Focus FOCUS

Ten days and counting down until I have to send off a draft of the human enhancement essay. And here's the thing: I don't know what to say at all!!!

The squirrel, what I'm saying is that all animals have moral standing and that I think equal consideration is the best way to determine how they should be treated in any given situation as it is context dependent and does not lead to arbitrary line drawing. I don't think that different tiers of moral status work. There is something offensive about saying that this animal but not that one is above a certain threshold. However, I do think that relational bonds actually should play a part - it matters that a troop relies on the elephant matriarch; it matters that an orca's sons under thirty have a higher risk of mortality if their mother dies.

As for the human enhancement. Oh God. I want to use my wonder-stuff somehow. I want to say that as much as anything, the capacity for wonder is a human attribute - it's not species specific but it seems to be a dispositional trait we have more than any others and I think it is related to the desire to make meaning out of things. What inspires wonder in us is what is meaningful to us. It might be beauty or truth or reason. It might be life or love or potential.

So if human enhancement involved enhancing the capacities that seem to be 'most' human - not smarts, but abstract thinking, creativity and meaning making then... what? You get some people determined that what matters is the gift of life - a 'gratitude' mind set - and others committed to the potential - the 'creativity' mindset. Perhaps what makes us most human is the tendency to differ dramatically from one another, to find our own paths - and that ultimately what is most human is the refusal to accept that there ever could be one path to enhancement.

This doesn't really work. But it's the sort of thing I want to say.