Introduction: Political Implications of Moral Enhancement
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EDITORIAL NOTE
Introduction: Political Implications of Moral Enhancement Norbert Paulo & Christoph Bublitz
Received: 23 December 2017 / Accepted: 27 December 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Even after a decade of debate, the promises and perils of moral enhancements still attract considerable interest in academia and beyond. While much has been written and said about a range of pertinent issues, from empirical feasibility to conceptual issues to the Bfreedom to fall^, the aim of the papers collected in this special issue is to emphasize a somewhat neglected problem, namely the political dimension of moral enhancement. JeanJacques Rousseau famously declared in the very first sentence of his The Social Contract that the task of political philosophy is Bto inquire whether, taking men as they are and laws as they can be made to be, it is possible to establish some just and reliable rule of administration in civil affairs^ ([1], 155, italics added). The highlighted passage reflects the assumption that politics may change the prescriptive and contingent laws of the state in order to fit the more or less constant anthropological properties of humankind. However, social orders have always striven to enhance the moral behaviour of
N. Paulo (*) Institute of Philosophy, University of Graz, Attemsgasse 25, 8010 Graz, Austria e-mail: [email protected] N. Paulo Department of Social Sciences and Economics, University of Salzburg, Churfürststr. 1, 5020 Salzburg, Austria C. Bublitz Faculty of Law, University of Hamburg, Rothenbaumchaussee 33, 20148 Hamburg, Germany
their members to promote social cooperation and to ensure security. Education, moral, legal or religious systems and psychiatric institutions are example of traditional ways of influencing moral behaviour for the better. Already Aristotle noted, Bthe true politician … wants to make citizens good and obedient to the laws^ ([2], 20 [1102a8–10]). And Rousseau’s educational works are prime examples of traditional ways to make people morally better. This tension between the contingent and the constant, which has implications for the proper place of political intervention, is shifting. Human properties once conceived as hardly alterable have become the object of scientific experimentation. It seems moral behaviour, moral thought and moral emotions can be manipulated through non-traditional means, at least in the lab. That is, humankind’s constant anthropological properties might turn out to be alterable. Conversely, answers to questions about politics usually emphasize their relative and contingent nature. However, there seems to be a slowly emerging shared belief in the paramount importance of some political goals: The fight against anthropogenic climate change and global warming, the alleviation of global injustice, and minimizing the threat of weapons of mass destruction, to name some of the most obvious. Of course there is disagreement about these matters even in the highest places of political power, but we cannot but s
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