27-28 October | Prof. Alberto García Gómez- Director of the UNESCO Chair and Dean of the Faculty of Biothics and Dr. Giulia Bovassi, Associate Researcher of the UNESCO Chair participated in the X INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON BIOETHICS: LIFE IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY AND RESILIENCE organized by the Universidad Militar Nueva Granada.
Is global bioethics capable of promoting sustainable development in times of uncertainty and resilience? by Dr. Alberto García Gómez
Vulnerability and resilience in light of Trans and Post-humanist provocations, by Dr. Giulia Bovassi.
Abstract
At the dawn of a “post-pandemic” era, it is necessary to look at the future of humanity by confronting antagonistic characters of this historical moment: the radicality of vulnerability, an inseparable ally of resilience; the hybris of trans and post-humanist provocations, jointly caused by understanding vulnerability as an “accidental deficit” of human nature. The latter gives a reductionist and mechanistic ontological reading of the human being, reduced to a de-subjectified individual, whose inherent, original-by-nature dignity becomes data to be acquired according to performance parameters, vectors of a techno-mediated system of normalization and homogenization. This anxiety toward the attainment of a perfectionistic ideal is well summarized in the concept of Human Enhancement (HE), which expresses a pervasive employment of technique, no longer as an extensional tool of the human being – in order to fulfill his needs –, but as an “embodiment”, an intra-organic entity. The central postulate is that every technically possible achievement is, de facto, a matter of social justice: the indefinite expansion of what is possible becomes a meliorative asset – morally obligatory for ourselves (right) and toward society (duty) – responsible for self-evolution. For this to happen, it is necessary to constitute the human being, first by uprooting him («tabula rasa») from an ontologically given identity and, subsequently, by reprogramming him into a dynamic, disembodied, liquid, nomadic and hybrid (a symbiote, product of heterogeneous contaminations) post-human identity (homunculus). To aspire to perfection (HE) forces humanity to absorb into his culture a new «pudendum» or «Promethean shame», as Günther Anders calls it. Transdisciplinary analysis on the resulting neuro(bio)ethical and biopolitical dilemmas must start from the fundamental anthropological question: who is the human being of the «analgesic society», that aspires to become a “product” of technical power, and who he is called to be. Consequently, the danger of dissolving the virtuous alliance between vulnerability and its understanding (resilience) into an artificialization of the human being, as a technocentric response to the «malaise of uniqueness» and as an unprecedented “resolving” effort at the problem of human limit, is finally understood.