Most ethical debates about transhumanism divide along familiar lines. Consequentialists argue that enhancement is good if it increases wellbeing, reduces suffering, or extends cognitive capacity. Deontologists argue that enhancement must respect autonomy, informed consent, and the equal dignity of persons. Both frameworks have real purchase. Neither resolves the hardest questions about digital identity, consciousness transfer, or the transition to synthetic substrates.

Published by Springer Nature in January 2026, Technologies of the Future Self: An Ethics for Transhuman Flourishing by bioethicist and philosopher Elena Marchetti proposes a third approach. Rather than asking whether enhancement maximizes utility or respects rights, it asks whether enhancement supports or undermines human flourishing in its fullest sense. The framework draws on Aristotelian eudaimonia and adapts it for the conditions of radical technological change.

The book is not widely read outside academic philosophy. But its core arguments bear directly on the practical and ethical questions surrounding whole brain emulation research, and they add conceptual tools that the field needs.

The Problem with Existing Frameworks

Utilitarian ethics applied to transhumanism tends to produce conclusions that many people find intuitively wrong. If uploading minds extends cognitive capacity and reduces the suffering associated with biological aging and death, it seems to follow straightforwardly that we should pursue it. The problem is that this framing excludes entire categories of value that do not fit neatly into a utility calculation.

What is the utility of continuity of personal identity? How do you assign a number to the value of remaining recognizably yourself through technological change? If the uploaded version of you is happier, more capable, and longer-lived, but experiences the world in ways that bear no resemblance to your current experience, is that an improvement or a replacement? Utility calculations are silent on this because they measure outcomes, not the integrity of the entity experiencing them.

Rights-based frameworks handle continuity better. They can argue that an individual has a right to remain themselves, that non-consensual enhancement violates autonomy, and that creating digital replicas without explicit consent treats persons as means rather than ends. But rights frameworks struggle with cases where the person does consent, or where the technology creates new entities rather than modifying existing ones. If mind uploading produces something that is arguably a new person rather than a continuation of the old one, whose rights are being protected?

Marchetti’s argument is that both frameworks are missing the right question. The question is not “does this maximize outcomes” or “does this respect rights.” It is “does this support the conditions under which a person can live well?”

Eudaimonia and the Future Self

The Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia is often translated as “happiness,” but the translation is misleading. Eudaimonia is better understood as flourishing: the actualization of a being’s characteristic capacities in a way that is excellent and sustained over a life. It is an activity, not a state. You cannot be flourishing if you are merely comfortable. You flourish by exercising what you are capable of in ways that are genuinely excellent.

Marchetti applies this framework to enhancement technologies by asking: what are the characteristic capacities of human beings that are worth actualizing? Her answer draws on a list she calls the “technopersonal capabilities.” These include: embodied agency (the ability to act in and through a physical body), narrative continuity (the ability to understand your life as a coherent story), relational identity (the ability to maintain meaningful relationships that constitute part of who you are), temporal depth (the experience of having a past and anticipating a future), and reflective autonomy (the ability to evaluate and revise your own values and commitments).

Enhancement technologies are evaluated by whether they support or undermine these capabilities. Medical augmentation that restores embodied agency after injury scores well. Cognitive enhancement that expands narrative continuity by improving memory scores well. Mind uploading, assessed against this framework, raises harder questions.

How the Framework Applies to Mind Uploading

On Marchetti’s account, mind uploading’s ethical status depends entirely on whether the specific implementation preserves or disrupts the technopersonal capabilities. This is not a simple yes or no.

Embodied agency is the most directly threatened. If the upload is to a digital substrate with no physical interface, the characteristic human way of acting in the world through a body is lost. Marchetti does not treat this as automatically disqualifying. She allows that a digital substrate with rich sensorimotor simulation might preserve a functionally equivalent form of embodied agency. But she is clear that an upload that produces a purely cognitive entity with no embodied interface has disrupted something fundamental.

Narrative continuity depends on whether the upload preserves subjective continuity of experience. The question of whether consciousness can persist through destructive scanning is directly relevant here. If the upload involves a gap in experience, a period of non-existence between the biological original and the digital copy, Marchetti argues that narrative continuity is broken. The copy may have access to the same memories, but it does not have the same experiential history.

