View article

Like genetic manipulation, but perhaps with more realistic possibilities, nanotechnology is linked to a variety of post-human futures, where consciousness can be" downloaded" onto electronic media, where human sensory apparatus will be linked to spatially dispersed information gathering devices, where intelligence will be distributed amongst various brains and computing capabilities and where the vagaries of the human body will be bolstered by devices that increase its physical power and resistance to external threats. This paper will not engage the ethical and ontological issues of the distant post-human future directly. Instead, I will probe its opposite: the disenhancement of non-human animals' capabilities in the present and near term, a set of technological possibilities exemplified by the blind chicken problem, discussed below. Here we have a set of ethical quandaries that have already been widely discussed, and yet, I will argue, little progress has been made in articulating exactly what the ethical issue actually is. I make no overt claims about the ethics of human enhancement, though my suspicion is that similarly inchoate concerns pervade this area as well.