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The American Journal of Bioethics
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Personhood, Welfare, and Enhancement
Hugh Desmond
To cite this article: Hugh Desmond (2022) Personhood, Welfare, and Enhancement, The
American Journal of Bioethics, 22:9, 37-39, DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2022.2105428
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THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOETHICS
2022, VOL. 22, NO. 9, 37–39
https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2022.2105428
OPEN PEER COMMENTARIES
Personhood, Welfare, and Enhancement
Hugh Desmond
a,b
a
Leibniz Universitat Hannover;
b
University of Antwerp
The debate on enhancement ethics cannot escape
some of the deeper questions troubling the concept of
personhood. That is, in a sentence, my reading of
Robert Sparrow’s target article (Sparrow 2022). This
development is significant for enhancement ethics,
because personhood has assumed the grounding role
once played by human nature. Thinking in terms of
effects on persons (instead of on human nature) fits
in with liberal approaches to enhancement, where
enhancements are either like life choices to be regu-
lated along libertarian principles, or like goods such as
education to be regulated along principles of fairness.
Genetic enhancement in particular can be subsumed
under parental autonomy: parents choosing the best
for their child. However, insofar the liberal approach
rests on the metaphysical fulcrum of personhood,
problems with the latter reverberate throughout
enhancement ethics. In this commentary I will add
two problems to those already identified by Sparrow:
one regarding person-affecting enhancement, and the
other regarding identity-affecting enhancement.
A PROBLEM FOR PERSON-AFFECTING
ENHANCEMENT
What is the object of enhancement? The standard
answer is: a person, and more specifically, a person’s
welfare (defined as the total of benefits minus harms
befalling that person). However, Parfit divorces wel-
fare from personhood. According to Parfit, there is
nothing more to a person than different gradations of
“psychological connectedness”(Parfit 1984, 215).
Parfit argued for this by means various futuristic puz-
zles regarding personal identity (brain transplants;
teletransportation; and so on), but his metaphysics
ultimately concerned ethics: if one could adopt this
reductionist stance on personhood, the impersonality
required by genuine utilitarianism made sense. What
matters is the quality of experiences being had, not
whether those experiences are being had by you or by
me, or even by someone at great spatiotemporal dis-
tance (Parfit 1984, 346).
Like many utilitarians, in no meaningful way does
Parfit speak of how utilitarian calculations should be
affected by the particulars of the social structures in
which a person is contingently embedded, such as
families, communities, or institutions. Experiences just
are there. If one adopts the Parfitian reductionism
towards persons, the social embeddedness of persons
(or more exactly, the embeddedness of loci of psycho-
logical connectedness) poses a problem for the con-
cept of “person-affecting enhancement”. For when the
subjective experiences of welfare are so connected
with external social processes, how much sense does it
still have to maintain that a “person”is the object of
enhancement?
As a first illustration of what I have in mind, con-
sider one of the most straightforward forms of human
enhancement: athletic enhancement. Who are athletes
aiming to benefit when they choose performance-
enhancing drugs? Themselves? Not if the athlete is a
true Parfitian. A Parfitian athlete would be moved by
the prospect of giving millions of sports fans a more
enjoyable experience, or of giving more prize earnings
to charity. Most athletes, of course, are not Parfitian.
They report on motivations to obtain a “hero status”
and financial gain without any further goal beyond
their own benefit (see discussion in Desmond 2021,
CONTACT Hugh Desmond hugh.desmond@gmail.com Department of Philosophy, Leibniz Universitat Hannover, Hannover, 30167, Germany;
Department of Philosophy, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, 2000, Belgium.
ß2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOETHICS 37
38). Nonetheless, we could question here who pre-
cisely is intended to receive the future benefit from
the athletic doping. Is it the future person—consti-
tuted of a rich interconnectedness of memories, val-
ues, experiences? Or, a socialized idealization of their
future self that the athlete has constructed?
Sparrow elucidates a structurally similar example
when pointing out that acting as to maximize welfare
would dictate that parents choose the embryos best
adapted to racist, sexist, and heteronormative social
environments. Here we can similarly question who
precisely the parents wish to target with the enhance-
ment intervention. A person as some rich, unique
combination of traits, or an avatar consisting of a
small number of desirable traits?
Such examples are not marginal considerations for
the ethics of enhancement. Elsewhere I have worked
to show how social status infiltrate many of our deci-
sions—especially decisions to enhance—and how an
ethics of enhancement should reflect this (Desmond
2020,2021). The examples also point to the limits of
an individual-focused ethics, since our ideas about
what will bring us “welfare”or “benefit”is inextricably
bound up with the evaluative judgments present in
families, communities, or even online environments
such as social media (for the latter, see
Desmond 2022).
The problem I wish to raise for the category of
“person-affecting enhancement”is that it is often
ambiguous whether a person (and a person’s welfare)
is targeted by an enhancement or rather a representant
of a status class. Here I mean “representant”in the
mathematical sense where persons are modeled as
interchangeable members of “equivalence classes”. For
instance, an advertiser might want the Olympic cham-
pion in the 100-meter dash—it would not matter who
they are, just as long as the person being hired hap-
pens to have that title. The category of “fair-weather
friend”encapsulates this idea: this type of friend does
not care about who you are as a person, but merely
who you are as a representant of a certain type of suc-
cess or status.
