James Hughes is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and its affiliated World Transhumanist Association. A bioethicist and sociologist, Dr. Hughes teaches health policy at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, and produces a syndicated weekly radio program, Changesurfer Radio. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. Dr. Hughes speaks on medical ethics, health care policy and future studies worldwide, and appears often radio and television.

Presentation: Beyond Human Nature: Human Enhancement and the Rights of the Person

The concept of human nature is illusory, selectively deployed, and does not impose any ethical constraint on human enhancement. Human nature is not only a meaningless concept, a product of our imperfect human cognition and a relic of idea of "soul," but, as it is deployed today against human enhancement technologies, it is also a morally offensive, racist concept. The "human-racists" who deploy the concept of human nature are more inclusive than their forebears, but they make the same mistake of tying citizenship and value to biology. Only by setting aside the concept of human nature can we affirm the value of the capacities that we wish to preserve and extend using human enhancement technologies, whether part of "human nature" or not.