Human enhancement: bio-juridical issues.

Abstract

Human Enhancement is a modification aimed to improve human’s characteristics and capabilities through scientific or technological interventions in the human body, starting from an ‘integrity condition’ and not from a state of disease. Therefore, we need to value if the enhancement is harmful of the human dignity or if it’s an useful tool to improve the human life’s condition. Methods: At first we focused on the bibliographic research dedicated to the HE’s classification through the analysis of health’s and enhancement’s definitions, confronting with the bio-juridical perspective as for example the possible negative effects over a person’s dignity, identity, freedom, equality; and comparing scientific and humanistic theories. We later examined in detail the national and the supranational legal framework of the last ten years, from the Science and Technology Options Assessment’s Human Enhancement Study to the Comitato Nazionale per la Bioetica’s opinions. Starting from this classification we located and analyzed some typologies of enhancement, using a medical social methodological approach and deepening each subject matter from both doctrinaire and jurisprudential profile. Results: Doping, cosmetic surgery and prenatal genetic enhancement’s prohibition are techniques already disciplined. Smart drugs and deep brain stimulation are techniques already disciplined for therapeutic purpose, but sometimes their application lies outside the disease’s therapy. Military and biological enhancement
are techniques in an experimental phase. We have represented the particular difficulties in
identifying the limits of lawfulness of each of these typologies of enhancement. Conclusions: We could hypothesize a ‘case by case’ law’s approach, because it’s ductile and able to adapt on the peculiar characteristics of every single form of enhancement, evaluating at the same time political, legal, ethical, social and safety impact, in a context of inhomogeneity of the Human Enhancement Technologies that it doesn’t allow an uniform normative framework able to fully satisfy individual and collective needs.