After Humanity? Philosophical and Moral Perspectives on the Idea of Posthumanity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The author provides a philosophical and moral evaluation of a number of arguments against and in favour of posthumanism. Some of the arguments explored are: the claim that current evils are necessary to maintain our humanity; Sandel’s association of radical enhancement with the striving for mastery and perfection; psychological concerns about posthumanism; the “simple conservative argument” (Buchanan); the idea of unlimited longevity; as well as possible issues in the relationship between unenhanced people and posthumans. The author defends the idea that radical enhancements are justified in view of the possible lag of natural selection to select desirable/necessary current human traits. He also rejects the idea that “human nature” ought to be regarded as a moral desideratum. His conclusion is that the possibility of radical (also biomedical) human enhancements does not warrant blanket moral approval or disapproval. We ought to see what specific possibilities arise, and then judge those possibilities on their own, specific merit.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.128 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".