Utilitarian Morality and Deontological Amoralism of Transhumanist Ideology
Abstract
The ethics of transhumanism is a utilitarian ethics. The aim of the transhumanist project of human enhancement is to increase the physical, mental and social well-being of the human being, i.e. to increase the sum of the happiness of individual and the community of which he or she is a part. The content of these considerations is to identify and describe what constitutes the ultimate basis of transhumanist ethics and, at the same time, marks the boundary beyond which transhumanist projects of human enhancement projects cannot go. We argue that this basis and at the same time the limit of moral acceptability of actions is the preservation of the personal identity of the subject. We understand this identity in the Cartesian sense, i.e. as the relation in which the subject’s self-consciousness remains to its corporeality. Transhumanist human enhancement thus becomes immoral if it can lead to the loss of the individual’s memory of past relations between his or her self-consciousness and his or her corporeality.
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