Technological moral enhancement or traditional moral progress? Why not both?

Moral Enhancement as a Technological Imperative

The inroads of biomedical technology into what human beings are as people manifest themselves in many ways, one of which is to explore whether and to what extent people can be enhanced, that is, perform better than they would have in the absence of the technology in question. Of the various possibilities discussed, one centers on cognitive performance, improving concentration, memory and the li...

Moral Enhancement

Opponents of biomedical enhancement often claim that, even if such enhancement would benefit the enhanced, it would harm others. But this objection looks unpersuasive when the enhancement in question is a moral enhancement - an enhancement that will expectably leave the enhanced person with morally better motives than she had previously. In this article I (1) describe one type of psychological ...

Moral Hard‐Wiring and Moral Enhancement

We have argued for an urgent need for moral bioenhancement; that human moral psychology is limited in its ability to address current existential threats due to the evolutionary function of morality to maximize cooperation in small groups. We address here Powell and Buchanan's novel objection that there is an 'inclusivist anomaly': humans have the capacity to care beyond in-groups. They propose ...

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws

Moral Enhancement and Freedom

This paper identifies human enhancement as one of the most significant areas of bioethical interest in the last twenty years. It discusses in more detail one area, namely moral enhancement, which is generating significant contemporary interest. The author argues that so far from being susceptible to new forms of high tech manipulation, either genetic, chemical, surgical or neurological, the onl...