Risk and the Question of the Acceptability of Human Enhancement: The Humanist and Transhumanist Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the difficulties involved in interdisciplinary work on the question of the risks associated with the ethical and social acceptability of human enhancement through the development of nanotechnologies. These difficulties emerge in the context of the debate between transhumanism, whose principal defenders have backgrounds in the natural sciences, and humanism, whose principal defenders have backgrounds in the social sciences and the humanities. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that essentially transhumanists and humanists differ on these questions: the identification of risks and impacts; the assessment that serves as the foundation for the acceptability or unacceptability of these risks and impacts; and faith in the capacity of science to overcome the identified risks to human beings. This paper’s presentation of the divergences that exist in the debate between transhumanism and humanism constitutes a necessary first step towards intervening in that debate in an interdisciplinary manner.
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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 | 0.055 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.133 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".