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Guenther Anders was a highly influential 20th-century philosopher of technology and culture. In his magnum opus, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (1956; now translated as The Obsolescence of the Human, 2025), Anders identifies the Promethean gap: the disparity between our capacity to produce and our capacity to imagine. He argues that this gap has led to a state of potential self-destruction through nuclear or ecological disasters, because our technologically mediated actions have become so extensive that we, as their executors, cannot adequately experience what we are doing. The biggest crimes, therefore, tend to take the form of natural disasters, behind which those actually responsible disappear: »Inhuman acts today are acts without humans« (Anders). Consequently, Anders calls for »moral stretching exercises« to deliberately expand our moral imagination in order to keep pace with our production. In this presentation, I introduce the philosophy of Anders in order to compare his position with current debates on moral bioenhancement, including those involving Julian Savulescu. For the discussion, I have formulated five provisional theses.
