''hyper-agency,'

Even legalsystems have been moral enhancements

small numbers of people

Wal-Mart there are over one hundred and thirty drugs that used to be on patent and have now gone off patent and gone generic,

If you're thinking about something like surgical procedures

seemed to be much more positive and seemed to convey that people could have quite legitimate interests in cognitive enhancement technologies, and that the people who desire these technologies aren't just cranks or people who have inappropriate desires

The misleading assumption is that if wedon't interfere, we're going to continue the way we are, and of course that goes completely contrary to everything we know about evolution.

summit of perfection

Yes, in one sense we might say that it's part of human nature to strive to improve our capacities. Humans have done this in the past by developing literacy and numeracy, and the institutions of science, and more recently we've done it with computers and the Internet

“I’m talking about being able to take on twice the responsibility, work twice as fast, write more effectively, manage better, be more attentive, devise better and more creative strategies.”

But others insist that the ethics are not so clear, and that academic performance is different in important ways from baseball, or cycling

Among high school students, abuse of prescription medications is second only to cannabis use.”

“The original purpose of medicine is to heal the sick, not turn healthy people into gods.

Some argue that such use could be worse, given the potentially deep impact on society. And the behavior of academics in particular, as intellectual leaders, could serve as an example to others.

regular use of prescription drugs like Adderall, a stimulant, and Provigil, which promoteswakefulness,

pays only financial compensation for having unintentionally caused the miscarriage,

The Talmud also explains that the embryo is part of the mother’s body and has no identity of its own, since it is dependent for its life upon the body of the woman

Once the head of the child has come out, the child may not be harmed because it is considered as fully born, and one life may not be taken to save another

“If a woman is having difficulty in giving birth [and her life is in danger], one cuts up the fetus within her womb and extracts it limb by limb, because her life takes precedence over that of the fetus

Dolphins had a sense of self which could be tested bythe way they recognise themselves in mirrors, sheadded

A person needs to be an individual. If individuals count, then the deliberate killing of individualsof this sort is ethically the equivalent of deliberately killing a human being.

This has led the experts to conclude that althoughnon-human, dolphins and whales are "people" in aphilosophical sense, which has far-reachingimplications.

recommended that experiments on embryos left over from in vitro fertilization should be restricted to aperiod of 14 days after conception,

But somewhere between 20 and 32 weeks gestation, the cortical neurons become capable of firing in ways that make consciousness possible.

No one is "there" anymore to benefit from such treatment;

How can we know that a person has died, or when are we justified in declaring a person to be dead?

we logically exclude many vulnerable human populations from the category of persons, and thus from the rights we ascribe to persons, which is very troubling.

a being need not have all of these attributes in order properly to be considered a person in some sense.

To be classified as a "person" normally entails having strong moral rights and legal protections,

If the soul is immaterial, then it can have no location in space, and thus cannot be contained by any physical brain or body.

but religious traditions have affirmed similar beliefs for millennia

jus ti ceandme rcy

r,ther e mustbe fixedmoralstandardsagainstwhi ch we ca n judg e our actions and po licies . If therewer eno such stand ards, we wou ld haveno gr oundsfo r thinkingthat thingsar ebett er now than the y w

Leib niz’s po int is that if thing s are neitherright nor wr ong independentlyofGod’swil l, then God cannotchoo se one thing over another becauseit isrigh t. Thusif he does choo se one over anot her, hi s c

Neit her an individualno r a societycan mak e an act ion right by appr ovingit.

No, becausethey both be li eve that mur der is wro ng. Whatthe y dis -agre e aboutis the natureof the fet us. Is a fe tus the sort of thing th at can bemurdered?

