History, Eugenics, and Human Enhancement: How the Past Can Inform Ethical Debates in the Present
Monday 24 March 2025, 9am - 5.30pm
Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne's College
Register via Eventbrite. Free lunch & coffee breaks provided for those who register. Please note places are limited.
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?
Programme:
9am - 9.10am Welcome/Introduction: Andrew Moeller (Oxford) & Jose Maria Andres Porras (UNC; Oxford)
9.10am - 10.30am Panel 1: The Long History of Human Enhancement
Chair: Sophie Page (UCL)
Panelists:
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Jose Maria Andres Porras (UNC-Oxford) - Late Medieval “Eugenics” and the Betterment of Society
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Meagan S. Allen (John Hopkins University) - No One Wants to Live Forever: Ethical and Natural Concerns Surrounding the Extreme Prolongation of Life in the Middle Ages
10.30am - 10.45am Coffee Break
10.45 - 12.05 Panel 2: On the Place of History and the Historian
Chair: Katrien Devolder (Oxford)
Panelists:
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Andrew Moeller (Oxford) - History as the Wisdom of Lived Experience
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Marius Turda (Oxford Brookes) - “We Are Not Alone”: Reflecting on the Legacies of Eugenics
12.05am - 1pm Lunch Break
1pm - 2.20pm Panel 3: Eugenics after the Second World War
Chair: Ann-Marie Shorrocks (Oxford)
Panelists:
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Alex Aylward (Oxford) - Eugenics Evolving: Continuity and Change across the Eugenic Century
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Heloise Robsinon (Oxford) - Is Eugenics Still with US?
2.20pm - 2.35pm Coffee Break
2.35pm - 3.55pm Panel 4: Critics of Enhancement
Chair: John Lidwell-Durnin (Exeter)
Panelists:
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Keith Lemna (St Meinrad) - Reasons of the Heart and the Human Quest for Perfection
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Carlos López Beltrán (UNAM) - Cynics of Enhancement: From 18th Century France to 20th Century Mexico
3.55pm - 4.10pm Coffee Break
4.10pm - 5.25pm The Moral Stakes of Germline Genome Editing
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Moderator: Alberto Guibilini
Discussants:
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Julian Savulescu (NUS)
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Ben Hurlbut (ASU)
5.25pm - 5.30pm Conclusion
- William Hurlbut (Stanford)
Andrew Moeller is a historian and ethicist who is a researcher in ethics and humanities and co-director of religious outreach for the Boundaries of Humanity Project, based at Stanford University. He is also an associate member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. His historical work focuses on the history of eugenics and other population control measures, as well as the intersecting history of Christianity in the twentieth century. His contemporary work, aligned with the goals of the Boundaries of Humanity Project, explores how notions of human uniqueness and identity might shape public and private engagement with emerging biotechnologies.
Marius Turda, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is Professor of Biomedicine and Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University, having previously taught at UCL and University of Oxford. He was the founding director of the 'Cantemir Institute' at the University of Oxford. He has authored, co-authored and edited more than 20 books on the history of eugenics, race, and racism in East-Central Europe and beyond, including Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Race published in 6 volumes in 2021 (paperback 2025). He has also curated four exhibitions on eugenics, racial anthropology and biopolitics, most notably the one entitled 'We are not Alone': Legacies of Eugenics. His most recent public engagement project is www.confront-eugenics.org.
Katrien Devolder Katrien Devolder is Professor of Applied Ethics at the University of Oxford, Director of Public Philosophy at the Uehiro Oxford Institute, and an Official Fellow at Reuben College. She is Subject Editor (Practical Ethics) of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Associate Editor of the Journal of Practical Ethics. She previously held a Marie Curie Fellowship at Oxford to complete a project on moral complicity of medical professionals in others’ wrongdoing, and a Wellcome Trust Fellowship to work on her project ‘The Ethics of Genome Editing in Livestock’.
