ReviewBMC medical ethics2017
Limits to human enhancement: nature, disease, therapy or betterment?
Review in BMC medical ethics, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Clashing Perspectives? Two Approaches to the Desirability of Biological Aging.Health care analysis : HCA : journal of health philosophy and policy · 2026Article
- The Right to Remain Unaugmented: A Critical Response to Braidotti's Posthuman Ethics for AI.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2026Article
- It is time to rethink proprioception: From biological feedback to integrable augmentation.Journal of sport and health science · 2026Article
- Well-being and enhancement: reassessing the welfarist account.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2025Article
- The irrationality of human confidence that an ageless existence would be better.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2024Article
- Adapting Ourselves, Instead of the Environment: An Inquiry into Human Enhancement for Function and Beyond.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Article
- Managing the moral expansion of medicine.BMC medical ethics · 2022Article
- Enhancing the collectivist critique: accounts of the human enhancement debate.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2021Article
- The role of philosophy and ethics at the edges of medicine.Philosophy, ethics, and humanities in medicine : PEHM · 2021Article
- Pharmacological Human Enhancement: An Overview of the Looming Bioethical and Regulatory Challenges.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Review
- Expanding disease and undermining the ethos of medicine.European journal of epidemiology · 2019Article
- Human Enhancement: Enhancing Health or Harnessing Happiness?Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2019Article
- Evaluating facts and facting evaluations: On the fact-value relationship in HTA.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2018Article
- The gene-editing of super-ego.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2018Article
- How medical technologies shape the experience of illness.Life sciences, society and policy · 2018Article
- Young Blood Rejuvenates Old Bodies: A Call for Reflection when Moving from Mice to Men.Transfusion medicine and hemotherapy : offizielles Organ der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur Transfusionsmedizin und Immunhamatologie · 2018Article
- Digital Twins in Health Care: Ethical Implications of an Emerging Engineering Paradigm.Frontiers in genetics · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundNew technologies facilitate the enhancement of a wide range of human dispositions, capacities, or abilities. While it is argued that we need to set limits to human enhancement, it is unclear where we should find resources to set such limits. DISCUSSION: Traditional routes for setting limits, such as referring to nature, the therapy-enhancement distinction, and the health-disease distinction, turn out to have some shortcomings. However, upon closer scrutiny the concept of enhancement is based on vague conceptions of what is to be enhanced. Explaining why it is better to become older, stronger, and more intelligent presupposes a clear conception of goodness, which is seldom provided. In particular, the qualitative better is frequently confused with the quantitative more. We may therefore not need "external" measures for setting its limits - they are available in the concept of enhancement itself. While there may be shortcomings in traditional sources of limit setting to human enhancement, such as nature, therapy, and disease, such approaches may not be necessary. The specification-of-betterment problem inherent in the conception of human enhancement itself provides means to restrict its unwarranted proliferation. We only need to demand clear, sustainable, obtainable goals for enhancement that are based on evidence, and not on lofty speculations, hypes, analogies, or weak associations. Human enhancements that specify what will become better, and provide adequate evidence, are good and should be pursued. Others should not be accepted.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.