Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal

This season’s issue includes two articles on a quickly expanding topic in bioethics: the ethics of enhancement. There are many kinds of enhancement both actual and imagined: we can (or at least might be able to) enhance people’s physical, aesthetic, cognitive, or moral capacities, for instance; individuals might choose particular enhancements, parents might choose them for their future children, or states might institute them at the widespread population level; the enhancements might be technologically complex or take the form of low-tech education and training; they might be permanent genetic features or swappable technological prosthetics; and so forth. Many discussions of the ethics of enhancement are concerned with possible futuristic scenarios; others are concerned with the ways in which we currently control and design human traits. It is difficult to chart a path through this complex array.

The articles in this issue by Robert Sparrow and Owen Schaefer take up very different aspects of “the” enhancement debate, but it is interesting and productive to think about how they might be put into conversation with one another.

In “Enhancement and Obsolescence: Avoiding an ‘Enhanced Rat Race,’” Sparrow identifies a social concern about making enhancements that increase productivity (including cognitive and physical enhancements) widely available: if these enhancements are not “upgradable” or are only upgradable at extravagant cost, we might end up with a situation in which every few years, a new crop of young adults renders their elders literally obsolete. His portrayal of the technological possibility of obsolescent people is powerful. This “enhanced rat race” would, Sparrow argues, intensify the competitive, class-divided, socially stratified, stressful character of capitalist culture at its worst. An important philosophical byproduct of his argument is that there are significant ethical distinctions between upgradable and permanent enhancements, as well as previously unnoticed ethical issues that arise if we make enhancements available to those with sufficient personal resources. [End Page vii]

In “Direct vs. Indirect Moral Enhancement,” Schaefer is concerned specifically with population-level enhancements of our moral judgment. His interest is not limited to high-tech enhancements; he is also interested in widespread educational programs and the like. He distinguishes between direct enhancements, which are designed to produce specific moral views and judgments, and indirect enhancements, which aim to increase people’s capacity for moral reasoning and action but without determining the specific views and actions they will settle on. Schaefer argues that direct moral enhancements are unacceptably problematic, for roughly Millian reasons: they suppress important dissent and don’t take enough account of our fallibility. He offers a limited defense of indirect moral enhancements, particularly enhancements of our reasoning capacities and our ability to overcome akrasia. He argues that such indirect moral enhancements avoid a “presentist bias” in that they do not assume that our current moral commitments are correct and will not be overthrown by progress. His account is nuanced, especially in his recognition that it is unclear how to separate reasoning and will from the ends for which we use them; and likewise that it is unclear whether enhancing them would have good moral effects while still avoiding the ethical pitfalls of direct enhancement.

Sparrow’s consideration of moral enhancement is brief; indeed, he claims that the notion is too speculative at the moment to warrant detailed discussion. I think this is partly because he fails to consider the kinds of low-tech enhancements that interest Schaefer. Sparrow does point out that widespread moral enhancement could either exacerbate the problems he is worried about, by creating motives for the morally enhanced to shut others out of public decision-making, or mitigate them, by creating moral agents who would be sensitive to issues of justice and inclusion.

It is an interesting question whether moral enhancement is a special exception to the kinds of worries that Sparrow raises. It seems, prima facie, almost definitional that making agents more moral is a good thing. Surely there is at least some sense in which moral progress has to be good, even if it renders many people “morally obsolete” faster than they would like. Indeed, arguably, we are in this situation now: civil rights movements focused on (for instance) LGBTQ issues and...