In his paper "The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem" (Nanoethics 2:305-316, 2008) Paul Thompson argues that the possibility of "disenhancing" animals in order to improve animal welfare poses a philosophical conundrum. Although many people intuitively think such disenhancement would be morally impermissible, it's difficult to find good arguments to support such intuitions. In this brief response to Thompson, I accept that there's a conundrum here. But I argue that if we seriously consider whether creating beings can harm or benefit them, and introduce the non-identity problem to discussions of animal disehancement, the conundrum is even deeper than Thompson suggests. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
CITATION STYLE
Palmer, C. (2011). Animal Disenhancement and the Non-Identity Problem: A Response to Thompson. NanoEthics, 5(1), 43–48. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-011-0115-1
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