What to Enhance: Behaviour, Emotion or Disposition?

Neuroethics 7 (3):253-261 (2014)
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Abstract

As we learn more about the human brain, novel biotechnological means to modulate human behaviour and emotional dispositions become possible. These technologies could be used to enhance our morality. Moral bioenhancement, an instance of human enhancement, alters a person’s dispositions, emotions or behaviour in order to make that person more moral. I will argue that moral bioenhancement could be carried out in three different ways. The first strategy, well known from science fiction, is behavioural enhancement. The second strategy, favoured by prominent defenders of moral bioenhancement, is emotional enhancement. The third strategy is the enhancement of moral dispositions, such as empathy and inequity aversion. I will argue that we ought to implement a combination of the second and third strategies. Furthermore, I will argue that the usual arguments against other instances of human enhancement do not apply to moral bioenhancement, or apply only to the first strategy, behavioural enhancement

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Author's Profile

Karim Jebari
Institute for Futures Studies

References found in this work

The methods of ethics.Henry Sidgwick - 1877 - Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press. Edited by Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones.
Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement.Ingmar Persson & Julian Savulescu - 2012 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK. Edited by Julian Savulescu.
Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals.Immanuel Kant - 2007 - In Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya (eds.), Late modern philosophy: essential readings with commentary. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.Immanuel Kant - 1996 - In Mary J. Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. pp. 37-108.

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