Ethics of vulnerability and the normative limits of biomedical enhancement

Abstract

The convergence of gene editing, neurotechnologies, and life-extension projects has turned the human biological condition into an object of redesign, while transhumanism reinterprets vulnerability, dependence, and finitude as correctable deficits. This article seeks to ground an ethics of vulnerability that, resting on a rigorous delimitation of this condition from fragility and weakness, enables the assessment of biomedical enhancement and the derivation of operative normative criteria for its governance; to this end it adopts a qualitative, hermeneutic-critical design supported by conceptual analysis and a critical review of the philosophical, bioethical, and normative literature. The analysis distinguishes vulnerability, fragility, and weakness, reconstructs the enhancement paradigm in its strongest version, and shows that fragility is the condition of possibility of prudence, moral agency, and solidarity, so that its eradication would cancel the very goods the project claims to promote. On this basis, the distinction between therapy and enhancement, articulated with a principle of ontological precaution with graduated conditions of activation and response, offers a criterion for governing heritable germline editing, advanced neurotechnology, and radical longevity, in the service of dignity and justice.