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Enhancement: Consequentialist Arguments

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Abstract

Enhancement, the improvement of mental capacities with psychoactive substances and technologies has stimulated one of the largest debates in contemporary bioethics. Surprisingly few participants in this debate take note of the tendentious legal status of psychoactive pharmaceuticals as the primary means of enhancement.

Enhancement technologies and substances have measurable effects on specific measurable cognitive functions. A major issue of contention in the debate is how to evaluate these effects, i. e. which theory of value to use. It is contested whether the pleasures and achievements resulting from the use of enhancement can be counted as such or can be ignored or devaluate by calling them fraudulent or inauthentic.

The alleged and real benefits of enhancement are not expected to be evenly distributed, nor is it always clear whether enhancement is a zero-sum game or has benefits even for the non-users. This results in a complex structure of risks and benefits for individuals and groups, which needs to be broken down in detail.

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Notes

  1. The terminological choice ‘enhancement’ itself is not unproblematic. It carries a strong positive connotation, which might not be justified by every intervention which falls under the extension of the term. Labelling the use of psychoactive pharmaceuticals and technologies enhancement in the professional debate might even reinforce public perception that the interventions in question are good for their users on the whole, and might thus lead to reduced critical stance in prospective user’s deliberation (Mohamed 2014, 540). Alternative terms such as ‘human engineering’ have, however, not caught on in the debate.

  2. Under ‘neuroenhancement’ we subsume means of enhancement, which modify cognitive and emotive functions by means of modifying neural activity, either chemically or electromagnetically. The term thus covers a major part of the enhancement toolbox currently under debate, such as smart drugs, moral enhancement, mood enhancement, love enhancement etc. Enhancement technologies probably not within this spectrum are means of increasing longevity and physical enhancements such as most doping in sports.

  3. Earlier research into the effects of drugs beyond therapeutic, preventative and palliative use was conducted in the 1950s and early 1960s but discontinued and widely forgotten for political reasons. For an impressive overview of the earlier research see (Grinspoon and Bakalar 1979).

  4. ‘Neuroscience’ in this case is an umbrella term for a number of disciplines contributing to a new understanding of psychoactive substances. For example, molecular neuroscience and neuropharmacology provided key insights into the mechanisms of action of the substances in question, e. g. neurotransmitter antagonists or reuptake inhibitors. Cognitive psychology provided a detailed taxonomy of cognitive and emotive functions, neuroanatomy generated increasingly detailed atlases of brain regions and their interconnections and cognitive neuroscience could – on this basis – identify neural networks involved in the realisation of functions. Thus the neuroscientific evidence referred to spans a broad spectrum of methods, including behavioural, microscopic, and imaging techniques applied over different scales, ranging from nanometre scale of molecular processes to the meter scale of bodily behaviour.

  5. The Deipnosophistai are a report of fictitious debates held during three banquets allegedly visited by the author. The guests to the banquets include several famous philosophers and politicians and some fictional individuals. The whole writing has become famous because it includes quotations of over 700 classic authors, many of which would otherwise not have been passed down to us.

  6. The 1925 convention was comparably permissive as it only limited international trade and some types of distribution within the signatory counties. For this reason, the United States of America never signed this treaty. Their more extreme prohibitionist policy was welded into international law with the Convention for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs of 1931.

  7. In part inspired by some of the results generated with psychedelic drugs in the 1950s.

  8. The most abstract version of such an objective list axiology most likely is the pair: (change in survival (in years), change in welfare). More detailed measures of medical benefit are often tailored to a specific group of patients. There are for example different methods to measure cognitive function in patients with anxiety syndrome, patients with dementia and patients with depression (Ragguett et al. 2016).

  9. There is a significant number of deontological and virtue ethicist contributions as well. These will be separate topics in the remainder of this little article series.

  10. The terminology for different positions is not unproblematic either. Not only does it refer to political positions, which are, at least in this constellation specific to the political system of the United States of America and not representative of other national, much less of international contexts. Even in the American context it subsumes position under the wrong label. Not every bioconservative for example is a political conservative. That is why several authors (Caplan 2009; Macklin 2006) suggested alternative nomenclatures, which, however, have not caught on yet.

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Acknowledgements

We want to thank our colleagues at the Institute for Ethics in the Neurosciences at Forschungszentrum Jülich, who provided ample and helpful input in several debates. A special thanks goes to Markus Rüther, who will co-author one part of this little series and significantly helped to shape the whole.

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  1. Institut für Neurowissenschaften und Medizin, INM-8: Ethik in den Neurowissenschaften, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH in der Helmholtz Gemeinschaft, 52425, Jülich, Germany

    Jan-Hendrik Heinrichs

  2. Deutsches Referenzzentrum für Ethik in den Biowissenschaften, Bonner Talweg 57, 53113, Bonn, Germany

    Mandy Stake

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Heinrichs, JH., Stake, M. Enhancement: Consequentialist Arguments. ZEMO 1, 321–342 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-018-0025-9

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