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On Defining Moral Enhancement: A Clarificatory Taxonomy

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Abstract

Recently there has been some discussion concerning a particular type of enhancement, namely ‘moral enhancement’. However, there is no consensus on what precisely constitutes moral enhancement, and as a result the concept is used and defined in a wide variety of ways. In this article, we develop a clarificatory taxonomy of these definitions and we identify the criteria that are used to delineate the concept. We think that the current definitions can be distinguished from each other by the criteria used for determining whether an intervention is indeed moral enhancement. For example, some definitions are broad and include moral enhancement by any means, while other definitions focus only on moral enhancement by means of specific types of intervention (e.g. biomedical or genetic interventions). Moreover, for some definitions it suffices for an intervention to be aimed or intended to morally enhance a person, while other definitions only refer to ‘moral enhancement’ in relation to interventions that are actually effective. For all these differences in definitions we discuss some of their (more normative) implications. This shows that definitions are significantly less descriptive and more normative than they are regularly portrayed to be. We therefore hope that the taxonomy developed in this paper and the comments on the implications for the normative debate of the variety of definitions will provide conceptual clarity in a complex and highly interesting debate.

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Notes

  1. The debate on a possible distinction between ‘treatment’ and ‘enhancement’ is, of course, by no means exclusive to the moral enhancement debate. Many commentators have already discussed the relevance or irrelevance of such a distinction for the general debate on enhancement [20].

  2. One might understand ‘moral capacities’ as being those capacities we actually use when making moral decisions (which capacities these are, is researched in moral psychology and neuroscience). For example, a recent review on the neurobiology of morality argues that it is most plausible to depict moral processes as requiring the engagement of both emotional and cognitive neural networks) [23]. However, ‘moral capacities’ might also be used to refer to those capacities one believes one should use when making moral decisions, or capacities that, when used more or better, would lead to better moral decisions. These capacities might, for example, constitute the capacity for sympathy and fairness [9] or cognitive capacities [1].

  3. Of course, again, we should not mistake the debate on what to call these interventions with debate on the ethical validity of such interventions. Authors such as Harris can consistently claim: (1) that an intervention such as the one performed on Jack is not a moral enhancement, and (2) that there might be some cases where such an intervention is morally justified.

  4. In this respect, Savulescu and Persson do mention at the end of their paper that ‘[s]uch interventions and such control are not plausibly moral enhancements of that person’ [30, p.417]. They mainly argue for the God Machine on the grounds that there would be many positive effects and as such their view perhaps does not differ that much from authors such as Harris.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Kasper Raus, Farah Focquaert & Sigrid Sterckx

  2. Department of Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine, Erasmus MC, PO Box 2040, 3000 CA, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Maartje Schermer & Jona Specker

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  1. Kasper Raus
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  2. Farah Focquaert
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  3. Maartje Schermer
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Correspondence to Kasper Raus.

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Raus, K., Focquaert, F., Schermer, M. et al. On Defining Moral Enhancement: A Clarificatory Taxonomy. Neuroethics 7, 263–273 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-014-9205-4

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