Author: James Hughes
James J. Hughes is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He teaches health policy at Trinity College and is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Hachette, 2004).
Enhancing Virtues: Fairness
“We can begin to experiment with ways to enhance our moral reasoning with drugs and devices to become even better citizens.”
After Happiness, Cyborg Virtue
When I was seventeen I was part of a six-week summer seminar at Cornell University on the theme of “the individual and the community.” A dozen of us nerdy teens read an intensive diet of John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud under the tutelage of two philosophy professors. Afterward, I was a determined socialist …
Social Pressures for Technological Mood Management
What’s wrong with society wanting us to be happy and friendly? The concern that America was becoming a “Prozac nation” popping happy pills was premature, given the emerging evidence that suppression of clinical trial data had inflated the reported efficacy of SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) like Prozac. Nonetheless, our growing understanding of the neurobiology …