For more than a decade, the field of bioethics has increasingly turned its attention to wide-ranging discussions of possible future biotechnologies, such as those that might be used to determine the genetic endowments of future offspring or to enhance existing people. Yet while the literature on human biomedical enhancement has become a focal point of bioethical debate, few of the technologies that stimulate this discourse have reached the point where they actually generate the ethical questions that the literature addresses. This study offers a comprehensive analysis and critique of speculative bioethics that builds on existing conceptualizations of two parallel modes of bioethical discourse (prophetic and regulatory), and draws from literature outside of bioethics that examines the social function of expectations regarding future technologies.I begin by tracing various developments in bioethics that have given rise to the enhancement discourse in its present form and survey some of the existing criticism that it has drawn. I demonstrate the ways in which speculative bioethics goes wrong when exploring potential future technologies and scenarios, and evaluate the utility of anticipatory bioethics research that attempts to get ahead of expected future technological developments. In the course of developing a robust theory of the nature and function of the prophetic and regulatory aspects of bioethics, I establish that speculative explorations belong within the domain of the prophetic, not regulatory, mode of bioethics.I expand the critique by examining the roles that technological expectations play in driving both biomedical research as well as public engagement with ethical issues in biomedicine. I argue that many existing ethical explorations of possible future technological scenarios mistakenly identify the object of ethical analysis as the actual possible future. Instead, it is the expectations that drive public discussion and research agendas that are the proper object of scrutiny and analysis. After probing the nature of this shortcoming and its consequences, I enlist alternative approaches that are capable of critically assessing the moral implications of technological expectations themselves. Finally, I develop an integrated approach for exploring the possible future technological scenarios found in speculative bioethics. Drawing on work in narrative ethics and the interface between literature and bioethics, I offer a multifaceted model of `narrative competence,' appropriate for analyzing the existing literature on human enhancement, as well as for pursuing alternatives that could better advance useful modes of bioethical discourse and public deliberation.
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