‘My child will never initiate Ultimate Harm’: an argument against moral enhancement

Abstract

Recently, there has been a lot of philosophical work published on the morality of moral enhancement. One thing that tends to get overlooked in this literature is that there are many different potential methods of morally enhancing humans, and a blanket moral assessment of them may not be warranted. Here I focus on one mode of moral enhancement, namely, prenatal genetic moral enhancement, and offer a normative assessment of it. I argue that there is good reason to adopt a parent-centred perspective (as opposed to a social or state-centred perspective) towards the ethics of prenatal genetic moral enhancement, and, once we do so, that there is good reason to argue that prenatal genetic attempts at moral enhancement are morally problematic and ought not to be pursued. The main reasons for this have to do with the nature of moral enhancement research, and the idea that prospective parents are justified in not assuming that their children will be morally depraved. I leave it open as to whether other modes of morally enhancing humans fare better, morally speaking.

Desafíos éticos del biomejoramiento moral

“…(Giubilini, 2015;Rakić, 2018;Crutchfield, 2019;Lavazza, 2019). Otros autores entienden que la propuesta del mejoramiento moral es ineficaz para favorecer el auténtico desarrollo moral personal, al trivializar el esfuerzo moral por resolver los dilemas éticos que se presentan a los individuos (Tonkens, 2015;Wiseman, 2018;Schlag, 2019;Ray y Gallegos de Castillo, 2019).…”

“…Julian Savulescu (2001) aborda este dilema moral, a través de lo que él denomina "el principio beneficencia procreativa obligatoria", el cual implica que los padres estarían obligados moralmente a desechar un embrión con potenciales genes criminales y a la vez escoger los embriones que poseen los genes más favorables para él mismo y para la sociedad. Por tanto, los padres deberían elegir el embrión "mejor" entre varios, es decir, el más "valioso", "inteligente", "excelente" o "sano", algo que parece incoherente en la mente de unos padres con un afecto incondicional por cualquiera de sus hijos (Tonkens, 2015;Jensen, 2018). Frente a eventuales mejoras e incluso a la adquisición de características predeciblemente beneficiosas, nos podemos preguntar ¿debería ser obligatoria la selección genética embrionaria?…”

Smarter Than Thou, Holier Than Thou: The Dynamic Interplay Between Cognitive and Moral Enhancement

“…Underlining the probable desirability of cognitive enhancement, Chatterjee (2004) holds that the arrival and use of effective drugs are inevitable given the kinds of things that modern humans tend to value, and Dubljevic (2012) advocates the need for strategies for managing and limiting (in particular, unequal) access to relevant enhancement products. By contrast, Bronstein (2010 , p. 86) contends that bio-engineered virtue “seems unlikely to find a willing public” and Tonkens (2014) claims that parents are unlikely to express a desire to morally enhance their children. As noted above, the term moral enhancement has been used to refer to interventions aimed at “deficiencies” in morality rather than increasing the moral qualities of the average person.…”

Commentary: Grand challenge: ELSI in a changing global environment

“…A question which has been widely debated in the context of moral enhancement (Harris and Savulescu, 2015 ). The answer may be none, but with imprecise and vague reasons: we are aware that no one can force us to be better, but we do not know why (Tonkens, 2015 ). There seem to exist a conceptual vacuum that causes reasoning to be stagnant, unable to define well what perfection, autonomy or identity are.…”