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Biomedical Moral Enhancement in the Face of Moral Particularism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2018

Pei-Hua Huang  and
Peter Shiu-Hwa Tsu
Pei-Hua Huang
Affiliation:
Monash University
Peter Shiu-Hwa Tsu*
Affiliation:
Chung Cheng University
*
[email protected]
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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.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 83: Moral Enhancement: Critical Perspectives , October 2018 , pp. 189 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2018 

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References

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2 For a more detailed review of pharmaceuticals that are known to be effective in modulating moral behaviours, see Levy, Neil, et al. , ‘Are You Morally Modified? The Moral Effects of Widely Used Pharmaceuticals’, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21:2 (2014), 111–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 It is to be noted that although according to Aristotle self-control is not a virtue, Aristotle certainly would not deny its importance for the production of morally right behaviour on many occasions. For instance, it is certainly required for the ethical behaviour of a man who lusts for his friend's wife.

4 Persson and Savulescu, ‘The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity’; Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement; Douglas, Thomas, ‘Moral Enhancement’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 25:3 (2008), 228–245CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Persson and Savulescu, ‘The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity’, and Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement, for instance.

6 See Dreu, Carsten De, et al. , ‘Oxytocin Promotes Human Ethnocentrism’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108:4 (2011), 1262–66CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Recently it has even been argued that tinkering with some dispositions via biomedical means might actually lead to adverse effects on others. See Handfield, Toby, Huang, Pei-Hua, and Simpson, Robert Mark, ‘Climate Change, Cooperation, and Moral Bioenhancement’, Journal of Medical Ethics 42:11 (2016), 742–747CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 See especially Sparrow, ‘Better Living Through Chemistry? A Reply to Savulescu and Persson on “Moral Enhancement”’, 5; Sparrow, Robert, ‘Egalitarianism and Moral Bioenhancement’, American Journal of Bioethics 14:4 (2014), 20, 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, Douglas, Thomas, ‘Moral Enhancement’, in Savulescu, Julian, Muelen, Ruud ter, and Kahane, Guy (eds), Enhancing Human Capacities (Blackwell: Oxford, 2011), 467–485Google Scholar. It is worth mentioning that although Douglas, a supporter of BME, acknowledges this line of objection, he does not really address it but merely sets it aside.

15 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.

16 The passage from the beginning of this section is adapted from Tsu, Peter Shiu-Hwa, ‘Particularism in Ethics’, in Pritchard, Duncan (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0367.xml.

17 We use “moral values” broadly to refer to not only goodness and badness but rightness and wrongness as well.

18 Jonathan Dancy, “Moral Particularism”, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/moral-particularism/.

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21 Bader, Ralf, ‘Conditions, Modifiers, and Holism’, in Lord, Errol and McGuire, Barry (eds), Weighing Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 27–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 We say “arguably” because one might feel that what happens in the S&M chamber is consensual and therefore cannot really be torture. On the other hand, it might well be contended that if what is going on in the S&M chamber is not real torture then the masochists in the S&M chamber would not get a kick out of it. The fact that the masochists do get a kick, one might therefore suggest, indicates that what they experience is indeed torture. See Timmons, Mark, Moral Theory (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 259Google Scholar.

23 Blackburn, Simon, ‘Through Thick and Thin’, in Practical Tortoise Raising and Other Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch.7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Disentangling Disentangling’, in Kirchin, Simon (ed.), Thick Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 121–135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See for instance Sparrow, ‘Better Living Through Chemistry? A Reply to Savulescu and Persson on “Moral Enhancement”’, and ‘Egalitarianism and Moral Bioenhancement’.

