Enhancing Moral Goodness: Toward a Virtue Ethics of Moral Bioenhancement

Abstract

A recurrent philosophical critique of the project of moral bioenhancement proposed by Julian Savulescu and his colleagues at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics is that although certain positive consequences might result from the deliberate biogenetic or pharmacological reshaping of moral disposition and behavior , the implementation of the various measures of moral bioenhancement would nevertheless entail the morally unacceptable consequence of undermining personal autonomy and moral responsibility. This chapter engages this critique of moral bioenhancement from a virtue ethics perspective, and argues, first, that the adoption of a select range of means of combined cognitive and moral enhancement may in fact enhance rather than undermine personal autonomy, thereby improving moral performance, and second, that the most appropriate normative framework within which to locate the practice of moral bioenhancement is that of virtue ethics rather than, as with Savulescu et al., utilitarianism.

Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics (September 2014) and the follow-up meeting of the Human Distinctiveness Seminar at the University of Notre Dame (June 2016). Many thanks to those in attendance at both of these meetings for their collegial and very generous constructive feedback concerning the chapter.