Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

prima facie
reason to adjust emotions, inclinations and habits. 
Biomedical emotion modification is one way of making such adjustment. 
Moreover, the fact that the adjustment does not require effortful deliberation to 
produce
the change in conative and affective states (although deliberation remains 
necessary in establishing what are the inclinations conducive to the good and fine-
tuning) is in this context a clear advantage over more laborious habit-formation. 
Since the justificatory and action guiding role of deliberation remains intact, my 
argument evades Harris’ concern about Douglas’ position that since ‘“once the 
enhancement has been initiated, there is no further need for cognition”, then the 
morally enhanced action is effectively automatic, unconscious and therefore 
unintended.’ (Harris, 2013b, p. 179) Thus, the limitations of self-control resources 
are a strong 
prima facie
reason against a view that inclinations that require frequent 
overcoming are not a problem if the effortful control over them is effective. 

---

224 
Enkrateia might be as good as virtue all other things being equal – it is just that ‘all 
other things’ are never equal.
Aristotle seems to take a similar stance when he emphasises the importance of 
habits. But it is not only that we cultivate virtue by simply practicing virtue; rather 
we cultivate both the internal states of virtue as well as the skills necessary for 
moral action by practicing the external actions of virtue. In cultivating those 
internal states, we make the external actions of virtue easier to perform: 
‘…by abstaining from pleasures we become temperate, and it is when 
we have become so that we are most able to abstain from them; and 
similarly too in the case of courage; for by being habituated to despise 
things that are terrible and to stand our ground against them we become 
brave, and it is when we have become so that we shall be most able to 
stand our ground against them.’ (
Nicomachean Ethics
, 1104a33-b3). 
However, the cultivation of the internal states that allow and make virtue is not 
easy, and the thus enkratic and akratic actions (which interests me) and characters 
(which interests Aristotle) abound. 
Whether and to what extent the biomedically produced approximation of virtuous 
inclinations can be achieved remains to be seen. Douglas (2014) expressed a further 
concern about the moral worth of moral conformity enhancements achieved by 
modifying the underpinnings of inclinations – a concern related to reliability. The 
first concern is that ‘brute conformity enhancements’ will be more contingent on 
the circumstances than their deliberatively achieved counterparts. This suggestion 
is, I think, very likely to be true. However, as I have previously argued (Pacholczyk 
2011), context-sensitivity should be taken as a given – while greater inclinations to 
feelings of sympathy might be more conducive overall to moral outcomes in some 
circumstances and not others. Some of those circumstances will be rare or not 
foreseeable, such as the case of the amateur emergency surgery in an example 
brought forward by Harris (2014a). In many cases however, the effects are 
foreseeable, and often agents have a good indication of which of their current 
inclinations are not conducive to the good. Douglas (2014) gives the example of an 
emergency medic ‘surrounded by severe pain and suffering’ (p. 14). Other 

---

225 
examples include a nurse who suffers from burnout (Pacholczyk 2011), a person 
who cares for a chronically and severely ill family member and cannot cope with 
the witnessed suffering, or a surgeon. In fact, medical education, especially of some 
specialties, may be seen to include selectively impairing the exercise of empathetic 
ability, with the goal of the increasing ability to act in the presence of suffering and 
sights that are difficult to see for the unaccustomed eye and mind. This cognitive 
and emotional ‘skill’ is developed over years of education and practice in an 
Aristotelian fashion – by exposure coupled with deliberation. When circumstances 
change, however – for example, if the surgeon decides to change his profession to 
one requiring sustained sensitivity to others’ suffering or a soldier finishes military 
service – the profile of emotional reactions may need changing and the transition 
may be aided or at least eased by biomedical means. As a result, the context-
sensitivity of what inclinations are conducive to the good is not a damning a 
problem for a voluntary agent-led emotion modulation.
The second worry raised by 
Douglas (2014; see also Pacholczyk, 2011) 
is that 
‘brute enhancements’ are more sensitive to the magnitude of the transformation 
than the deliberative alternative:
‘Whether tendencies towards impulsive violence and indifference to 
the suffering of strangers impede moral conformity depends on the 
degree to which those tendencies are present. For example, though a 
strong tendency towards impulsive violence is unlikely to be 
conducive to moral conformity, a milder tendency of the same kind 
may well be conducive to it, for example, because it helps to prevent 
excessively submissive conduct.’ (p. 14) 
This second consideration, although resting on a correct observation, is also not a 
strong objection against MB if it is led by an agent and subject to post-intervention 
review and modification. Moreover, seen from the perspective of limited self-
control resources, biomedical emotion modification does not need to result in 
inclinations that 
reliably
lead to the good – it only has to produce the effect that is 
somewhat
more
likely
to lead to morally good outcomes than in the case of non-
enhancement.

---

226 
Insofar as we see moral enhancement as aimed at making better moral agents, we 
are concerned with moral action. Risking stating the obvious, if we are concerned 
about bettering moral action, we should be concerned with both parts of ‘moral 
action’: the ‘moral’ and the ‘action’. As Harris correctly points out, akrasia is not a 
specifically moral problem. However, a problem that afflicts rational agency is also 
a problem that afflicts our moral agency, and those who are concerned with moral 
agency also need to be concerned with making it more possible for agents to act on 
their moral beliefs.
64
Many of the ways that aid both achieving the good and moral 
agency are already here and were listed by Harris and include moral education, 
making it easier for agents to participate in collective efforts of making substantial 
change, legislation and policy, systems of incentives and disincentives, etc. 
However, if we are concerned with moral agency specifically and agency in 
general, the ‘cognitive’ means of enhancement alone are not going to deliver better 
solutions to the problem of weak-willed akrasia than cognitive and emotional 
modulation together.