Is moral bioenhancement dangerous?

Abstract

In a recent response to Persson and Savulescu's Unfit for the Future, Nicholas Agar argues that moral bioenhancement is dangerous. His grounds for this are that normal moral judgement should be privileged because it involves a balance of moral subcapacities; moral bioenhancement, Agar argues, involves the enhancement of only particular moral subcapacities, and thus upsets the balance inherent in normal moral judgement. Mistaken moral judgements, he says, are likely to result. I argue that Agar's argument fails for two reasons. First, having strength in a particular moral subcapacity does not necessarily entail a worsening of moral judgement; it can involve strength in a particular aspect of morality. Second, normal moral judgement is not sufficiently likely to be correct to be the standard by which moral judgements are measured.

The ethnical analysis of moral bioenhancement : theoretical and normative perspectives

“…Since utilitarianism places significant normative weight on agent neutrality, enhancement of altruism could, under some circumstances, undermine the principle of impartiality. For example, parents with enhanced altruism might prefer marginal increases in their children's well-being over massive increases in the well-being of a great number of other children (see, e.g., Drake, 2016). As long as the enhancement of altruism promotes only in-group cooperation and sympathy, its potential to prompt utilitarian judgments among agents will be limited.…”