Moral Enhancement: Do Means Matter Morally?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Moral Enhancement: Do Means Matter Morally? Farah Focquaert & Maartje Schermer
Received: 17 October 2014 / Accepted: 22 January 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract One of the reasons why moral enhancement may be controversial, is because the advantages of moral enhancement may fall upon society rather than on those who are enhanced. If directed at individuals with certain counter-moral traits it may have direct societal benefits by lowering immoral behavior and increasing public safety, but it is not directly clear if this also benefits the individual in question. In this paper, we will discuss what we consider to be moral enhancement, how different means may be used to achieve it and whether the means we employ to reach moral enhancement matter morally. Are certain means to achieve moral enhancement wrong in themselves? Are certain means to achieve moral enhancement better than others, and if so, why? More specifically, we will investigate whether the difference between direct and indirect moral enhancement matters morally. Is it the case that indirect means are morally preferable to direct means of moral enhancement and can we indeed
F. Focquaert (*) Bioethics Institute Ghent, Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] M. Schermer Department of Medical Ethics and Philosophy, PO Box 2040, 3000 CA Rotterdam, The Netherlands
pinpoint relevant intrinsic, moral differences between both? We argue that the distinction between direct and indirect means is indeed morally relevant, but only insofar as it tracks an underlying distinction between active and passive interventions. Although passive interventions can be ethical provided specific safeguards are put in place, these interventions exhibit a greater potential to compromise autonomy and disrupt identity. Keywords Moral enhancement . Enhancement . Bioenhancement . Biomedical enhancement . Identity . Autonomy
Introduction An enhancement can be broadly defined as any Bdeliberate intervention … which aims to improve an existing capacity that most or all human beings typically have, or to create a new capacity^ [1: 23]. When these interventions are biomedical or biotechnological in nature and act directly on the body or brain, we can speak of biomedical enhancement. In this article we focus on moral enhancement, because this is a relatively new and controversial concept. Moral enhancement is more complex compared to most forms of (cognitive) enhancement, in which typically one more-or-less
F. Focquaert, M. Schermer
isolated trait is targeted, and attitudes towards moral enhancement appear to be more varied.1 One of the reasons it is controversial, is because the advantages of moral enhancement may fall upon society rather than on those who are enhanced. If directed at individuals with certain counter-moral traits it may have direct societal benefits by lowering immoral behavior and increasing public safety, but it is not directly clear
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