AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Transhumanism advances the view that enhancing human cognitive and physical capacities through technological means constitutes the primary route to the greatest good. On this view, the current human condition is deficient and inefficient, and should be optimised, re-engineered, or even transcended into a “posthuman” status to achieve flourishing.
I critically analyse Nick Bostrom’s transhumanist framework, focusing in particular on three key ideas: his characterisation of the human as a rational, isolated, and disembodied agent; of limits as constraints to be overcome; and of flourishing as the maximisation of capacities and subjective wellbeing alongside the minimisation of effort and suffering. I argue that this individualistic and reductionist account of the human, limits, and flourishing is inconsistent with ecological and scientific understandings of human nature.
Drawing on ecological, system, and relational approaches – including embodied cognition, complex systems theory, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s relational ontology – I present an alternative view of humans as embodied, situated, and relational beings, constituted through dynamic interactions with ecological and evolutionary processes. From this perspective, limits are not merely constraints, but constitutive conditions of flourishing.