Authenticity and Ambivalence: Toward Understanding the Enhancement Debate‪.‬

As both a participant in, and an observer of the "enhancement debate" over the last decade, I am intrigued by how frequently this debate features decent, smart people talking past each other. To suggest a way to understand its structure, and maybe even to gesture toward improving its tenor, I want to do three things. First, I want to suggest that both proponents and critics of so-called "enhancement technologies" proceed from a "moral ideal of authenticity," although they differ in how they understand it. Here I'm trying to emphasize that critics and proponents share more than they usually remember in the heat of academic battle. Second, I want to suggest that these different understandings of authenticity grow out of two different but equally worthy ethical frameworks, which stand in a fertile tension with each other. I will emphasize that reasons alone cannot account for why most of us feel more comfortable in one framework than in the other and that none of us feels comfortable only in one of them--we all move back and forth between them, to some extent. Finally, I will discuss two examples to show that, on reflection, none of us should want to speak only out of the framework in which we feel most comfortable. If understanding is what we are after, we should embrace rather than suppress the ambivalence we often experience when we think about specific interventions. The Moral Ideal of Authenticity