Abstract
Moral enhancement is an ostensibly laudable project. Who wouldn’t
want people to become more moral? Still, the project’s approach is crucial. We can
distinguish between two approaches for moral enhancement: direct and indirect.
Direct moral enhancements aim at bringing about particular ideas, motives or
behaviors. Indirect moral enhancements, by contrast, aim at making people more
reliably produce the morally correct ideas, motives or behaviors without committing
to the content of those ideas, motives and/or actions. I will argue, on Millian
grounds, that the value of disagreement puts serious pressure on proposals for
relatively widespread direct moral enhancement. A more acceptable path would
be to focus instead on indirect moral enhancements while staying neutral, for
the most part, on a wide range of substantive moral claims. I will outline what
such indirect moral enhancement might look like, and why we should expect it
to lead to general moral improvement.