Biomedical Moral Enhancement and Moral Progress

This chapter critically examines a different and highly provocative response to the thesis that evolved human moral psychology poses severe and inflexible limitations on moral progress: the “evoliberal” proposal to re-engineer human moral psychology through biomedical technologies in order to solve some of our most pressing moral problems: war, terrorism, genocide, and climate change. It shows that the evoliberal position is premised on the same problematic evolutionary assumptions that underpin the evoconservative view. Once our world’s great moral problems are recast in terms of failures of moral inclusivity, it becomes clear that biomedical moral enhancement technology is unlikely to be necessary or effective in addressing them. To the contrary, the evolutionary model of moral psychological development sketched in Part II suggests that cultural moral innovations that deploy our best understanding of the evolutionary development of human morality stand the best chance of driving moral progress and preventing moral regression.