If an individual has freely chosen to use a biomedical enhancement on the basis of rational deliberation ('speech and deeds'), the enhancement reflects the individual's agency rather than bypassing it.
(as used in the statement about enhancement and autonomy)
Shows that the choice truly came from the person's own thinking and values, rather than someone else controlling them or the technology taking over their decision-making.
agency(Used to assess whether switching the trolley is deontologically prohibited.)
A morally relevant sense in which an agent is the direct cause of harm, invoked in deontological constraints; its absence removes a deontological bar to acting.
biomedical enhancement(Kass 2003, 22)
An intervention that improves an individual's capacities through biomedical means, distinguished from education, training, and practice in that the subject plays no active role in the mechanism of improvement and cannot understand its effects in human terms.
One style of argument for the claim that enhancements undermine authenticity is to contend that we could claim no personal credit for accomplishments that are the result of biomedical enhancements, because the biomedical interventions that caused improvements in our capacities would supersede our own agency in authoring the achievement (Sandel 2007). Defenders of this perspective argue that while, for example, education, training, and practice proceed through “speech and deeds” that are comprehe