Ethical Principles Under the Challenge of Enhancing Medecine

Abstract

Our purpose in this article is to make a prospectivist evaluation of the enhancing medicine regarding the human nature. From this, we are interested by the future of humanity within the project of artificializing human life. In order to achieve our epistemological aim, we have distributed this work into three main parts. The first part is an analysis of medical ethical principles that are presented as the safety belt of human nature. The human being within Hippocratic tradition of medicine has always been treated with certain consideration since he is an absolute value. In all circumstances, physicians were bound to preserve live and protect human dignity. Then, the medical paradigm prevailing was the therapeutic one. In the second part, the concern is to scrutinize the biotechnological revolution mainly the process of genetic engineering. This revolution brought alongside medical practices another version of treating human being. It is the version of higher experimentation and scientific curiosity. Therefore, the practitioners of genetic engineering proceed by a profound intervention in human genome in order, not mainly to cure disease, but to discover what makes life and others human functions be possible. When these are discovered, they can program, design and enhance the future human being. This practice cannot go on without raising ethical questions such as the risk of alteration of human nature. It can also bring in the society the social injustice, giving the fact that those practices are more expensive to be at the level of all the social classes. The most eminent consequence of this social injustice is what we name bioimperialism where the natural human beings will become the slaves of artificial and enhanced human beings. Finally, we will bring a new perspective to contain the risks of enhancing medicine. It is necessary that man must recognize the limits of his power and the effects that the overuse of that power can generate as disasters. However, it is also relevant to notice that, enhancing medicine has already gained public opinion. Accordingly, theorical discourses of bioethicists and philosophical pessimism are not more able to bind the biomedical progress. What is important for bioethicists and humanity as whole, is a habitude of resilience consisting not of rejecting categorically the biomedical practices but to appreciate them according to the good there are able to achieve.