Moral Enhancement Should Target Self-Interest and Cognitive Capacity
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Moral Enhancement Should Target Self-Interest and Cognitive Capacity Rafael Ahlskog
Received: 10 October 2016 / Accepted: 7 April 2017 © The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication
Abstract Current suggestions for capacities that should be targeted for moral enhancement has centered on traits like empathy, fairness or aggression. The literature, however, lacks a proper model for understanding the interplay and complexity of moral capacities, which limits the practicability of proposed interventions. In this paper, I integrate some existing knowledge on the nature of human moral behavior and present a formal model of prosocial motivation. The model provides two important results regarding the most friction-free route to moral enhancement. First, we should consider decreasing self-interested motivation rather than increasing prosociality directly. Second, this should be complemented with cognitive enhancement. These suggestions are tested against existing and emerging evidence on cognitive capacity, mindfulness meditation and the effects of psychedelic drugs and are found to have sufficient grounding for further theoretical and empirical exploration. Furthermore, moral effects of the latter two are hypothesized to result from a diminished sense of self with subsequent reductions in self-interest.
R. Ahlskog () Department of Government, Uppsala Universitet, Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Moral enhancement · Cognitive enhancement · Self-interest · Sense of self · Psychedelics
Introduction Do humans possess a large enough capacity for morality to safely navigate the minefield of modern, hightech civilization [1]? If not, would it be admissible to enhance moral capacities or moral behavior and thereby avoid certain catastrophic calamities? How would one go about doing so, and what traits ought to be targeted? The moral enhancement debate has covered these questions extensively in recent years, with a large variety of viewpoints regarding the necessity, admissibility and practicability of different supposed moral enhancement interventions. Furthermore, a number of different capacities have been suggested as potential targets – aggression, empathy, self-control etc, as well as a number of specific biomedical interventions [2]. In this paper I will argue, based on a novel formal model of moral capacities, in favor of a previously underappreciated route to moral enhancement: rather than increasing certain moral or prosocial motivations directly (which as we shall see is likely to have significant unintended consequences), a more
R. Ahlskog
reliable path would be to diminish self-interested motivation, thereby allowing the moral sentiments that people already possess naturally more room to flourish. Further, I argue that this can be synergetically supplemented with cognitive enhancement. My argument is thus partially in line with both Earp et al. [3], who argue that in certain cases, diminishing a capacity can actually be an enhancement, and with auth
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