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This essay begins by acknowledging the fresh and provocative contribution made to bioethics by John Harris’s book The Value of Life but it goes on to take a more critical look at Harris’s concept of the ‘person’. Harris’s ‘person’ is a technical abstraction, relied upon to do much of the moral work, both within the book and in later writing, though the concept has, since its first introduction, remained underdeveloped and poorly theorized. It is argued here that Harris’s ‘person’ is both anti-human and anti-humane leaving too many points of irritation in its application to the moral domain of bioethics. This chapter explores some of the limitations of Harris’s ‘person’ approach with examples drawn from ethical issues at the start of life and it offers an alternative account which argues to retain the anthropocentric, human and humane, account of the person.

This chapter presents two ideals that compete to direct the enhancement of human beings. According to the objective ideal, an enhancement has prudential value commensurate with the degree to which it objectively enhances a human capacity. Technologies that produce enhancements of greater objective magnitude are, all else equal, more valuable than technologies that produce enhancements of lesser magnitude. The objective ideal is strongly suggested by many of the statements of the members of an intellectual and cultural movement known as transhumanism. According to the anthropocentric ideal, some enhancements of greater objective magnitude are more prudentially valuable than enhancements of lesser magnitude. However, some enhancements of greater magnitude are less valuable than enhancements of lesser magnitude. Such assessments are warranted for enhancements of our capacities to levels significantly beyond human norms. I connect these different ideals of enhancement with Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion of the internal and external goods of human activities.

This concluding chapter begins with the observation that when dealing with environmental harms described and examined in this book, there are tensions both within and between the three approaches to justice. The chapter discusses how in their extreme versions, the weighing of certain elements within the particular approaches skew the moral compass in certain directions: for example, toward an environmental justice that is ssocially exclusive to specific oppressed human communities and downplays or ignores ecological inclusion and species interests; an ecological justice that pprioritises places over people and sacrifices specific community interests for the sake of ecocentric conservation ideals; and a species justice that hold the rights of animals over those of human need and the requirements of specific biocentric environments. The chapter attempts to grapple with these tensions by illuminating key dilemmas and identifying possible pathways for their resolution.