Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

altogether 
to produce impossible-to-regulate affect and behaviour, this indeed 
would be a problem – not only for freedom but for the basic ability to act as the 
agents we are used to being. I have, however, argued that this is not a necessary 
outcome. The ability for offline review can be preserved, and it is the ability for 
offline review that matters for crafting institutional level solutions that Harris 
(2013b) proposes we should prioritise.
But perhaps I am wrong – biomedically induced emotions and inclinations could 
also significantly impair the process of offline moral review itself. Harris appears to 
me to assume as much at least in some of his writings (2013b)
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and the 
psychologist Bloom recently made a similar argument in a 
Boston Globe 
article 
aptly titled
‘Against Empathy’ 
since, as he writes, he is ‘against empathy.’
 
Bloom 
argues that feeling strong empathy does a disservice to both the empathizer and the 
individual on the receiving end and fails to make the world a better place by 
impacting negatively on what I have called offline review. Bloom argues that:
‘Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred 
deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, 
and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway 
country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even if our 
emotions pull us in a different direction. Without empathy, we 
are better able to grasp the importance of vaccinating children 
and responding to climate change. These acts impose costs on 
real people in the here and now for the sake of abstract future 
benefits, so tackling them may require overriding empathetic 
responses that favor the comfort and well-being of individuals 
today.’ (Bloom, 2014) 
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Although this interpretation might be overblown given that he mainly responds to the 
rather extreme proposals in Persson and Savulescu 2008.

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201 
But beyond the first appeal this is puzzling – what has empathy to do with it? We 
could empathise with a vaccinated child or imagine the ones who would die if not 
for the vaccination. If we are to support a military intervention by our own country 
in a faraway but oil-rich land, it does not appear to me that we do it because we 
personally know the soldiers, or 
empathise
with our neighbours’ benefits more than 
the other people’s sorrow. There might be a bias in terms of being more easily able 
to empathise with people more like us, but most of us do not find it hard to 
empathise with those who had their loved ones killed or are starving – those arouse 
rather vivid pictures and it does not take a lot of cultural sensitivity to be able to 
react to them with empathy. We may suffer from a problem of imagination, care 
about our own interests more than citizens of other nations, be more often exposed 
to the images in the media that enhance our ability to empathise with ‘our side’ 
(considering that there is an ‘our side’ is probably an indication of a certain way of 
perceiving and understanding the events), and care more about the interests of our 
family than others or simply be too busy with our own lives to care. Those plausible 
explanations have little to do with 
empathy
as an affective or cognitive ability. Just 
as anger is not 
the problem
to be eliminated (contra Seneca), as it can equally serve 
to fuel the fight against injustice and unfairness or lead to unjust violence; similarly 
empathy can be conducive or not to moral outcomes. Especially when we are 
talking about offline moral review, such as in deliberation about a moral course of 
action and thinking about political solutions to matters requiring collective action, 
the quality and process of our reasoning about policy measures seems to hardly be 
rooted in ‘more or less empathy.’
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Thus, ‘more empathy’ is not a solution to 
world’s ills, but neither is ‘more empathy’ perilous to the moral discourse. The 
ability for offline moral review, by and large, is preserved regardless of the strength 
of emotions and is thus accessible to people with a range of emotions and degrees 
of empathy – bioenhanced or not bioenhanced.
I do not see a clear indication that serotonin or oxytocin-induced changes would 
necessarily have such an perilous effect and thus should not gravely worry us, 
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Within certain parameters – some empathetic ability may be necessary for understanding 
what others’ interests are, for example. But I assume that we are talking about enhancement 
in the population that does not, for the most part, suffer from Autistic Spectrum Disorder. 
The ability to 
understand 
that to starve or to be poor is not good for others does not require 
a whole lot of empathy.

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although given the side effects of most drugs and their typical impacts on the 
outcomes of reasoning, the matter is up for debate. This, however, leaves us with a 
difficult question – since there exists a degree of variability in the presence of those 
neurotransmitters in drug-free populations anyway, the drug-induced changes might 
be seen as not more biasing that our non-modified condition. A successful critique 
would have to make sense of and account for that.
Notice that I have argued that the ability for moral review would be likely to be 
present ‘by and large.’ This is because the question about more subtle effects on 
reasoning (as well as motivation and action) remains open. If we were convinced 
that any kind of biomedical emotion modulation would have a detrimental effect on 
moral agency, we would have to accept that people who take SSRIs are somehow 
made worse moral agents for that. For Harris’ and Blooms’ argument to be strong, 
such impairment needs to happen in a specific way – by impairing the ability for 
appropriate moral review and seriously impairing their ability for political