Biomedical Moral Enhancement in the Face of Moral Particularism

Abstract

Biomedical moral enhancement, or BME for short, aims to improve people's moral behaviour through augmenting, via biomedical means, their virtuous dispositions such as sympathy, honesty, courage, or generosity. Recently, however, it has been challenged, on particularist grounds, that the manifestations of virtuous dispositions can be morally wrong. For instance, being generous in terrorist financing is one such case. If so, biomedical moral enhancement, by enhancing people's virtues, might turn out to be counterproductive in terms of people's moral behaviour. In this chapter, we argue, via a comparison with moral education, that the case for the practice of biomedical moral enhancement is not weakened by the particularists’ stress on the variable moral statuses of the manifestations of our virtues. The real challenge from the particularists, we argue, lies elsewhere. It is that practical wisdom, being essentially context-sensitive, cannot be enhanced via biomedical means. On the basis of this, we further argue that BME ought to be used with great caution, for it may wrongly enhance, for instance, a terrorist financier's generosity, a robber's courage, or an undercover detective's honesty. Finally, we sketch how boundaries can be set on the use of BME, and address some potential objections to our position.

Revisiting Moral Bioenhancement and Autonomy

“…To this end specific interventions aimed at targeting certain traits have been suggested, such as the use of oxytocin, serotonin or SSRI's, β-blockers, or psychedelic drugs [7]. For instance, SSRI's are believed to boost people's motivation to cooperate, whereas oxytocin is believed to enhance people's generosity [8]. Others have argued that MBE interventions should target second-order capacities such as deliberative reasoning capacities, or 'procedural' qualities such as "logical competence, conceptual understanding, empirical competence" [9], rather than 'first-order' emotions such as empathy.…”