Dr. Adam Henschke, Assistant Professor at the Philosophy Section of the University of Twente, has recently published a new article entitled "On the Enhancement of Soldiers, Disenhancement, and the Importance of Context" in the Journal of Military Ethics.
Abstract:
Militaries around the world are exploring biotechnological interventions to enhance a soldier’s capacity to fight and win wars. In this article, I argue that a moral assessment of the enhancement of soldiers for warfighting needs to take into account the fact that these enhanced soldiers will return to civilian life, and that enhancements for military purposes might be disenhancements for civilian life. The problem that I am concerned with is the contextual nature of biotechnological human enhancements; specifically, that a set of biotechnological interventions to enhance a person for the context of fighting wars can become a disenhancement when in the context of post-conflict civilian life. I argue that context determines whether an intervention is considered an enhancement or a disenhancement. That is, a comprehensive moral appraisal of a given intervention must take context into account. For military enhancements, the two most relevant contexts are fighting wars and civilian life.
Bio:
Dr. Adam Henschke is an Assistant Professor with the Philosophy Section at the University of Twente. He is an applied ethicist, working at the intersection of ethics, technology, and national security policy. His recent work has looked at ethical issues with intelligence institutions, and with the ethical and political concepts relating to cognitive warfare. He has written extensively on the ethics of military conflict, cybersecurity, terrorism/counter-terrorism, surveillance, human military enhancement, cyber-physical systems, and medical ethics. His current research concerns the ethical and political challenges facing liberal democracies when they seek to protect against cognitive warfare and the problem of ‘brainwashing’.
To read the full article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15027570.2025.2487329
