Dept. of Philosophy, San Francisco State University

Anita Silvers, Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, has published seven books, including Medicine and Social Justice (with Rosamond Rhodes and Margaret Battin), Americans With Disabilities: Exploring Implications of the Law for Individuals and Institutions (with Leslie Francis), Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy (with David Wasserman and Mary Mahowald), Sociobiology and Human Nature (with Michael Gregory). and The Recombinant DNA Controversy (with Michael Gregory). She has written more than one hundred book chapters and articles on ethics and bioethics, social philosophy, aesthetics, law, feminism, and disability studies, In 2002, Silvers co-directed (with Eva Kittay) an NEH Summer Seminar on “Justice, Equality, and the Challenge of Disability”. The California Faculty Association honored her with its Equal Rights Award for her work in making higher education more accessible to people with disabilities.

Enhancement is as American as Apple Pie. An avalanche of moral and political claims have been launched to cast enhancement as alien or alienating. But their real target is whoever and whatever appears to be an outlier, namely, anybody or anything considered not to be normal. To the contrary, the personal liberty value to which our nation is subscribed is most fruitful when promoting diversity that frees us not to be normal. What of the fear that permitting this freedom to some inevitably reduces other people’s freedom?  Prudence is advisable because the availability of enhancement technologies contingently could do so, but enhancement’s basic nature is to nourish freedom, not to starve it.