Empirical Support for the Moral Salience of the Therapy-Enhancement Distinction in the Debate Over Cognitive, Affective and Social Enhancement

Abstract

The ambiguity regarding whether a given intervention is perceived as enhancement or as therapy might contribute to the angst that the public expresses with respect to endorsement of enhancement. We set out to develop empirical data that explored this. We used Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit participants (N= 2776) from Canada and the United States. Each individual was randomly assigned to read one (and only one) vignette describing the use of a pill to enhance one of 12 cognitive, affective or social (CAS) domains. The vignettes described a situation in which an individual was using a pill to enhance the relevant domain under one of two possible enhancement conditions, one perceived as enhancing above the norm (EAN), what most people recognize as a clear case of enhancement, whereas the other perceived as enhancing towards the norm (ETN), with the individual using the enhancement having a modest, but subclinical deficit. Participants were asked how comfortable they were with the individual using the enhancement and about the impact the enhancement might have had in the individuals' success in life. We found that irrespective of the domain to be enhanced, participants felt significantly more comfortable with ETN than with EAN, and they regarded the enhancement intervention as contributing to greater success in life with ETN rather than EAN. These data demonstrate that the therapy enhancement distinction is morally salient to the public, and that this distinction contributes to the angst that people feel when considering the propriety of CAS enhancement.

The Multiplicity of Memory Enhancement: Practical and Ethical Implications of the Diverse Neural Substrates Underlying Human Memory Systems

“…Unfortunately, very few studies to date bear on the question of public attitudes to various kinds of memory enhancement, and yet such information has large and obvious implications for any philosophical or ethical debate on these topics (Cabrera, Fitz, & Reiner, 2014;Cabrera et al, 2015). If people have no interest in strengthening autobiographical memory, for instance, there is little cause for extended debate on the implications of such an enhancement.…”

My Brain Made Me Moral: Moral Performance Enhancement for Realists

“…Enhancement is retaining enough operational meaning to indicate a reach for expectations beyond therapeutic goals [5], even if therapy is also hard to define. Ambiguity can be managed by distinguishing contexts for separate definitional precision.…”

“…The embedded assumptions are unrealistic, of course. 5 Even if some of those assumptions were satisfiable, cognitive reasoning is asked to play a large role, and emotions won't end up being primarily responsible for any moral improvement.…”

Rethinking Human Enhancement

“…However, there is evidence that the majority of people still believe that certain enhancement interventions (such as biomedical or transhumanist) are not needed (Cabrera, Fitz, & Reiner, 2014). If we take into consideration the fact that we live in societies under restricted resources and poor regulatory schemes, we can see why many people do not consider these types of enhancement interventions as priorities (Hamlett, Cobb, & Guston, 2008).…”