Moral Enhancement, Self-Governance, and Resistance

Abstract

John Harris recently argued that the moral bioenhancement proposed by Persson and Savulescu can damage moral agency by depriving recipients of their freedom to fall (freedom to make wrongful choices) and therefore should not be pursued. The link Harris makes between moral agency and the freedom to fall, however, implies that all forms of moral enhancement that aim to make the enhancement recipients less likely to "fall," including moral education, are detrimental to moral agency. In this article, I present a new moral agency-based critique against the moral bioenhancement program envisaged by Persson and Savulescu. I argue that the irresistible influences exerted by the bioenhancement program harm our capabilities for conducting accurate self-reflection and forming decisions that truly express our will, subsequently undermining our moral agency.

Desafíos éticos del biomejoramiento moral

“…En consecuencia, consideran que la única "mejora" moral aceptable serían aquellas que se dirijan a devolver la autonomía personal perdida o dañada por una lesión fisiológica (neuronal, endocrina o genética), pero donde la técnica no sustituya a la capacidad de elegir entre el bien y el mal. Por eso, estos autores muestran ciertas dudas hacia aquellas intervenciones en las que la tecnología de biomejoramiento suplanta el esfuerzo moral y la libre decisión de mejorar (Glannon, 2018;Huang, 2018;Paulo y Bublitz, 2019).…”