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Moral Enhancement and the Human Condition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2018

Edward Skidelsky
Edward Skidelsky*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

I argue that the project of moral enhancement is incipiently contradictory. All our judgements of human excellence and deficiency rest on what I call the human “form of life”, meaning that a radical transformation of this form of life, such as is envisioned by advocates of moral enhancement, would undermine the basis of those judgements. It follows that the project of moral enhancement is self-defeating: its fulfilment would spell the abolition of the very conditions that allow us to describe it as an “enhancement”.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 83: Moral Enhancement: Critical Perspectives , October 2018 , pp. 109 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2018 

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References

1 This, in very brief outline, is the argument of ‘The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity’, the article in which Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu first launched the concept of moral enhancement. See Persson, Ingmar and Savulescu, Julian, ‘The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 25:3 (2008), 162–177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Foot, Philippa, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have borrowed this example from her.

3 Foot, Natural Goodness, 45.

4 See Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 1–6Google Scholar.

5 Mainstream economics assumes that people want money simply in order to acquire the goods that they want, regardless of what others have. But this ignores the way in which consumer wants are themselves shaped by social expectations. See Frank, Robert H., Luxury Fever: Weighing the Cost of Excess (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

6 See Savulescu, Julian and Persson, Ingmar, ‘Moral Enhancement, Freedom and the God Machine’, The Monist 95:3 (2012), 399–421, 407–8CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

7 Savulescu and Persson ‘Moral Enhancement, Freedom and the God Machine’, 400–405.

8 Harris, John, ‘Moral Enhancement and Freedom’, Bioethics 25:2 (2011), 102–111CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

9 Savulescu and Persson, ‘Moral Enhancement, Freedom and the God Machine’, 409.

10 Nicomachean Ethics II.9.

11 Foot, Philippa, Virtues and Vices (University of California Press, 1978), 8Google Scholar.

12 James, William, ‘What Makes Life Significant?’, in McDermott, John (ed.), The Writings of William James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 647Google Scholar.

13 A “moral zombie” possesses consciousness and reason but lacks personality. I owe this useful concept to philosopher Rodion Garshin (private conversation).

14 The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007)Google Scholar.