Abstract
We argued in Unfit for the Future that moral enhancement – which might include biomedical moral enhancement – is necessary to solve the coordination problem presented by the amelioration of anthropogenic climate change. Stefan Schlag contends that this proposal is self-defeating because the implementation of biomedical moral enhancement poses the same problems as combatting climate change. We reply that it can be seen that this is not so when it is realized that we can be sufficiently morally motivated to form an intention in advance to act in a certain (moral) way when a situation arises without being sufficiently motivated to follow through this intention when we are in the midst of the situation and actually experience the self-sacrifices this way of acting imposes on us.
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Notes
Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2012. We have run basically the same argument in several other places, but we will here focus on the book, as does our critic, Schlag.
In the book, we use the shorter term ‘moral bioenhancement’, but here we adopt the terminology of Schlag.
‘The Tragedy of the Commons and the Dispensability of Biomedical Moral Enhancement’, Neuroethics, this issue. Unprefixed page references in the text are to this paper.
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Persson, I., Savulescu, J. Biomedical Moral Enhancement – not a Lever without a Fulcrum. Neuroethics 12, 19–22 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-017-9344-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-017-9344-5