Monday 24 March 2025, 9am
Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne's College
Registration will open soon. In the meantime, please contact Andrew Moeller with any questions at andrew.moeller@history.ox.ac.uk.
Convenors: Andrew Moeller (Faculty of History); Jose Maria Andres Porras (Faculty of History); Alberto Giubilini (Uehiro Oxford Institute)
This conference is concerned with human enhancement, past and present. In the present, a broad set of developments across the fields of artificial intelligence and biology are unlocking transformational powers over the natural world. Within that context, a slew of proposals directed at the enhancement of humans have gained notoriety in recent years. These include selecting for traits through germline genome editing, linking or merging the human brain with artificial intelligence, and radical life extension.
Within the medical humanities and bioethics, one of the most familiar uses of the past as it pertains to deliberations over human enhancement is drawing upon the history of eugenics to inform moral assessments of modern-day practices that allow for exerting some level of control over inborn traits. Yet, many contemporary proposals for enhancement cannot be reasonably compared to the biological means of enhancement promoted by many nineteenth and twentieth-century eugenicists. The more limited applicability of the history of eugenics to deliberations relating to life extension and the linking of the human brain with AI, for example, serves as an encouragement to look to other past topics and themes that might function as better parallels and bring useful insights
Notably, past efforts aimed at enhancement were not limited to what might be described as the historic eugenics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, eugenic efforts aimed at enhancement can be placed within a much broader history of human enhancement that stretches back thousands of years and encompasses diverse efforts by human beings to overcome or transcend the bounded human form.
The Conference on History, Eugenics, and Human Enhancement brings together scholars from across disciplines to discuss how that past can and should inform the present.
What should be the role of the historian, philosopher, and other scholars be in contemporary moral debates over enhancement? What topics and time periods might even be relevant to such debates? What can we learn from past critics of human enhancement? What did proponents of enhancement believe to be at stake in their efforts? And what is at stake today as we ponder the morality and desirability of enhancement proposals?
Medical Humanities Research Hub, TORCH Research Hubs