Similarly, if we strive to enhance ourselves in order
to achieve a type of welfare that ultimately consists of
the approval of others, we can become our own fair-
weather friends. I do not wish to deny that the pleas-
ure we feel at receiving praise, recognition, or honor
from others may be genuine. However, if an enhance-
ment that is directed at one’s future self is driven
(even if unconsciously) by a desire for social status,
the target is not a person but rather an abstract repre-
sentation of a person. One could call this
representation by various names: a socialized idealiza-
tion, an avatar, or a representant of a social status
equivalence class. However, the upshot is that such
enhancements may increase welfare without being
genuinely person-affecting in even the reductionist,
Parfitian sense of “person”.
IDENTIFY-AFFECTING ENHANCEMENT AND THE
LIBERAL APPROACH TO ENHANCEMENT
That being said, genetic enhancement, as it is cur-
rently implemented, is not person-effecting. Phrases
such as “knocking out a gene”are misleading in this
regard, since they suggest that genetic enhancement is
akin to pressing a particular switch in the internal
mechanisms of a person’s body. The science is much
more complicated than that, as Sparrow emphasizes.
The latest genome engineering technologies (CRISPR-
Cas) merely affect the probabilities of how an embryo
will develop. From the perspective of philosophy of
science, this is not surprising: cells are highly stochas-
tic and the common textbook representation of them
as complex machines is a significant idealization of
reality (Nicholson 2019). For many epistemic chal-
lenges this idealization does the job, but for others it
does not and the ethics of CRISPR-Cas seems to be
one of those. Whether following the technique of edit-
ing the genome of a live embryo, or of inducing gam-
etogenesis of gene-edited pluripotent stem cells, it is
necessary to conduct several attempts and subse-
quently select the most desirable embryo. In other
words, genetic enhancement for the foreseeable future
will involve generating and selecting between multiple
embryos. Instead of increasing the welfare of existing
persons, genetic enhancement de facto selects which
persons can come into existence.
Such identify-affecting enhancements may not
seem very puzzling for a Parfitian ethics. Parfit argues
that one should simply select the persons with highest
expected welfare (Parfit 1984, 356–360). One could of
course question how helpful this prescription is: the
idea of being able to make total expected welfare cal-
culation of an entire person calls to mind an omnisci-
ent God on judgment day. However, even if we
bracket such concerns, the category of identity-affect-
ing enhancements runs into fundamental problems.
The first problem is that liberal principles are not
necessarily respected when selecting persons with
highest expected welfare. Think of how eugenicists
justified measures such as forcible sterilization with
reference to a utilitarian calculation where the short-
term pains of administering cruel treatments and of
38 OPEN PEER COMMENTARIES
suppressing instincts of sympathy were outweighed by
the long-term benefit to the human stock. Similarly, if
we stipulate that some type of trait, such as
“intelligence,”is an intrinsic good because it raises the
welfare of the person involved, one could use utilitar-
ian reasoning to justify the genetic enhancement of
such a trait through methods that are equivalent to
improving human stock. Of course, there is a signifi-
cant moral difference between the artificial selection
on embryos and the artificial selection on fully devel-
oped human beings. Nonetheless, there is nothing in
this line of reasoning that should preclude the
endorsement of widespread social programs to
improve human stock at the embryonic stage.
So it would be desirable (for ethicists) to be able to
conceptualize identity-affecting enhancements in a
way that safeguards basic liberal principles. However,
which principles are applicable? It makes no sense to
refer to the autonomy of the enhancee given that the
act of enhancement brings them into existence. One
cannot refer to parental autonomy either, because
genetic enhancement does not involve acting in the
best interests of a specific offspring in the way that
guardianship, where parental autonomy is paradigmat-
ically appropriate, does. Could we then say that one
should select those persons that have the best chance
of flourishing? Unfortunately, the concept of flourish-
ing is intertwined with concepts of human nature,
and it would seem unsatisfactory for a person-based
ethics of enhancement to bottom out in human
nature. Alternatively, one could invoke an older
meaning of the word “liberal,”namely that it refers to
respecting the intrinsic value of a person. In this older
sense of liberalism, respect of human autonomy is
merely one way of respecting the intrinsic value of a
person. However, what is the “intrinsic value”of a
person? With this type of language, we are approach-
ing a Thomistic mindset, where the concept of human
nature is precisely what grounds the intrinsic value of
persons (Eberl 2014). This line of reasoning also bot-
toms out in the concept of human nature, raising the
same problem for a person-based enhancement ethics.
In this way, if one accepts that genetic enhance-
ment is not a person-affecting enhancement, but must
be an identity-affecting enhancement, it becomes
unclear how precisely liberal approaches to enhance-
ment should reason about such cases. As a final
remark, this problem suggests a different diagnosis
(compared to Sparrow’s) why person-affecting
enhancements have received outsized attention in the
literature: they neatly fit into a liberal approach to
enhancement. By contrast, it is not clear how identify-
affecting enhancements fit in, if at all.
FUNDING
The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with
the work featured in this article.
ORCID
Hugh Desmond http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4822-923X
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Desmond, H. 2021. In service to others: A new evolutionary
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Desmond, H. 2022. Reclaiming Privacy and Care in the Age
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