Abstract / DOI
Limitless Optimization? The «Homo Deus» Transhumanism. The ambitions of transhumanism to break down boundaries, which aim to optimize human beings and to transcend the physical limits of human beings through biotechnology and information technology, raise fundamental anthropological and ethical questions. On the one hand it is a question of what constitutes man as a human being, and on the other hand it is a question of how the right balance can be found between a responsible crossing of physical boundaries and unrestricted self-optimization with regard to man’s physical conditionality. In his book «Homo Deus», the historian Yuval Noah Harari outlines future scenarios that critically illuminate transhumanist fictions and warn against their reality. From an anthropological-ethical perspective, the significance of the reflected practical self-understanding of man as a moral subject for a critical discussion of human enhancement is outlined.