David Lewin examines the intersection between education, technology and religion by considering what kinds of human improvement are ethically justified, and how they are justified. Lewin observes that within discussions of technological human enhancement, ethical questions can’t be restricted to the ends of human improvement, as though the means to those ends are neutral. Rather, there is an ethical demand for both a vision of what it means to be human, and how that vision should be realised. General notions of improvement or enhancement suggest an ethical discontinuity between acceptable and unacceptable means of improvement: conventional forms of human enhancement, specifically through education are considered ethically acceptable, even demanded, while unconventional means of human enhancement, for instance, drugs, gene therapies or neural implants, are often considered ethically problematic or unacceptable.
The Winter 2021 event series was sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.