According to Asch,peoplein dif fe rent culturesar rive at diffe rent moral jud g-mentsnot becausethey hav e diff ere nt view s ab ou t the nat ure of morality, butbecausethe y have differentvie ws about the natur

Peopleused to fee l str onglythat the re wa s noth ing wr ong with ow ningslav es. But that didn’tmakeslaverymor ally pe rm

The anthropological argument for cu lturalrelat ivis m says tha t beca use peoplein differentcul tures disagreeabo ut the moralityof various actions,the re are nouniversalmor al standa

the ra bbit’spain is neither goodnor bad. It maymoveyou to ex press an

emotionsrath er than to make

Whenwe sa y that an actionis right , we are mer ely sayingthat weapproveof it.

utism:the view that whatmakes an actionrigh t is thatone approvesof i

u re , the diff er ence s in moralbeliefscan be v

time . If a theoryof moralit y impli es that we don’ t dothesething s— if it im pl ies tha t we don’tmakemor al judgments, get int omoraldi spute s, or act immoral ly— there’sreasonto be lieve that it’ s m

a of inqu iry, the re is a dynamicinter play be -twee n data and

Manypeoplelearnhow to act morallyby beingta ught a mo ra

us t as virtuouspeoplecan do the wrongth ing, so can vicious peo ple dothe right t

Peopleused to fee l str onglythat the re wa s noth ing wr ong with ow ningslav es. But that didn’tmakeslaverymor ally pe rm

It is generally held that persons who are equals should qualify for equaltreatment.

The foreseeable unintended consequence (thoughundesired) is the death of the fetus.

By contrast, in an emergency, if thepatient in question happens to be a ten year old child, and the parents refusepermission for a life saving blood transfusion, in the State of Washingtonand other states as well, there is legal precedence for overriding the parent'swishes by appealing to the Juvenile Court Judge who is authorized by thestate to protect the lives of its citizens, particularly minors, until they reachthe age of majority and can make such choices independently.

Desiring to "benefit"the patient, the physician may strongly want to provide a blood transfusion,believing it to be a clear "medical benefit."

Four commonly accepted principles

a prima facie duty

principles in current usage in health care ethics seem to be ofself-evident value and of clear application

Such guidelines would need to be broadly acceptable among thereligious and the nonreligious and for persons across many differentcultures.

Hast y Gene ra l

Appealto the Mass

it relieson factors of human judgm ent that resis

cri teri a of adeq

it will have the same so rt of eff ect

lid, they ca n still give us goodreas ons for believingtheir conc lusions pr ovided that cert ain co ndit ions areme

Theone thi ng it cannot ha ve is true premisesand a fal se conclus

You don’t want to misr epre sent th

r, beca us e th ere may be sever a

Anargument, th en, is a group of cla ims cons is ting of one or mor epremisesand a conclus ion that supposedlyfollow s from the pr

What is justice?” “What is virtue?” “What is knowledge?”

Determining whether a condition is necessary or sufficient for something involves deciding whether it’s possible for the thing to exist without the con-dition being met, or vice versa

the existence of evil.

We all have a philosophy, for we all have beliefs about what is real, what is valuable, and how we come to know what is real and valuable.

In other words, something can be logically pos-sible even though it’s causally impossible. Something is causally impossible if and only if it violates a law of nature.

In order to think about the world, your thoughts must have a specific content; they must represent the world as being one way rather than another.

Unlike science, however, philosophy is more concerned with explaining how it’s possible for concepts to apply than how it’s possible for events to occur.

o if being pleasing to the gods is what makes something holy, something could be holy and unholy at the same time.

As we have seen, philosophical problems arise because some of our most fun-damental beliefs seem to conflict with one another. To solve these problems, we have to eliminate the conflict. The first step in this process is arriving at a correct view of the things those beliefs are about

Who we are seems to be closely tied to our memories.

But if every event has a cause, then it would seem that noth-ing we do is up to us, for all of our actions are determined by forces beyond our control.

For example, many in the West believe that the world contains physical objects, that our senses give us knowledge of those objects, and that our selves are legitimate objects of concern. Many in the East, however, deny all three of these claims. For them, consciousness is the only reality, mystical experience is the only source of knowledge, and belief in the existence of the self is the root of all evil. As a result, they lead very different lives than we do.

Some would say that that makes the answers unknowable. But to say that something is unknowable is to have already answered the question about the nature of knowledge. You can’t claim that something is unknowable without assuming a particular theory of knowledge.