‘The Thorny and Arduous Path of Moral Progress’: Moral Psychology and Moral Enhancement

Public Attitudes Towards Moral Enhancement. Evidence that Means Matter Morally

To gain insight into the reasons that the public may have for endorsing or eschewing pharmacological moral enhancement for themselves or for others, we used empirical tools to explore public attitudes towards these issues. Participants (N = 293) from the United States were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk and were randomly assigned to read one of several contrastive vignettes in which a 13-year-old child is described as bullying another student in school and then is offered an empathy-enhancing program. The empathy-enhancing program is described as either involving taking a pill or playing a video game on a daily basis for four weeks. In addition, participants were asked to imagine either their own child bullying another student at school, or their own child being bullied by another student. This resulted in a 2 × 2 between-subjects design. In an escalating series of morally challenging questions, we asked participants to rate their overall support for the program; whether they would support requiring participation; whether they would support requiring participation of children who are at higher risk to become bullies in the future; whether they would support requiring participation of all children or even the entire population; and whether they would be willing to participate in the program themselves. We found that people were significantly more troubled by pharmacological as opposed to non-pharmacological moral enhancement interventions. The results indicate that members of the public for the greater part oppose pharmacological moral bioenhancement, yet are open to non-biomedical means to attain moral enhancement. [248 words].

Moral enhancement, gnosticism, and some philosophical paradoxes

This article examines the concept of moral enhancement from two different perspectives. The first is a bottom-up approach, which aims at identifying fundamental moral traits and subcapacities as targets for enhancement. The second perspective, a top-down approach, is holistic and in line with virtue ethics. Both perspectives lead to the observation that alterations of material and social conditions are the most reliable means to improve prosocial behavior overall. Moral enhancement as a preventive measure invokes Gnostic narratives on the allegedly fallen status of human nature, its search for salvation, and the dependence of the laity on heteronomous salvific interventions. The allure of the preventive kind of enhancement is attributable to its religious hues. Owing to the absence of clarity regarding moral enhancement and of metrics to evaluate its progress, humanity is at risk of prioritizing unclear and unsubstantiated measures of preventive diminishment at the expense of celebrating human capacities and joys.

The ethical desirability of moral bioenhancement: a review of reasons

Background

The debate on the ethical aspects of moral bioenhancement focuses on the desirability of using biomedical as opposed to traditional means to achieve moral betterment. The aim of this paper is to systematically review the ethical reasons presented in the literature for and against moral bioenhancement.

Discussion

A review was performed and resulted in the inclusion of 85 articles. We classified the arguments used in those articles in the following six clusters: (1) why we (don’t) need moral bioenhancement, (2) it will (not) be possible to reach consensus on what moral bioenhancement should involve, (3) the feasibility of moral bioenhancement and the status of current scientific research, (4) means and processes of arriving at moral improvement matter ethically, (5) arguments related to the freedom, identity and autonomy of the individual, and (6) arguments related to social/group effects and dynamics. We discuss each argument separately, and assess the debate as a whole. First, there is little discussion on what distinguishes moral bioenhancement from treatment of pathological deficiencies in morality. Furthermore, remarkably little attention has been paid so far to the safety, risks and side-effects of moral enhancement, including the risk of identity changes. Finally, many authors overestimate the scientific as well as the practical feasibility of the interventions they discuss, rendering the debate too speculative.

Summary

Based on our discussion of the arguments used in the debate on moral enhancement, and our assessment of this debate, we advocate a shift in focus. Instead of speculating about non-realistic hypothetical scenarios such as the genetic engineering of morality, or morally enhancing ‘the whole of humanity’, we call for a more focused debate on realistic options of biomedical treatment of moral pathologies and the concrete moral questions these treatments raise.

How does enhancing cognition affect human values? How does this translate into social responsibility?

The past decade has seen a rise in the use of different technologies aimed at enhancing cognition of normal healthy individuals. While values have been acknowledged to be an important aspect of cognitive enhancement practices, the discussion has predominantly focused on just a few values, such as safety, peer pressure, and authenticity. How are values, in a broader sense, affected by enhancing cognitive abilities? Is this dependent on the type of technology or intervention used to attain the enhancement, or does the cognitive domain targeted play a bigger role in how values are affected? Values are not only likely to be affected by cognitive enhancement practices; they also play a crucial role in defining the type of interventions that are likely to be undertaken. This paper explores the way values affect and are affected by enhancing cognitive abilities. Furthermore, it argues that knowledge of the interplay between values and cognitive enhancement makes a strong case for social responsibility around cognitive enhancement practices.