2 - A Visit to the Kantian Doctor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Summary
What of the claim that we know a cure to be mere enhancement when, on the best understanding, it instills a trait that is ungenuine, artificial, and inauthentic to the individual? And what of the corollary: that anything that an individual achieves as a result of such a trait shouldn't redound to her credit, because the trait is not genuinely hers? The runner on steroids or the mild depressive on Prozac courts unease as to whether her performance or personality really is her own: whether steroids and Prozac are less cures that make her whole, make her who she is, than enhancements that make her into something else.
Though this question is posed about individuals, it cannot — I argued in the Introduction — be answered by individuals. Every person will have a different idea as to what is necessary to make her whole. Apotemnophiliacs, who will feel whole only once an arm is amputated, and aspiring major-league pitchers, who will feel whole only once their arms can throw like Kerry Wood's, will offer widely differing and unsatisfactory answers. Better that we should transcend the individual plane and examine this question at the group level. The question will be, what can we say of a group in general — slow runners, mild depressives, the plain-featured, the deaf, the obese, and the others — as to whether cures will make the individuals who belong to it whole or, alternatively, take them beyond whole, thereby becoming enhancements?
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- Information
- The Limits of Medicine , pp. 85 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006