Evaluating the argument

Biomedical enhancements have such great potential to improve our lives that we need to keep pushing forward enthusiastically, confident in our ability to mitigate any problems that might arise along the way—just as we’ve done regarding other technological breakthroughs.

Although biomedical enhancements hold tremendous promise, they also come with some risk. Therefore, we should pursue these enhancements at a slower pace, ready to pause and reassess, or even abandon a given enhancement when it starts to raise significant concerns.

Biomedical enhancements are more likely to unravel the fabric of our lives than improve them. So we should generally stop pursuing them—with the exception of those rare enhancements that are extremely likely to make enormous contributions to the preservation and enrichment of human life.

Biomedical enhancements directly undermine the conditions, relationships, and character traits that ground the value and dignity of human life. We don’t need these enhancements and should stop pursuing them.