Cognitive Enhancement to Overcome Laziness: Ethically Wrong or Just Stupid?

Abstract

The article "Enhancing Motivation by Use of Prescription Stimulants: The Ethics of Motivation Enhancement" by Torben Kjaersgaard (2015) argues that bioethical debates on cognitive enhancement (CE) should rather focus on the question of motivational enhancement than performance enhancement. After all, available CE drugs only show modest performance-enhancing effects in healthy individuals, but significant performance maintenance effects. The latter issue, however, is frequently neglected in current bioethical debates (Ranisch, Garofoli, and Dubljevic 2013). His article discusses ethical questions concerning these neglected effects of motivational enhancement. He focuses on (self-) reported effects of Adderall use by healthy students and discusses ethical issues concerning accomplishment and effort. Kjaersgaard concludes that in most cases people should not use CE drugs to enhance motivation.While Kjaersgaard's article offers an insightful contribution to bio-and neuroethical questions, it fails to clarify the status of the normative claims he makes. In most cases, bioethical analyses focus on moral questions of enhancement technologies, such as liberty, justice, and harm. While Kjaersgaard makes clear that these aspects are important for an analysis of CE drugs, he is more interested in raising "some ethical questions beyond" these concerns. He identifies these as "individual issues," that is, "what contributes to" and what "constitutes a good life." I follow Kjaersgaard by terming these questions "ethical" rather than "moral" questions.It has sometimes been suggested that even though human enhancement technologies are innovative, they do not really pose new moral questions. The extended possibilities to modify, enhance, or even transform our nature rather confront us with questions about the human condition, how we want to live and how we should live well. Thus, possibilities of changing essential aspects of our psychological, emotional, and physiological constitution make it necessary to confront questions that are ethical by their nature, rather than moral. In this respect, Kjaersgaard's article is an important contribution to the ethics of human enhancement.Nevertheless, his approach faces a difficulty if it wishes to be of practical relevance or to even guide policymaking: Liberal societies are distinguished by a "reasonable pluralism" (the term used by Rawls), and we find a legitimate diversity of concepts of the good life. For this reason, it is widely believed the one key element of liberalism is state neutrality: Policies should not be justified by a controversial and contested concept of the good. Reasons for neutrality are different. Sometimes it is maintained for epistemic reasons that state policies should not be guided by a particular concept of the good since we are unable to prove its superiority. Other positions hold that neutrality is the best mean to guarantee social and political stability or human flourishing. Regardless of justification of neutrality, there is a consensus in liberal societies...

Neuromedia, cognitive offloading, and intellectual perseverance

“…The virtue epistemology of technology analyzes both (a) how different cognitive artifacts shape (or are prone to shape) the cultivation and possession of intellectual virtues and (b) how the cultivation and possession of different intellectual virtues shape (or are prone to shape) the manner in which agents approach and navigate their use of cognitive artifacts. Up until now, the majority of scholars working in this area have focused on contemporary cognitive artifacts like pharmaceutical 'smart' drugs (Carter, 2020;Ranisch, 2015), GPS navigation systems (Gillett & Heersmink, 2019), and more than anything else, the internet and online search engines (Sunstein, 2006, Greenfield, 2014, Heersmink, 2016, Smart 2018a, Schwengerer, 2021. Richard Heersmink (2018), for example, demonstrates how nine different intellectual virtues ought to be deployed within the context of online search engines.…”