Procedural Moral Enhancement
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Procedural Moral Enhancement G. Owen Schaefer & Julian Savulescu
Received: 10 March 2016 / Accepted: 6 April 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract While philosophers are often concerned with the conditions for moral knowledge or justification, in practice something arguably less demanding is just as, if not more, important – reliably making correct moral judgments. Judges and juries should hand down fair sentences, government officials should decide on just laws, members of ethics committees should make sound recommendations, and so on. We want such agents, more often than not and as often as possible, to make the right decisions. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of enhancing the moral reliability of such agents. In particular, we advocate for a procedural approach; certain internal processes generally contribute to people’s moral reliability. Building on the early work of Rawls, we identify several particular factors related to moral reasoning that are specific enough to be the target of practical intervention: logical competence, conceptual understanding, empirical competence, openness, empathy and bias. Improving on these processes can in turn make people more morally reliable in a variety of
G. O. Schaefer (*) Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Block MD11, Clinical Research Centre, 10 Medical Drive, Singapore 117597, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] J. Savulescu Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University, Suite 8, Littlegate House, 16/17 St Ebbe’s St, Oxford OX1 1PT, UK e-mail: [email protected]
contexts and has implications for recent debates over moral enhancement. Keywords Moral enhancement . Reliability . Rawls . Proceduralism
Introduction While moral and political philosophers are often concerned with high-level issues concerning the conditions of goodness and justice, in practice individual judgment plays a significant role in realizing the demands of morality. Individual judges and juries hand down purportedly fair sentences, government officials decide on just laws, and members of the public make personal decisions on whom to elect. In order to realize just outcomes, we need such agents, more often than not and as often as possible, to make the right decisions. While there is no doubt that interaction between agents in groups is important to deliberative quality (see, e.g., [1]), the purpose of this paper is to propose a method of enhancing the moral decision-making of individual agents. In particular, we advocate for a procedural approach; certain internal processes generally contribute to people’s moral reliability. Building on the early work of Rawls, we identify several particular factors related to moral reasoning that are specific enough to be the target of practical intervention: logical competence, conceptual understanding, empirical competence, openness,
G.O. Schaefer, J. Savulescu
empathy and bias. Improving on th
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