Kumulative Dissertation, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 2025

Being human is stressful and entails confronting various demands. One of the most evident and characterizing strategies for coping with them on an individual and collective level might be environmental manipulations at different scales. However, humans can also use the resources of the material environment to create technologies to adapt themselves instead of the environment and aim at improving their abilities directly. This constitutes what I understand as Human Enhancement. It encompasses a variety of contexts and means and can have a profound impact on our being and self-understanding. The latter effects provoke a passionate debate among its adversaries and advocates. But is Human Enhancement really such a disruptive force? Can it – as feared or hoped – really disrupt one of the most self-evident psychological truths we know: identifying as humans? And will the subsequent result really be humanity’s evolutionary descendant: the post-Human? Drawing from interdisciplinary insights, I present a psychological theory about the functionality of Human Enhancement and its employment in everyday life. I further elaborate upon the psychological manifestation and malleability of our human identity and argue that technology and science have and can indeed alter it. Key to these theoretical propositions is to acknowledge our human identity as a sense-making, intersubjective psychological structure. Motivated not to confine my discussion about the impact of Human Enhancement to the abstract, core paper #1 (Döbler & Carbon, 2023) empirically explores the controversies concerning the extent of this practice on the matter of vaccination against SARS-CoV-2. Results revealed people’s unwillingness to adapt themselves using means they consider unnatural or invasive. These effects were stronger for those who rejected the biotechnological enhancement of their immune capacities, aka the vaccine. Yet, apart from adapting to a physically hazardous environment, Human Enhancement can be used in relation to a given socio-normative context.
For further elaboration, I present core paper #2 (Döbler et al., 2024). Here, I highlight how educational or workplace settings may privilege specific enhancements either by direct command or by fostering a demanding environment that urges adaptation in secrecy. Provided historical examples show how social normativity influences how we purposefully and technologically shape our bodies.
Elaborating on the premise of adapting to social normativity, core paper #3 (Döbler & Carbon, 2025) presents empirical results indicating that people may use hypothetical genetic engineering for the enforcement of normative gender stereotypes. This would adapt their child to an environment that regularly punishes gender divergence. However, results also indicate that parents may use this power to push for more gender egalitarianism.
All results are discussed in the light of how our socio-technological practices and organization influence our understanding of ourselves as humans. Here, the need to adapt ourselves may be so fundamental that adversaries and advocates must find a satisfying way to negotiate the historical and contemporary role of Human Enhancement within their notion of being human. While our human identity has proved to be highly adaptable so that the effects of past enhancements were successfully incorporated into our self-understanding, future Human Enhancement may nonetheless yield the impossibility of integrating its effects. If so, discarding our contingent identity appears as a necessity. Targeting the controversial center of the Human Enhancement debate and the desirability of the post Human, I discuss psychological mechanisms potentially yielding a disruption in the continuous self-conception of our species. Special emphasis is placed on the empirical psychological phenomena of dehumanization and the adoption of social judgments and material practices into our self-perception. Seen from a collective level, I highlight how we use historical narratives to negotiate changes in this conception and how the reliance on these psychological processes opens the possibility of historizing a radical change in our identity. Interventions like vaccination, productivity enhancements, and genetic engineering may appear controversial, yet not potentially identity breaking. However, humans do not live isolated from technology. The large-scale adaptation of the environment to meet our needs directly confronts us with the benefits and risks of our contemporary technological lifestyle. The same power applies to Human Enhancement. In that sense, the psychological approach presented here elucidates whether the technological adaptation of ourselves can give rise to the dusk of humanity.
Given that our human identity is by no means fixed, the post-Human may be possible, yet not inevitable.