Philippine E-Journals

AND THE MACHINE BECAME FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US: REFIGURING THE NEW HUMAN IN KAROL WOJTYLA’S CHRISTIAN PERSONALISM

Alma S. Espartinez

 

Abstract:

This paper explores refiguring the concept of a new human proposed by transhumanism in light of Karol Wojtyla’s Christian Personalism. I start by presenting the tenets of transhumanism, focusing on the prospect of enhancing humans into posthuman persons to redesign human nature. After that, I position Karol Wojtyla’s Christian personalism vis-à-vis transhumanism into a conversation in an attempt to examine the ethical implications of human enhancement from the personalist concept of the person inquiring into the problematic moral issues arising from the ethics of enhancement. Drawing some ethical insights from these investigations, I conclude that human enhancement intervention is morally problematic and reprehensible because of its attempt to redesign the human species, make a mockery of human dignity and create a posthuman that is no longer human. While human enhancement will endure in the deep future, it is our moral response to these significant changes that are now in question. This discussion on transhumanism is enormously significant as an important contemporary intellectual discourse as it offers an unsettling possibility of moving the humans over and making machines take charge.