At the end of each module, you are challenged to demonstrate your integrated knowledge of the week’s material by putting course resources and discussion into thoughtful conversation with your own life and the life of the world. Remember that your goals are to demonstrate that you understand and are applying course material (whose ideas you CITE parenthetically) to your own life and the world. Guidelines: Your entry should be 400-600 words. Anything less than a full, double-spaced page is probably not sufficient. I do NOT expect you to treat this reflection as an essay with a thesis statement that you defend throughout the essay. I DO expect that your reflection will consist of well-written, well-organized paragraphs with topic sentences and unifying themes. I DO expect that you will use this opportunity to dig into the ideas that have most intrigued you, bothered you, excited you, and baffled you, and to bring those ideas into conscious dialogue with your own life today and your hopes and plans for yourself and our world. I DO expect that you will use and cite course material. I DO expect that you will illustrate your points with specific examples. I will offer a few particular questions or ideas that may be helpful for you to consider in this journal assignment. You are not restricted to those themes; they are there to help you get started. Week 6: Can you think of cases that straddle the line between “repair” and “enhancement”? Is there an ethical difference? Why or why not? In particular, how does human enhancement affect they ways we do or SHOULD think about what it means to be human? Are there examples of what gets counted as “disability” or “disorder” that you would want us to reconsider? Or to think about more complexly? Or are there ways in which you want to support cultural norms of these definitions? As you consider dis/ability, repair, enhancement, and transhumanism, what personal (Panicola) and social (Cameron and Welch) ethical principles should be foremost in our minds? Are there additional virtues or principles we should be thinking about?
