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My Brain Made Me Moral: Moral Performance Enhancement for Realists

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Abstract

How should ethics help decide the morality of enhancing morality? The idea of morally enhancing the human brain quickly emerged when the promise of cognitive enhancement in general began to seem realizable. However, on reflection, achieving moral enhancement must be limited by the practical challenges to any sort of cognitive modification, along with obstacles particular to morality’s bases in social cognition. The objectivity offered by the brain sciences cannot ensure the technological achievement of moral bioenhancement for humanity-wide application. Additionally, any limited moral enhancement will not easily fulfil ethical expectations. Three hypothetical scenarios involving putative moral enhancement help illustrate why. Philosophical concerns about the “Does-Must Dichotomy” and the “Factor-Cause Plurality,” as I label them, forbid easy leaps from views about morality on to conclusions about ways to enhance morality, and then further on to ethically justifying those enhancements. A modest and realistic approach to moral enhancement emerges from exploring these issues.

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Notes

  1. Quoted in [11], p. 9.

  2. Quoted in [16], p. 142.

  3. Paraphrasing David Hume [27], book III, part I, section I.

  4. Ranking moral theories as more or less ethical can be handled by moral psychology and moral neurology, according to Joshua Greene [28, 29].

  5. These kinds of concerns have bases in moral psychology [31] and get raised in reviews [32–35] of Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu’s Unfit for the Future [36].

  6. Critics of moral enhancement by various means, not just involving fairness, have appealed to these Limits. Examples for each Limit are: Limit I – [12] on losing freedom; Limit II – [39] on negative feedback systems; Limit III –[40] on trusting morally enhanced persons; Limit IV – [41] ch. 8 on the morality of posthumans; Limit V – [42] on chasing moral perfectionism; Limit VI – [43] ch 3 on overcoming prejudice in institutions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy Department, University at Buffalo, 135 Park Hall, Buffalo, NY, 14260, USA

    John R. Shook

  2. Science Education in the Graduate School of Education, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    John R. Shook

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Correspondence to John R. Shook.

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Shook, J.R. My Brain Made Me Moral: Moral Performance Enhancement for Realists. Neuroethics 9, 199–211 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-016-9270-y

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