Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

mens rea
condition is a logically necessary feature of 
domination: ‘the worsening that interference involves always has to be more or less 
39
Wendt himself seems to equate the agency with personhood, a move understandably 
opposed by other scholars: e.g. Waever (1994).

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intentional in character: it cannot occur by accident’ (1997, p. 52). There is a strong 
political purpose for such a concept of ‘domination’: to call the powerful to 
account, so that the arbitrary interference that relations of domination enable must 
be the sort of thing for which the dominating agent can be held responsible (Pettit, 
2005, p. 93).
The God Machine is not an ‘agent’ or an ‘agency’ in Pettit’s understanding of that 
term, at least not in a straight forward way. Citizens of the God Machine society are 
not ‘members’ of the God Machine just like people are not ‘members of the 
criminal law’, and so even if we extend the view of agency to organisations, it does 
not help Sparrow’s (2014) argument. In fact, we have stumbled upon a serious 
limitation of Pettit’s (1997, 2001) theory of freedom as non-domination – the 
limitation related to his view of agency in general and his view of the kind of 
agency that states enjoy specifically.
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Further, Pettit’s collective agents are rather odd creatures. On the one hand, Pettit 
says that collective agents are ‘candidates for freedom’ insofar as they ‘have the 
capacity to function in their own right as free and responsible agents’ (2001, pp. 
115-123). On the other hand, Pettit argues that ‘it would represent a bizarre 
normative position to think that [collective agents’] freedom as discursive control 
mattered in itself, and not just in virtue of the correlated freedom that individuals 
may enjoy’ (2001, p. 126-127). This conclusion is predicated on the fact that 
collective subjects have a somewhat different status from individual subjects: they 
‘come into existence in order to serve the interest of individuals’ (2001, p. 126). It 
is worth quoting Pettit’s account of the distinctiveness of collective agents at 
length: 
Although social integrates have to be ascribed personality in the 
same way as individual human beings, it is worth emphasizing 
that such collective subjects differ from individuals in as many 
ways as they resemble them. They are not centres of perception or 
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The republican notion of agency has received little explicit attention in the debate on 
freedom as non-domination. One exception is Markell (2008), whose argument about the 
insufficiency of the ideal of non-domination goes back to questions about agency. Another 
is a critique put forward by Rigstadt (2011) who argued for a structuralist approach to 
republican freedom as non-domination.

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memory or sentience. They form their collective minds only on a 
restricted range of matters, to do with whatever purpose they are 
organized to advance. And they are artificial creatures whose 
responses may be governed by reason, not in the spontaneous 
manner that is characteristic of individual human beings, but only 
in a painstaking fashion. Their reasoning may be as tortuous as 
that of the impaired human being who has to work out 
reflectively, case by case, that in virtue of believing that p and that 
if p then q, he or she ought also to believe that q. While integrated 
collectivities are persons and selves in virtue of being conversable 
and responsible centres of judgment, intention, and action, then, 
they are persons and selves of a bloodless, bounded, and crudely 
robotic variety. The most natural way to think of them is as agents 
to which individuals give life by suspending their own projects, 
now on this occasion, now on that, in order to serve the collective 
point of view. (Pettit, 2001, pp. 118–119) 
This rather unclear view of agents creates problems for the application of a non-
domination view of freedom and raises questions about the relation between full-
blown agents, such as people, and agencies (Markell, 2008). I do not aim to 
develop a full critique of Pettit’s view of agency; it suffices to say that the 
problems for this view arise exactly in considering the relation of individual 
agents to agencies. Moreover, the examination of Pettit’s view of agencies makes 
one thing clear – the God Machine is not an agent on Pettit’s view and thus 
Sparrow’s critique rests on a theory that struggles with conceptualising the issue 
he wishes to examine.
A serious limitation of Pettit’s theory resting on a strictly agential definition of 
domination is exactly that it is inattentive to the possibility of threats to freedom 
stemming from impersonal forces: whether systemic or ‘agential’ but originating in 
agents who cannot be held responsible and are not ‘conversable’. Pettit’s focus on 
agents as opposed to structures is not the only view available in the republican 
discussion of non-domination. For example, for Hobhouse, the question of how best 
to minimize arbitrary power should be answered by examining how social 
structures or systems yield hierarchical or anti-hierarchical effects. Hobhouse 

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(1911) characterizes the antithesis of liberal freedom as a ‘system of rightlessness.’ 
This insight is not new; La Boetie argued in the sixteenth century that ‘the 
mainspring and the secret of domination, the support and foundation of tyranny’ is 
always a hierarchically structured system of patronage (1576, p. 77). Other 
proponents of structural views of domination include, for example, Bohman who is 
especially concerned about the global proliferation of displaced people, refugees, 
asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, because in the dislocation of people from 
the places in which they can engage in politically effective speech and action, 
‘globalization has had effects that are structurally similar to modern tyranny’ (2007, 
p. 342). Bohman’s view is reminiscent of Hobhouse in that it is concerned about the 
structurally enacted ‘state of rightlessless’ that is important, even in the absence of 
an obvious tyrant. Similarly, Laborde states that on her view ‘domination refers not 
only to interpersonal relationships but to basic, systemic power structures’ (2010, p. 
54). Given the rich tradition of views more suitable to analysis of the God Machine, 
it remains a mystery why Sparrow (2014) chose to base his critique on a Pettit’s 
approach.
In so far as the God Machine is the analogy for and a replacement of the criminal 
law system and, more widely, the power of the state, the God Machine is not an 
agent, but an instrument that regulates relations between individuals. Thus, 
Sparrow’s (2014) supposedly obvious application of freedom as non-domination 
rests on a fundamental confusion of 
structures such as
laws
with 
agents allowed to 
dominate other agents by structures such as laws;
or, to state it another way: 
instruments
with 
those whose those instruments serve
.
If the God Machine is treated as an instrument as I have argued it should be, the 
appropriate analysis on the basis of non-domination is twofold. Firstly, it is to 
examine the context in which its exercise furthers or impedes the freedom as non-
domination. Thus, the first set of questions that one should ask include who are the 
agents behind the God Machine’s actions, who are the agents that make and shape 
the God Machine and what does the God Machine allow others to do should the 
conditions change? The second set of questions would refer to the features of the 
instrument itself, and here the analysis returns to the previously discussed 
conditions of ‘non-manipulability’ or whatever other framework one wishes to 
apply for the purposes of a similar analysis.

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