The Atlantic has run a fantastic piece by Dr. Patrick Lin, on trying to square cyborgs with International human rights law during wartime. This is just one small bit, when trying to take on whether cyborg enhancements used in war are “repugnant to the consciousness of mankind,” per the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention:
Not all enhancements, of course, are as fanciful as a human-chimeric warrior or a berserker mode, nor am I suggesting that any military has plans to do anything that extreme. Most, if not all, enhancements will likely not be as obviously inhuman. Nonetheless, the “consciousness of mankind” is sometimes deeply fragmented, especially on ethical issues. So what is unobjectionable to one person or culture may be obviously objectionable to another.
Something as ordinary as, say, a bionic limb or exoskeleton could be viewed as unethical by cultures that reject technology or such manipulation of the human body. This is not to say that ethics is subjective and we can never resolve this debate, but only that the ethics of military enhancements — at least with respect to the prohibition against inhumane weapons — requires specific details about the enhancement and its use, as well as the sensibilities of the adversary and international community. That is, we cannot generalize that all military enhancements either comply or do not comply with this prohibition.
Toward the end, we are reminded that this discussion barely scratches the surface:
The above discussion certainly does not exhaust all the legal issues that will arise from military human enhancements. In our new report, funded by The Greenwall Foundation and co-written with Maxwell Mehlman (Case Western Reserve University) and Keith Abney (California Polytechnic State University), we launch an investigation into these and other issues in order to identify problems that policymakers and society may need to confront.