Relational identity is partly preserved and partly disrupted. Relationships can continue in digital form. But the specific form of presence that constitutes physical relationship, being bodily present with another person, is altered or lost. Whether this matters depends on how much of relational identity is constituted by bodily co-presence.

Temporal depth is the capability that mind uploading most directly threatens, paradoxically, by apparently serving it. Marchetti argues that what gives temporal depth its value is not merely having a past and future, but the way biological time binds past and future into a continuous life. An indefinitely long digital existence may actually undermine temporal depth by removing the finitude that gives time its meaning. This argument resonates with philosophical critiques of immortality from Bernard Williams and others.

Reflective autonomy is the capability most clearly preserved. An uploaded mind can presumably continue to evaluate and revise its values and commitments. Marchetti counts this as a genuine point in favor of mind uploading, while noting that it is necessary but not sufficient for flourishing.

Technology Readiness and Ethical Preparedness

Whole brain emulation remains at TRL 1 to 2. The technologies the book’s framework is designed to evaluate do not yet exist at operational scale. Marchetti is explicit about this: the book is preparatory philosophy, building the conceptual tools needed before the technology arrives, not reactive ethics trying to catch up with existing practices.

This timing is appropriate. The whole brain emulation roadmap laid out by Sandberg and Bostrom is a technical document. It describes what would need to be true for brain emulation to be feasible and proposes a development pathway. It does not ask what kind of mind uploading would be worth doing, which implementations would preserve what matters about the person being uploaded, or what social and legal structures should govern the process.

Marchetti’s framework addresses this gap. The technopersonal capabilities provide a checklist not for whether a given technology is technically possible, but for whether it is worth pursuing in the form proposed.

Where the Framework Breaks Down

The most significant limitation of Marchetti’s approach is that it takes for granted the very thing that mind uploading puts in question: a continuous subject for whom enhancement is either good or bad.

When a body dies and a digital copy is activated, whose flourishing is at stake? The original person is gone. The copy has the original’s memories, values, and commitments, but it came into existence at a discrete moment. Saying that the copy is either flourishing or not flourishing presupposes that it is the same person as the original. That is precisely what is contested.

The colonizing death critique makes a similar point: that framing digital immortality as personal survival may systematically misrepresent what it actually is, which is the creation of a new entity that believes it is a continuation of the old one.

Marchetti is aware of this objection and addresses it in her final chapter. Her response is pragmatic: for technologies that fall short of full mind uploading, such as partial augmentation, neural interfaces, or behavioral digital twins, the question of substrate continuity does not arise. The framework applies cleanly. For full mind uploading, she argues that the question of identity continuity should be treated as empirically open and that the flourishing framework applies to whatever entity results from the process, on the assumption that the entity’s wellbeing matters regardless of its metaphysical status.

This is a reasonable position, though it sidesteps the hardest version of the problem. Whether what results from mind uploading is the same person in a meaningful sense, or a very good copy, affects not just ethics but the entire motivation for pursuing the technology.

What the Book Gets Right

The most valuable contribution of Technologies of the Future Self is its insistence that enhancement ethics cannot be reduced to risk-benefit calculations. The question of what it means to live well as a person undergoing radical technological change is not answered by calculating expected utility or by enumerating rights. It requires a richer account of human nature, and what aspects of that nature are worth preserving through the transition.

The ethics of designing digital ghosts and posthumous personas are a small instance of a much larger set of questions this book opens. What kind of digital existence would actually constitute flourishing? What would need to be preserved for an uploaded mind to live well, not just to continue computing? What obligations do creators of mind uploading technologies have to the entities they create?

These questions do not have easy answers. But Marchetti’s framework at least asks the right ones.

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Official Sources

• Marchetti, E. (2026). Technologies of the Future Self: An Ethics for Transhuman Flourishing. Springer Nature. ISBN referenced via books.google.com
• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by T. Irwin. Hackett Publishing.
• Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Harvard University Press.
• Williams, B. (1973). “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.” In Problems of the Self. Cambridge University Press.
• Sandberg, A., & Bostrom, N. (2008). Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap. Future of Humanity Institute Technical Report 2008-3.