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Upgrading Discussions of Cognitive Enhancement

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Abstract

Advocates of cognitive enhancement maintain that technological advances would augment autonomy indirectly by expanding the range of options available to individuals, while, in a recent article in this journal, Schaefer, Kahane, and Savulescu propose that cognitive enhancement would improve it more directly. Here, autonomy, construed in broad procedural terms, is at the fore. In contrast, when lauding the goodness of enhancement expressly, supporters’ line of argument is utilitarian, of an ideal variety. An inherent conflict results, for, within their utilitarian frame, the content of rational, hence autonomous, choices is quite restricted. Further, advocates do not clearly indicate their relative emphasis between the often conflicting goals of maximizing benefit and avoiding harm. In practice, their construction of harms is highly expansive, for disabilities include any constraints that “rational” people would decline if it were technically possible to do so. For advocates, this means that where enhancement measures are available, those constraints become avoidable limitations, and not to remove them is to harm. The centrality of harm-avoidance and their ideal utilitarian frame entail sociopolitical requirements that enhancement defenders disallow when trumpeting autonomy in the vein of individual choice. Advocates have thus not done enough to support the claim that their views are wholly separate from earlier eugenics.

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Notes

  1. Act utilitarianism is typically contrasted with the rule-based variety, not with ideal utilitarianism. For my purposes here, however, the existence of a direct contrast between act and ideal utilitarianism is not required. My point, rather, is that Savulescu [3] assumes wrongly that rejecting act utilitarianism, which he illustrates via the trolley problem and finds too exacting, is tantamount to dismissing altogether a utilitarian mantle for his approach. For my argument to succeed, it is necessary only that the particular utilitarian stance that Savulescu rejects and the ideal lens discussed in this paper represent distinct utilitarian modi operandi.

  2. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting that I separately identify this intermediate phase.

  3. Among them are Koch [58], Habermas [7], the President’s Council on Bioethics [28], Kass [59], Fukuyama [30], Sandel [60], Ramsey [61], and Annas, Andrews, and Isasi [12]. On the controversy between the groups over where and even whether a remediation-enhancement distinction can be drawn, see Levin [38: 2–3].

  4. The same applies to states of mind (Smart [16: 66]; Moore [62: 159]). See further Parfit [63: 499–500].

  5. Sparrow’s [18] account focuses on Harris and Savulescu, specifically.

  6. By the respective standards of (a)-(c), specific parents could of course be critiqued for what they did or omitted in pursuit of their favored path.

  7. Sparrow [18: 33] rightly sees “a tension between [enhancement supporters’] consequentialism and their (apparent) libertarianism when it comes to the rights of individuals to use—or not use—enhancement technologies as they see fit”; ultimately, “[t]heir consequentialism fails to support their libertarianism” (39).

  8. I concur here with Sparrow [18: 39–40] but do not aim to defend what I view as the stronger claim that “the gap between the new and the old eugenics is not that large at all” (33).

  9. I say “generally” because, as Mill [45] himself shows regarding autonomy and justice in On Liberty, the principle of utility alone is absolute.

  10. According to Malmqvist [26: 53n4], “[o]ne may wonder…just how robust enhancement advocates’ support for reproductive liberty can be. If one’s ultimate moral commitment is to the advancement of well-being, it is difficult to deny that coercive interference with reproductive choices might be justified when very much well-being is at stake.” This is right as far as it goes, but I argue in this section of the paper that a stronger claim can be made regarding Savulescu and Bostrom.

  11. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.

  12. Cf. Conly [64: 6]: “There is no clear [moral] distinction between disincentivizing an action [here, smoking] and simply making it impossible to perform.” For Conly (12, 186), as for Bostrom [11], justified limits on direct sociopolitical steerage, if any, would stem from our current social environment.

  13. Though this is not the same as catering to the status quo per se, as may occur in hedonistic and preference varieties of utilitarianism, Bostrom’s acknowledgment of a link thereto fits broadly under a utilitarian head. Regarding the status quo bias of utilitarianism, see Nagel [42: 53]. According to Sparrow [18: 35], the approach of enhancement advocates supports capitulation to existing states of affairs, in procreative decision-making, concerning the sex, race, and sexual orientation of children-to-be.

  14. On coercion and procreative decision-making in the views of Harris and Savulescu, see Sparrow [18: 37–39]. By their line of reasoning, perhaps “we should deny that the unenhanced have any claim on the resources of other individuals.…[I]t is one thing to deny that parents have a right to extra resources to compensate them for the low welfare of children they have chosen not to enhance, but it is quite another to deny that these children have a right to some social support” (38).

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Jill de Villiers, Fabrice Jotterand, and Tom Koch for helpful comments on a draft. In addition, I am grateful for the feedback of the journal’s anonymous referees.

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Levin, S.B. Upgrading Discussions of Cognitive Enhancement. Neuroethics 9, 53–67 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-016-9253-z

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