Personhood 2.0: Enhanced and Unenhanced Persons and the Equal Protection of the Laws

Abstract

It turns out that persons are in various ways upgradeable. But what if some formerly roughly equal persons are dramatically upgraded in their basic capacities, while others are not? How should our most basic law, in particular the principle of the equal protection of the laws, control the phenomenon of unequal dramatic human enhancement? The philosopher Rousseau famously took persons as they were, and on that assumedly unchanging basis, considered dramatic changes in the basic law. Current and future technological advances of various sorts, however, raise an opposite and at least equally important question: if we take the equal protection of the laws seriously, how should we react to the prospect of a society eventually divided into dramatically enhanced and unenhanced persons? This Article takes up the latter question.