Moral Enhancement

Abstract

AbstractShould we alter our brains to become better people? This chapter evaluates five key ethical concerns with going beyond treatment to enhancing ourselves. Such endeavors could, for example, bypass one’s agency, promote a problematic desire to master oneself, or lead to the rich getting morally richer. Although such concerns are to be taken seriously, they are typically overblown. Brain interventions will work best and most ethically when they merely aid more traditional forms of character building, such as moral instruction and exemplars. These work through our rational learning mechanisms rather than bypassing them in some posthuman fashion. The result is a realistic conception of moral enhancements as no more problematic than traditional modes of moral improvement. To make our discussion concrete, we begin by considering the neurobiological manipulation of intelligence and compassion.