Sagar Sanyal

Sagar Sanyal implores us to look beyond the analytical just war tradition in our thinking about humanitarian intervention. The standards and assumptions built into this approach are its trappings: they necessarily limit our appreciation of what is at stake, morally and politically. What is more, if we persist in this approach Sanyal fears that philosophers of war and military ethicists will become ‘decreasingly relevant to political reality’. To avoid this fate, Sanyal argues, Marxist concepts and precepts must be taken more seriously in our appraisal of war and conflict. If we start with a Marxist understanding of states and the wars they wage—as rooted in economic competition and driven by imperialist ambitions—we will be in a better position to confront the problems of the real world.

We humans can enhance some of our mental and physical abilities above the normal upper limits for our species with the use of particular drug therapies and medical procedures. We will be able to enhance many more of our abilities and be able to do so in more ways in the not-too-distant future. Some commentators have welcomed the prospect of human enhancement technologies becoming widely used, while others have viewed it with alarm and have made clear that they find human enhancement morally objectionable. Unfortunately the debate over the ethics of human enhancement appears to have reached an impasse, with proponents and opponents of human enhancement drawing on different intellectual traditions, relying on different methodologies and ‘talking past one another’. In order to move this debate forward, we need either to find new ways of understanding the current debate or to develop new ways of thinking about the ethics of human enhancement. In this volume leading philosophers and bioethicists invite us to adopt new ways to think about the ongoing debate, either by drawing on work in psychology that helps to explain common reactions to the prospect of human enhancement or by finding points of comparison between the current debate about the ethics of human enhancement and other academic debates, such as the debate about justice for people with disabilities. Other contributors offer original lines of argument about the ethics of human enhancement and seek to take that debate in new directions.

The chapter presents an overview of the major lines of debate in the ethics of human enhancement. While permissive and restrictive positions on enhancement can be contrasted, the conservative camp (which is the focus of the book as a whole) is a specific subset of the latter. Although the restrictive but non-conservative position is outlined, most of the chapter is devoted to the themes and arguments of the conservative camp. To give a well-rounded account of the conservative position, the chapter begins with connections to the tradition of social conservatism, before moving to prominent themes in the conservative opposition to human enhancement. These include the charge of ‘playing God’, the appeal to intuition or emotion, human dignity, and the connection to eugenics. The final section of the chapter surveys some of the recent work in moral psychology that the human enhancement debate increasingly draws upon.

Ethical debate surrounding human enhancement, especially by biotechnological means, has burgeoned since the turn of the century. Issues discussed include whether specific types of enhancement are permissible or even obligatory, whether they are likely to produce a net good for individuals and for society, and whether there is something intrinsically wrong in playing God with human nature. We characterize the main camps on the issue, identifying three main positions: permissive, restrictive and conservative positions. We present the major sub-debates and lines of argument from each camp. The review also gives a flavor of the general approach of key writers in the literature such as Julian Savulescu, Nick Bostrom, Michael Sandel, and Leon Kass

US military intervention and covert action is a significant contributor to global injustice. Discussion of this contributor to global injustice is relatively common in social justice movements. Yet it has been ignored by the global justice literature in political philosophy. This paper aims to fill this gap by introducing the topic into the global justice debate. While the global justice debate has focused on inter-national and supra-national institutions, I argue that an adequate analysis of US military and covert action must focus on domestic institutions of the US. I describe many such institutions including industry lobbying, the ubiquity of US military bases abroad, US programs for training foreign militaries, secrecy of the intelligence and military agencies, pliant news media and government propaganda.<br>.

Allen Buchanan has argued for a linking of the ethics of human enhancement to the ethics of development more generally. The promise of the ‘enhancement enterprise' is that it may help develop society, just as other technological advances have in the past. He proposes a framework of intellectual property rights, government action to ensure the poor can access the enhancements, an international organization to administer the diffusion of new enhancement technologies from the West to poor countries, and the diffusion within countries to the poorer populations. I take seriously his proposal of discussing biomedical enhancement in terms of the ethics of development. On these grounds of assessment, I argue that his proposal is politically conservative. To make the case, I distinguish conservatism in ethics from conservatism in politics; and I contextualize the proposal against the background of development economics and the neoliberal approach to development.