Jose Maria Andres Porras (DPhil) is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as an associate member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. His work explores the intellectual, cultural, and social history of Western Europe in the late Middle Ages with a special focus on the early Italian renaissance. In particular, he is interested in the history of the body and medicine, natural philosophy, and political theology. Of late, he has also been thinking about social ontology and its relation to a host of philosophical questions such as individuation, mereology, and organicism.
Meagan S. Allen is a historian of Medieval science, specializing in the alchemical medicine of the high and late Middle Ages. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of alchemy, pharmacology, and theology, especially in the writings of the Franciscan polymath Roger Bacon (d. 1292). Allen is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Roger Bacon and the Incorruptible Human: Alchemy, Pharmacology, and the Desire to Prolong Life (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), and the editor of The Sciences of Roger Bacon's Opus Maius (Routledge, Forthcoming 2025).
Keith Lemna is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Saint Meinrad Seminary in the United States. He is the author of The Apocalypse of Wisdom and The Trinitarian Wisdom of God. He has published in a wide array of scholarly journals. His research focuses, in part, on the intertwining of theology and philosophy in the continental tradition, particularly in the phenomenological tradition after Edmund Husserl. Keith is a member of the Boundaries of Humanity project.
Alex Aylward is a historian of science based in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. His research focuses upon the history of the life and human sciences, especially their evolving political implications and societal applications across the modern period. His work has appeared in journals such as The British Journal for the History of Science and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and he is finishing a book on the work of British statistician, geneticist and eugenicist R. A. Fisher.
Heloise Robinson is the Singer Fellow in Law at Exeter College, Oxford. She holds a DPhil in Law from Oxford, and her research mainly focuses on medical law, bioethics, and disability in law and philosophy, and she also writes on equality, human rights, and feminist legal theory. Her publications relate, among other things, to abortion on the grounds of disability, stigma theory and human rights, and pregnancy and personhood. She is currently writing a monograph which examines the role of the state in the context of prenatal selection practices which aim to prevent the birth of a disabled child. The book analyses issues surrounding eugenics, disability rights, and gender equality.
Carlos López Beltrán is a writer, poet, and senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) since 1992. He specializes in philosophical, historical, and social studies of life sciences - biology, medicine, anthropology - with a special focus on the representations and practices linked to hereditary transmission. He has recently turned his attention to the modes of racialization of genomic sciences, especially in the context of American mestizaje. Carlos completed his PhD at King’s College, London and has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris-VII, at the REHSEIS of the CNRS in Paris, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and at the Autonomous University of Madrid, among others.
Julian Savulescu is the Chen Su Lan Professor in Medical Ethics at the National University of Singapore, where he directs the Centre for Biomedical Ethics. An award-winning ethicist and moral philosopher, he trained in neuroscience, medicine, and philosophy, going on to hold the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford from 2002, where he founded the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in 2003, before moving to NUS in 2022. He co-directs the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. He is Distinguished Visiting Professorial Fellow at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Melbourne Law School, where he directs the Biomedical Ethics Research Group. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest.
J. Benjamin Hurlbut is Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is trained in science and technology studies (STS) with a focus on the history of the modern biomedical and life sciences, and his research lies at the intersection of intersection of STS, bioethics and political theory. He studies the changing relationships between science, politics and law in the governance of biomedical research and innovation, examining the interplay of science and technology with democracy, religious and moral pluralism, and public reason. He is the author of Experiments in Democracy: Human Embryo Research and the Politics of Bioethics (Columbia University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.
William B. Hurlbut is Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Scholar in Neurobiology at the Stanford Medical School. He is the founder and principal investigator of the Boundaries of Humanity Project. His primary areas of interest involve the ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology, the biological basis of moral awareness, and studies in the integration of theology with the philosophy of biology. He is the author of numerous publications on science and ethics. In addition to teaching at Stanford, he has also worked with NASA on projects in astrobiology and was a member of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Working group at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. From 2002-2009, Dr. Hurlbut served on the President’s Council on Bioethics.
