Michael Hauskeller

Ever since it was first unleashed in 1818 the story of Victor Frankenstein and his reanimated, stitched-together corpse has inspired intense debate. Can organic life be reanimated using electricity or genetic manipulation? If so, could Frankenstein’s monster really teach itself to read and speak as Mary Shelley imagined? Do monsters have rights, or responsibilities to those who would as soon kill them? What is it about music that so affects Frankenstein’s monster, or any of us? What does Mel Brook’s Frau Blucher say to contemporary eco-feminism? Why are some Frankenstein’s flops and others historic successes? Is there a true Frankenstein? Why are children, but not adults, drawn to Shelley’s monster? And what is a “monster,” anyway? Frankenstein and Philosophy calls 25 philosophers to stitch together these and other questions as they apply to history’s greatest horror franchise. Some chapters treat the Frankenstein films, others the original novel, and yet others the many comic books, novels, and modern adaptations. Together they pay tribute to perhaps the most enduring pop culture icon and the fundamental fears, hopes, and puzzles it raises.

In an age characterised by an increasing integration of advanced technology into our everyday lives, posthumanism has developed into a major intellectual force. It affects research agendas, economic developments, social policies, philosophical theories, and ultimately the way we understand ourselves. This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the various aspects of posthumanism and how they are represented, discussed and exemplified in the cultural medium of film and television. Understood broadly as any critical engagement with the possibility that the human condition is no longer a given, that it is more fluid than we once thought, and that we are, or will soon be, free to remould our constitutive framework and value systems, posthumanism is the next step in critical engagement in the humanities. It reflects upon the malleability of the human condition and acknowledges the fact that we are no longer the beings we thought we were, and that perhaps we never were.

I argue that Mill introduced the distinction between quality and quantity of pleasures in order to fend off the then common charge that utilitarianism is ‘a philosophy for swine’ and to accommodate the (still) widespread intuition that the life of a human is better, in the sense of being intrinsically more valuable, than the life of an animal. I argue that in this he fails because in order to do successfully he would have to show not only that the life of a human is preferable to that of an animal on hedonistic grounds, but also that it is in some sense nobler or more dignified to be a human, which he cannot do without tacitly presupposing non-hedonistic standards of what it means to lead a good life.

Michael Sandel's opposition to the project of human enhancement is based on an argument that centres on the notion of giftedness. Sandel claims that by trying to ?make better people? we fall prey to, and encourage, an attitude of mastery and thus lose, or diminish, our appreciation of the giftedness of life. Sandel's position and the underlying argument have been much criticised. In this paper I will try to make sense of Sandel's reasoning and give an account of giftedness that defends its relevance for the ethical assessment of the human enhancement project. In order to do so, I will also look at virtue-related notions, such as gratitude and humility, and distinguish the gifted from the merely given. The failure to acknowledge this distinction gives rise to one of the most common objections to Sandel's argument. Other objections will be shown to rest on similar misunderstandings

After showing that despite being inherently flawed the concept of dignity cannot be replaced without loss by ethical principles such as “respect for persons,” it is argued that, if dignity be not understood as dignitas, but as bonitas, which emphasizes connectedness rather than excellence and to which the proper response is not respect, but awe, there is no reason not to ascribe it to the human embryo. The question whether or not human embryos have dignity can then be answered in the affirmative on the same pragmatist grounds that ultimately lead us to respect other human persons as possessors of dignity, that is, a special moral worth

‘What’s wrong – fundamentally wrong – with the way animals are treated (…) isn’t the pain, the suffering, isn’t the deprivation. (…) The fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our resources, here for us – to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or exploited for sport or money.’\n\nTom Regan made this claim 20 years ago. What he maintains is basically that the fundamental wrong is not the suffering we inflict on animals but the way we look at them. What we do to them, what we believe we are allowed to do to them, is dependent on how we perceive or conceptualize them. We not only treat them as resources but prior to this we already think of them as resources, and when we look at them, all we tend to see is resources. In our perception of them they exist not for themselves but ‘for us’. But obviously it can only be fundamentally wrong in a moral sense to view them that way if it is wrong in a factual sense, that is, if animals are in fact not ‘for us’. But is it wrong?

Sorgner (2009, 29) has argued that Bostrom (2005, 4) was wrong to maintain that there are only surface-level similarities between Nietzsche’s vision of the overman, or overhuman, and the transhumanist conception of the posthuman. Rather, he claims, the similarities are “significant” and can be found “on a fundamental level”. However, I think that Bostrom was in fact quite right to dismiss Nietzsche as a major inspiration for transhumanism. There may be some common ground, but there are also essential differences, some of which I am going to point out in this brief reply.