Hearing the Mermaids Singing: The Possibility and Limits of Moral Enhancement

AbstractThe possibility of moral bioenhancement, and the alleged need for it, have been widely discussed both in ethics journals and the media since this type of enhancement was first proposed in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2008. Most prominently, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu have argued that humans in their current condition are simply not good enough to deal effectively with the global problems we face today and that, if we want to have any hope of saving the world from “ultimate harm,” we need to find ways to morally enhance people, using psychopharmaceuticals, neurostimulation, gene editing, or whatever other biological method we can think of that might do the trick. Persson and Savulescu's 2012 book on the subject, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement, has very much determined the direction of the debate. However, what remains contentious is the question of whether the kind of enhancement that Persson and Savulescu envisage is really desirable and actually feasible. Earlier in 2016, two books on moral bioenhancement were published, namely John Harris's How to Be Good: The Possibility of Moral Enhancement and Harris Wiseman's The Myth of the Moral Brain: The Limits of Moral Enhancement. Harris's book focuses on the desirability of moral bioenhancement, and Wiseman's primarily (though by no means exclusively) on its feasibility. Both reject Persson and Savulescu's proposal and approach, but for very different reasons.