is the fact that sometimes the diminishment of a capacity or function, under the right set of circumstances, could plausibly contribute to an individual's overall well-being: more is not always better, and sometimes less is more. Such cases may be especially likely, we suggest, when trade-offs in our modern environment have shifted since the environment of evolutionary adaptation. In this article, we introduce the notion of "diminishment as enhancement" and go on to defend a welfarist conception of enhancement. We show how this conception resolves a number of definitional ambiguities in the enhancement literature, and we suggest that it can provide a useful framework for thinking about the use of emerging neurotechnologies to promote human flourishing.
记忆、学习、注意力等。通常，争议的焦点是这些增强性增强是否应该被认为对任何感兴趣的维度都没有特定“医学”劣势的个体是允许的。然而，文献中很少涉及的一个事实是，在适当的情况下，能力或功能的减弱可能有助于个人的整体幸福感：多并不总是好，有时少即是多。我们认为，当自进化适应环境以来，我们现代环境中的权衡发生变化时，这种情况可能尤其可能发生。在本文中，我们引入了“减弱即增强”的概念，并进一步为增强的功利主义概念辩护。我们展示了这种概念如何解决增强文献中的一些定义上的模糊性，并表明它可以为思考利用新兴神经技术促进人类繁荣提供一个有用的框架。
