Virtue Ethics and Human Enhancement

Book excerpt: This book shows how pressing issues in bioethics – e.g. the ownership of biological material and human cognitive enhancement – successfully can be discussed with in a virtue ethics framework. This is not intended as a complete or exegetic account of virtue ethics. Rather, the aim here is to discuss how some key ideas in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, when interpreted pragmatically, can be a productive way to approach some hot issues in bioethics. In spite of being a very promising theoretical perspective virtue ethics has so far been underdeveloped both in bioethics and neuroethics and most discussions have been conducted in consequentialist and/or deontological terms. ​