Kant as ante litteram Theorist and Critic of the Moral Enhancement

In this chapter, I shall present the result of a tentative conjunction of two research paths that I have been developing throughout many years: the first one concerning Kant and practical philosophy (with a specific focus on a communitarian interpretation of the categorical imperative doctrine) and the second one pertaining to ethics and emerging technologies (with a specific reference to human enhancement and roboethics).1 Accordingly, this is the first attempt to orient my research agenda on Kant towards issues related to human enhancement and to the ethics of emerging technologies. The argumentative path here proposed is the following: after a preliminary framing of the issue, which makes reference to the most relevant and correlative key points within Kantian moral theory, I shall introduce a comprehensive two-fold argument in order to first consider what we could call “the internal enhancement” towards the asymptotic full adequacy to the moral law and then to discuss the “external-internal” help or integration to our moral adequacy and its alleged eligibility. Finally, I will consider two intrinsically problematic areas related to the same rationale in order to conclude by raising some correlative issues within and beyond the Kantian perspective.