Academic Papers

Click on the paper title to go to the published article. If you don’t have access to the paper you want, feel free to email me for a copy.

Understanding the Relationship Between Disability and Enhancement in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

Abstract: This paper assesses how views of disability and enhancement can combine. It is hard to maintain that disabilities and enhancements are both undesirable. Disability-positive views can combine with support for or opposition to enhancement, but not with the view that enhanced traits reliably increase well-being. It is consistent to hold that disability is bad and enhancement good; the plausibility of this combination depends on whether it is better to have more options and fewer limitations. Understanding these combined positions makes it easier to check for consistency by evaluating positions on disability and enhancement against each other.

Is Enhancement Inherently Ableist? In Bioethics

Abstract: Transhumanists and other proponents of enhancement have been criticized for their attitude to disability. Melinda Hall argues that transhumanists denigrate disabled people by devaluing interdependence and vulnerability, and implying that disabled people are dangerous. It might also be thought that further development of enhancement technologies would have bad consequences within current, ableist and otherwise oppressive social contexts. This paper responds to these objections, arguing that enhancement needn’t be in conflict with disability justice. While enhancements can be used and promoted in ways that reinforce ableism and other oppression, ways of mitigating these problems might be found by drawing on ideas from the disability rights movement, and social justice movements more broadly. The development of more accessible environments, and a general openness to surprises about which traits promote well-being, can help to create conditions under which people have genuine choice over which enhancement technologies, if any, to use.