Nicholas Agar, Jeff McMahan and Allen Buchanan have all expressed concerns about enhancing humans far outside the species-typical range. They argue radically enhanced beings will be entitled to greater and more beneficial treatment through an enhanced moral status, or a stronger claim to basic rights. I challenge these claims by first arguing that emerging technologies will likely give the enhanced direct control over their mental states. The lack of control we currently exhibit over our mental lives greatly contributes to our (...) sense of vulnerability. I then argue moral status should be viewed in terms of vulnerability. The enhanced will slowly gain the ability to command their mental states, reducing their vulnerability. These radically enhanced beings will have greater capacities, and possibly an inner life more valuable than our own. They will also be less vulnerable, and as a result, their moral status will be subordinate to our own. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 7, July 2019, Page 26-28.

Mobile health tools are often said to empower users by providing them with the information they need to exercise control over their health. We aim to bring clarity to this claim, and in doing so explore the relationship between empowerment and autonomy. We have identified three distinct models embedded in the empowerment rhetoric: empowerment as information, empowerment as control, and empowerment as values. Each distinct model of empowerment gives rise to an associated problem. These problems, the Problem of Interpretation, the (...) Value Alignment Problem, and the Priority Problem, show that mobile health tools in their current form are either insufficient for empowerment or are self‐defeating. These digital health technologies encourage users to adopt an individualized conception of autonomy, one that may weaken the doctor–patient relationship and undermine practices in shared decision making, and ultimately may not deliver on improving the health outcomes for those that need it the most. (shrink)

Sedlakova and Traschel (2023) propose limiting the scope and capabilities of psychotherapy-delivering conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), as (1) they deceive some users into thinking they...

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 44-46.