University of Southern Queensland

Kristi Giselsson is a doctoral student in English working within the Public Memory Research Centre at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She is researching the intersection between rhetoric, philosophy and ethics, the human and the posthuman.

As the main critique directed against humanism by posthumanists has been the apparent exclusion of diversity via the concept of a common humanity, one way to investigate how the language of human rights can guide us in framing some of the critical ethical issues surrounding human enhancement is to ascertain what ethical and epistemological grounds are needed in order to justify respect for difference. In this paper I will be suggesting that posthumanist ethics are actually substantiated by a rhetorical appeal to the concept of human rights and that ultimately, respect for diversity is impossible without retaining the notion of human being.