Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

1.2.1.
 
 Moral Enhancement as Enhancement that is Morally Desirable
When we say ‘moral enhancement’, we could be referring to an enhancement of 
any kind that is morally desirable. Here we may be thinking about enhancement 

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that will result – other things being equal – in a better world. Vaccinations for 
smallpox resulted in the eradication of this disease (Eyler, 2003), and most would 
agree that a world without suffering and deaths brought about by smallpox is better 
than an otherwise identical world with this disease. We often think that the increase 
in average life expectancy over the past century is a good thing, and that promoting 
longevity is, at the very least, an ethically permissible goal of the state, especially if 
it is accompanied by a good quality of life (Harris, 2007). Some have proposed that 
cognitive enhancement is not only permissible, but that there may be a duty to 
enhance (Harris, 2007). Enhancements can therefore be said to be moral in the 
sense of being morally permissible or even morally obligatory. Thus, ‘moral’ in the 
first sense refers solely to such ethical appraisal of a given enhancement.
Although this is not usually the only way in which proponents of moral 
enhancement (e.g. Douglas, 2008; Persson and Savulescu, 2008) use the concept of 
‘moral,’ it is important to clearly distinguish the concept of the ultimate desirability 
and ethical permissibility of enhancement from other meanings of the term ‘moral.’ 
The conflation of several senses of ‘moral’ might add to the opacity of the debate 
on moral enhancement, while such distinction is more obvious when discussing 
cognitive, mood or body enhancement.
It is important to emphasise the different senses of ‘moral,’ especially given the 
note on which the recent debate on moral enhancement started. In his 2008 paper 
Moral enhancement
, Douglas argues that enhancement of moral motives might be 
the kind of moral enhancement that is not susceptible to some of the critiques from 
opponents of other kinds of enhancement – thus suggesting that enhancement of 
moral motives is an enhancement that is 
prima facie
morally desirable. This and 
similar positions have been criticized by Harris (2011), who argues that at least the 
bioenhencement of motives proposed by Persson and Savulescu (2008) would not 
be morally desirable, if it is possible at all. However, when we say ‘moral 
enhancement’ we might mean something very different. 

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