* Should Human Beings Have Sex? Sexual Dimorphism and Human Enhancement
* The Risks of “Sexual Normalcy”
* Humans Should Be Free of All Biological Limitations Including Sex
* Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “Human Dignity and Transhumanism: Do Anthro-Technological Devices [nonbiological entities introduced into or attached to the human body] Have Moral Status?”
The whole discipline of bioethics is basically about trolling... or they're serious :/.
Abstract/Extract
Since the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artifact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of fetal sex via ultrasound along with the option of termination, means that we now have the power to choose the sex of our children. An influential contemporary line of thought about medical ethics suggests that we should use technology to serve the welfare of individuals and to remove limitations on the opportunities available to them. I argue that, if these are our goals, we may do well to move towards a “post sex” humanity. Until we have the technology to produce genuine hermaphrodites, the most efficient way to do this is to use sex selection technology to ensure that only girl children are born. There are significant restrictions on the opportunities available to men, around gestation, childbirth, and breast-feeding, which will be extremely difficult to overcome via social or technological mechanisms for the foreseeable future. Women also have longer life expectancies than men. Girl babies therefore have a significantly more “open” future than boy babies. Resisting the conclusion that we should ensure that all children are born the same sex will require insisting that sexual difference is natural to human beings and that we should not use technology to reshape humanity beyond certain natural limits. The real concern of my paper, then, is the moral significance of the idea of a normal human body in modern medicine.
I thought "Bioethics attracts all the weirdos who want to propose really off the wall crazy crap" until I read that list. People actually get paid to write stuff like that?
Things vary considerably, partly because there's no real central registry for journal names: If you're the Journal of X, it just means you were the first organization audacious enough to pick that name, not necessarily that you're actually a legitimate representative of field X.
There are, fortunately, some somewhat more sane bioethics journals, like the one named Bioethics, which has article titles that at least seem to involve legitimate issues at the intersection of medical practice and ethics, like, "Addiction and Autonomy: Can Addicted People Consent to the prescription of their drug of addiction?": http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0269-9702
I can't build (for example) a doomsday device that will eliminate all life on Earth. I still think I should be allowed to disagree with the building of one.
Alright, let's ignore research because it complicates the matter. Correct doomsday device scenario to "I've never carried out genocide, but I still think I should be able to disagree with it."
But you shouldn't have the right to block research that could hypothetically one day lay the groundwork for building such a device. Otherwise let's shut all the physics labs tomorrow.
Let's take a look at the Table of Contents of the Journal of Bioethics shall we (http://www.bioethics.net/journal/)
* Should Human Beings Have Sex? Sexual Dimorphism and Human Enhancement
* The Risks of “Sexual Normalcy”
* Humans Should Be Free of All Biological Limitations Including Sex
* Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “Human Dignity and Transhumanism: Do Anthro-Technological Devices [nonbiological entities introduced into or attached to the human body] Have Moral Status?”
The whole discipline of bioethics is basically about trolling... or they're serious :/.