Thinking across species—a critical bioethics approach to enhancement Richard Twine Published online: 5 March 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 Abstract Drawing upon a concept of ‘critical bioethics’ [7] this paper takes a species-broad approach to the social and ethical aspects of enhancement. Critical Bioethics aims to foreground interdisciplinarity, socio-political dimensions, as well as reflexivity to what becomes bioethical subject matter. This paper focuses upon the latter component and uses the example of animal enhancement as a way to think about both enhancement generally, and bioethics. It constructs several arguments for including animal enhancement as a part of enhancement debates, and considers some connections between human and animal enhancement. The paper concludes in a plea for an ‘enhancement’ to our critical abilities to examine some of the underlying social, moral and ethical assumptions bound up in varied anticipated ‘enhanced’ futures. Keywords Enhancement Á Bioethics Á Animals Á Ethical bypass Á Convergence Introduction The vast majority of work examining the social and ethical aspects of enhancement focuses upon the human case and so to an extent is orientated toward some future technoscientific elaboration of the human. Important conceptual attempts at both defining ‘enhancement’ and thinking through the usefulness or otherwise of the therapy/enhancement distinction have been made (see [1, 2]). For example, Juengst argues that enhancement usually functions as a R. Twine (&) ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), Lancaster University, IAS Building, County South, Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK e-mail: r.twine@lancaster.ac.uk 123 Theor Med Bioeth (2007) 28:509–523 DOI 10.1007/s11017-007-9057-6