An Ethical Assessment of Human Enhancements based on Michael J. Sandel’s Ethics of Giftedness

Abstract

Having found the familiar moral vocabulary about ethics, bioethics, or moral philosophy inadequate to address philosophical challenges like genetic engineering or human enhancements, Michael J. Sandel proposes his ‘ethics of giftedness’ to find out what is exactly at stake in the biotechnological debates on these issues. The central focus of the paper is to analyse the validity of Sandel’s “Ethics of Giftedness” argument and to investigate the viability of the normative significance of human nature. In the first part, we analyse the reasons for Sandel’s unease with human enhancements, which led him to appeal to the ethics of giftedness. We discuss and evaluate how human enhancements affect three main features of the moral landscape, namely, humility, responsibility, and solidarity. The second part constitutes a critical investigation of Sandel’s giftedness argument from various perspectives by examining the viability of Sandel’s ethics of giftedness only to propose that Sandel’s argument is likely to become more forceful if it leaves space for the inclusion of the distinction between the “gift” and the “given.” Finally, based on Sandel’s concerns about human nature that are likely to be affected by human enhancements, we investigate whether human nature has any normative significance in the ethical appraisal of human enhancements, and we argue for the latter based on human vulnerability that is an inevitable and distinctive property of human nature.