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Good People / Moral Enhancement
Published in Jonathan Anomaly, Creating Future People, 2020
The main targets for moral enhancement would presumably be hormones (and their associated receptors) that predispose us to be more empathetic, or to care more about fairness. Oxytocin, cortisol, and testosterone, for example, seem to affect empathy, aggression, trust, and a tendency to care about norms of justice. These hormones interact with each other and with genes in complicated ways. But we know that each of these hormones can affect behavior even in isolation.
Can we make empathy more intelligent? try social empathy!
Published in Alan Bleakley, Routledge handbook of the medical humanities, 2019
My own argument remains that we should not get rid of empathy but make it smarter. Social empathy means explicitly exploring the roots of partisanship and identifying proven methods of broadening medical learners’ moral compasses. These might include strategies for moral enhancement. Interestingly, some approaches to moral enhancement, rather than attempting to augment appreciation of others, suggest diminishing self-interest (Ahlskog 2017) and reducingempathy for one’s own in-group (Weisz and Zaki 2018). These sorts of strategies may be consistent with Buddhist-based mindfulness modalities emphasising ‘lovingkindness’ and ‘not-self,’ whisking us away, once more, from the individual as fulcrum of empathy to something both more dissolving and encompassing.
Moral Neuroenhancement
Published in L. Syd M Johnson, Karen S. Rommelfanger, The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics, 2017
Brian D. Earp, Thomas Douglas, Julian Savulescu
In her wide-ranging essay “Moral Enhancement: What Is It and Do We Want It?” Anna Pacholczyk (2011) outlines three major ways of understanding the term “moral enhancement,” two of which we will consider here. According to the first way of understanding the term, a moral enhancement is a change in some aspect of a person’s morality that results in a morally better person (251, paraphrased). This is broadly the sense we have in mind for this chapter, but it is not quite precise, nor is it sufficiently focused, for our purposes, on enhancements that work “directly” on the brain—that is, moral neuroenhancements in particular. We therefore propose an alternative definition: Moral neuroenhancement: Any change in a moral agent, A, effected or facilitated in some significant way by the application of a neurotechnology, that results, or is reasonably expected to result, in A’s being a morally better agent. Let us call this the agential conception of moral neuroenhancement. Note that the moral “betterness” of an agent could be understood in various ways. For example, it could be taken to be the increased moral worth or praiseworthiness of the agent, the increased moral excellence of the agent, or the increased moral desirability of the agent’s character traits, taken together (see Douglas, 2015, for further discussion). But however it is plausibly understood, as Pacholczyk notes, being moral (let alone more moral) is “a complex ability and there is a wide range of potentially enhancing interventions. Making morally better people could include making people more likely to act on their moral beliefs, improving their reflective and reasoning abilities as applied to moral issues, increasing their ability to be compassionate, and so on” (2011, 253). Of course, there are likely to be serious and substantive disagreements about what should or should not be included on this list, as well as what should or should not be counted as “morally better” in the first place. This is an important issue to which we will return throughout this chapter.
Mistaken Compassion: Tibetan Buddhist Perspectives on Neuroethics
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2022
Francisca Cho (2012), in her response to Tsomo, notes that “The scientific story can be very beneficial in solving human problems, but becomes harmful when taken as a form of metaphysics that naturalizes greed and undermines compassion” (Cho 2012, 541–542). This prioritization of the benefits and harms of scientific approaches to human problems can also be seen in the monastics’ responses to questions about enhancement, in which enhancement was not problematic in principle but only if it is used for personal gain or for harming others. This approach to the enhancement question intersects with current interest in the possibilities of moral enhancement (Douglas 2008; Focquaert and Schermer 2015). However, whereas the current discussion largely focuses on how enhancement could affect its users, the monastics asked broader questions about the purposes for which it is used and the intended social effects. As Cho notes, this practical perspective is consistent with Buddhist skepticism about objective truth (or objective goodness). Enhancement is not good or bad in itself; an ethical evaluation of it depends on its consequences.2
A Misguided yet Informative Approach
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2021
I depart from the author, however, by claiming that any form of moral enhancement implies the alteration of personal traits, necessarily constituting a virtue-based framework. Moral enhancement aims at improving moral behavior, which is described by traits insofar as they pertain to the good. The author gives a helpful definition of traits as “general and stable patterns of behaviour, thought or emotion … meant to be more robust and general than mere dispositions.” If this is the descriptive vocabulary of a framework to guide the empirical project, as I agree it should be, then any research into enhancement will presuppose a trait-based framework. Moreover, any sufficiently robust virtue theory will incorporate all morally relevant traits. Seen in this way, the desiderata are not to separate virtue theory from non-virtue theory, but instead to adjudicate the strengths and deficiencies of competing virtue theories. Likewise, any morally relevant trait will be located in the dimension of a virtue. In the end, it is enough to recognize that moral enhancement will necessarily alter personal traits, and all morally relevant traits will be germane to virtue. It follows, therefore, that any true moral enhancement implies virtue theory.
Enhancing Virtue without Becoming Ned Flanders?
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2021
From the argument of Fabiano could be implied that to prevent the future climate of exploitation by free-riders, morally enhanced individuals need to maintain or improve some moral traits to precisely punish uncooperative and selfish behavior. In short, moral enhancement itself solves the problems created by moral enhancement. I find this striking for two reasons. First, it entails expecting too much from the very possibilities of moral enhancement. In addition to the difficulties of targeting multiple moral dispositions, it obscures that the short-term prospects of moral enhancement would probably be restricted to improving or blocking particular moral traits. If we must wait for a complete and balanced moral enhancement, we should discard the immediate possibilities of moral enhancement because they will mostly be unbalanced.