Metaphilosophy 51 (1):128-150 (2020)
Authors |
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Abstract |
In her short story “Stable Strategies for Middle Management,” Eileen
Gunn imagines a future in which Margaret, an office worker, seeks radical genetic enhancements intended to help her secure the middle-management job she
wants. One source of the story’s tension and dark humor is dramatic irony: readers
can see that the enhancements Margaret buys stand little chance of making her
life go better for her; enhancing is, for Margaret, probably a prudential mistake.
This paper argues that our positions in the real world are sufficiently similar to
Margaret’s position in Gunn’s fictional world that we should take this story seriously as grounding an argument from analogy for the conclusion that radical
genetic enhancements are, for us, probably a prudential mistake. The paper then
defends this method. When the question at hand is one of speculative ethics, there
is no method better fit to the purpose than argument from analogy to speculative
fiction.
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Keywords | human enhancement philosophical methods philosophy and literature science fiction speculative ethics well‐being transhumanism |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
DOI | 10.1111/meta.12404 |
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References found in this work BETA
The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning.Albert R. Jonsen & Stephen Toulmin - 1988 - University of California Press.
The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning.Kenneth W. Kemp - 1988 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 24 (1):76-80.
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Citations of this work BETA
The Ethics of Terraforming: A Critical Survey of Six Arguments.Ian Stoner - 2021 - In Martin Beech, Joseph Seckbach & Richard Gordon (eds.), Terraforming Mars. Salem, MA: Wiley-Scrivener. pp. 101-116.
Enhancing Human Lives.Jason Charles Branford - 2021 - Dissertation, Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München
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