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Would Moral Enhancement Limit Freedom?

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Abstract

The proposal of moral enhancement as a valuable means to face the environmental, technological and social challenges that threaten the future of humanity has been criticized by a number of authors. One of the main criticisms has been that moral enhancement would diminish our freedom. It has been said that moral enhancement would lead enhanced people to lose their ‘freedom to fall’, that is, it would prevent them from being able to decide to carry out some morally bad actions, and the possibility to desire and carry out these bad actions is an essential ingredient of free will, which would thus be limited or destroyed—or so the argument goes. In this paper we offer an answer to this criticism. We contend that a morally enhanced agent could lose (to a large extent) the ‘freedom to fall’ without losing her freedom for two reasons. First, because we do not consider that a morally well-educated person, for whom the ‘freedom to fall’ is a remote option, is less free than an evildoer, and there is no reason to suppose that bioenhancement introduces a significant difference here. Second, because richness in the amount of alternative possibilities of action may be restored if the stated loss is compensated with an improvement in sensitivity and lucidity that can lead to seeing new options and nuances in the remaining possible actions.

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Notes

  1. For a clarification of the different meanings of ‘moral enhancement’, see Raus et al. (2014). We assume here that there is no precise way to determine, for any possible case, whether or not it could be included under this definition. As these authors rightly point out, “as there is no objective way of determining what falls within the range of ‘normal’ moral behaviour or functioning of moral capacities, every choice of cut-off point is, necessarily, a normative one. Even the question as to what constitutes ‘moral capacities’ has no straightforward answer.” (p. 269).

  2. Harris’ position changed in later papers, but we think that this argument is interesting enough as to deserve an answer regardless of Harris`s final opinion.

  3. Presumably, moral bioenhancement would not work through impeding physical actions of certain kinds. Moral bioenhancement must modify our inclinations to do good, rather than our capabilities to move.

  4. For a review of the main criticisms, see Fischer (2006, Chap. 2), and McKenna and Pereboom (2016, Chap. 5).

  5. For an updated discussion of the character of implicit biases and their effects on behavior and moral responsibility, see Levy (2017).

  6. Obviously, these social and institutional innovations could have also contributed to human cognitive enhancement, and in this sense, some of them do not bypass reasoning, but our point still stands. With this example we mean to illustrate that the mere fact of diminishing our freedom to fall does not diminish our free will, which was Harris’ initial concern.

  7. This is, however, a controversial issue. For a discussion, see McKenna and Pereboom (2016, Chap. 8).

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Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to an anonymous referee for very helpful comments. Research for this work has been supported by the research projects FFI2012-37354 (Spanish Government), HUM-0264 and HUM-7248 (Junta de Andalucía), and project PAPIIT-UNAM  IN403613 (Mexico).

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Diéguez, A., Véliz, C. Would Moral Enhancement Limit Freedom?. Topoi 38, 29–36 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9466-8

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