25 Swanton, Christine, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 244CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 It should be noted that situationist philosophers, such as John Doris and Gilbert Harman, often take the claim here to be falsified by empirical evidence (such as the Good Samaritan experiment) in social psychology. See Doris, John, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harman, Gilbert, ‘Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99:1 (1999), 315–332CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Situationism is roughly the view that our moral behaviour is very much of a function of the circumstances we are in; the virtues do not have much of a role to play. However, we are of the view that the empirical evidence adduced by the situationists might merely show that most people are not as virtuous as they should be, not that the virtues are usually causally inefficacious with regard to morally right actions. Before this alternative interpretation of the empirical evidence is ruled out, we do not think that situationism has much force against our claim.

27 Little, ‘Moral Generalities Revisited’, 296–298.

28 And after all, moral philosophers since the time of Aristotle have long been aware of moral (bad) luck.

29 Christine Swanston and John McDowell also interpret practical wisdom along these lines. See Swanton, Christine, ‘A Virtue Ethical Account of Right Action’, Ethics 112:1 (2001), 32–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDowell, John, ‘Virtue and Reason’, in Mind, Value & Reality (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 50–73Google Scholar. For Aristotle's relevant characterisation of practical wisdom, see Nicomachean Ethics, VI.8.

30 Dancy, Jonathan, Ethics Without Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.6.

32 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.13.

33 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.3.

34 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.8.

35 A passage from Elizabeth Telfer's work can illuminate why this is so: ‘it seems to be true that we do not call someone “wise” in English unless he is in general a good person, and it may be that the Greek noun “phronesis” carries a similar implication’. See Telfer, , ‘The Unity of the Moral Virtues in Aristotle's “Nicomachean Ethics”’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 90:1 (1990), 35–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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37 See Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’, Love's Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 148–167Google Scholar.

38 Although it should be admitted that contemporary moral philosophy often involves a heavy use of thought experiments which are abstracted from the concrete details of the case. We are not against their use, for they can indeed help illuminate difficult cases from time to time. But we should also be careful in their use in that there can be morally relevant differences between them and the real cases we encounter. This is a point the particularists have been wont to emphasise. See Dancy, Jonathan, ‘The Role of Imaginary Cases in Ethics’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66:1/2 (1985), 141–153CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 See for instance, Persson and Savulescu, ‘The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity’; Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement; and ‘The Duty to be Morally Enhanced’.

40 Something along these lines was suggested by Wiseman, Harris, The Myth of the Moral Brain: The Limit of Moral Enhancement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 170CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He maintains that working alongside traditional moral education, BME might well serve as a supplementary support mechanism for those who are already morally oriented.

41 Indeed, there is good textual evidence in support of this interpretation in Nicomachean Ethics, VI.12, where Aristotle claims that ‘[m]anifestly, then, one cannot be practically wise without being good’.

42 Harris Wiseman, The Myth of the Moral Brain: The Limit of Moral Enhancement, 285–286. For a more detailed discussion, see Huang, Pei-Hua, ‘Authenticity, Autonomy and Enhancement’, Dilemata 19 (2015), 39–52Google Scholar.

43 Christen, Markus and Narvaez, Darcia, ‘Moral Development in Early Childhood Is Key for Moral Enhancement’, AJOB Neuroscience 2:4 (2012), 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Irwin, Terence, ‘Ethics as an Inexact Science: Aristotle's Ambition for Moral Theory’, in Hooker, Brad and Little, Margaret (eds), Moral Particularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 100–129Google Scholar.

45 Agay, Nirit, et al. , ‘Non-Specific Effects of Methylphenidate (Ritalin) on Cognitive Ability and Decision-Making of ADHD and Healthy Adults’, Psychopharmacology 210:4 (2010), 511–519CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

46 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.12.

47 This chapter is a work of collaboration; both authors contributed equally to the writing of and research for it. We are immensely grateful to the following people for their helpful feedback: Robert Sparrow, Robert Mark Simpson, Andrew McLoughlin, and Hiroshi Miura. Tsu would also like to thank Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology for financial support (MOST-104-2628-H-194-001-MY2; MOST-105-2410-H-194-096-MY4).