Nicholas Agar is a professor of ethics

Ethics

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

 and an associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington

Victoria University of Wellington

Victoria University of Wellington was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a former constituent college of the University of New Zealand. It is particularly well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, but offers a broad range of other courses...

. Agar has a BA from Auckland University, an MA from Victoria and a PhD from the Australian National University

Australian National University

The Australian National University is a teaching and research university located in the Australian capital, Canberra.As of 2009, the ANU employs 3,945 administrative staff who teach approximately 10,000 undergraduates, and 7,500 postgraduate students...

. He has been teaching at Victoria since 1996. Agar's main research interests are in the ethics of the new genetics

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

. He has also published on personhood theory, environmental ethics

Environmental ethics

Environmental ethics is the part of environmental philosophy which considers extending the traditional boundaries of ethics from solely including humans to including the non-human world...

, and the philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...

. In 2010, he was elected as a Hastings Center

Hastings Center

The Hastings Center, founded in 1969, is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit bioethics research institute based in the United States. It is dedicated to the examination of essential questions in health care, biotechnology, and the environment...

 Fellow.

Ethically, Agar is descibed as occupying a position between bioconservatives like Leon Kass

Leon Kass

Leon Richard Kass is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual, best known as proponent of liberal education via the "Great Books," as an opponent of human cloning and euthanasia, as a critic of certain areas of technological progress and embryo research, and for his...

 and transhumanists

Transhumanism

Transhumanism, often abbreviated as H+ or h+, is an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human...

. Transhumanists argue that biotechnology should be used to overcome our human limitations so we may all become "better than well". Agar's supports reproductive freedom - the right of prospective parents to pursue enhancement technologies for their future children but without forcing them to embrace it.

Agar is a member of the New Zealand Government's Environmental Risk Management Authority Ethics Advisory Council. He was appointed in April 2008.

Books

• Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA:, 2010)
• Liberal Eugenics, In Defence of Human Enhancement (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
• Perfect Copy (Cambridge: Icon, 2002)
• Life’s Intrinsic Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)

Articles

• What Do Frogs Really Believe? Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1993) 71 (1):1-12.
• Philosophical Naturalism. Mind and Language (1995) 10 (1-2):194-197.
• Designing Babies: Morally Permissible Ways to Modify the Human Genome Bioethics (1995) 9 (1):1–15.
• Teleogy and Genes Biology and Philosophy (1996) 11 (3)
• Biocentrism and the Concept of Life. Ethics (1997) 108 (1):147-168
• Functionalism and Personal Identity Nous 37(2003): 52-70
• Cloning and Identity Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (2003): 9-26.
• Embryonic Potential and Stem Cells Bioethics, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 198-207, May 2007
• Thoughts about our species’ future: themes from Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement. Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol 21 Issue 2, November 2010, pp 23-31