Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

4.4. 
Conclusions 
To sum up, moral disagreement has much less straightforward consequences for 
MB that we may have thought at the outset. Firstly, it only applies to moral 
enhancement understood as making people more moral, and not to moral 
enhancement as a prudentially beneficial modification of the moral sphere. Also, it 
does not apply to a whole array of issues that we tend to agree on, including the 
issues of what is conducive to morally desirable moral sentiments, motivations, 
outcomes, etc.
If we treat moral disagreement as giving rise to a valid and strong argument against 
certain views on the metaphysics of morals, there is still much explaining to be 
done of what impact it should have on our moral knowledge and subsequent 
actions. We can, for example, adopt a non-realist view of morality that is not 
susceptible to the objection from disagreement and work from there. What we have 
learned from the discussion on the possible sources of disagreement is that 
disagreement about non-moral facts, procedural failure, bias and lack of proper 
discussion can all give raise to disagreement about moral issues. We may therefore 
have a good reason to support both traditional and non-traditional means of 

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improvement that would aid us in dealing with those disagreements better then we 
now do. 
It is also unclear how an epistemological argument from disagreement should 
impact our behaviour, but it is unlikely to support the 
status quo
. If we indeed think 
that holding our judgement means abandoning moral considerations in controversial 
cases and that this is what we 
ought to 
do, we may have a good case for a particular 
kind of MB. Also, let us not forget that we have political means of dealing with 
moral disagreement. Respecting moral agentsʼ decisions and allowing moral agents 
to pursue their idea of the good in the private sphere (and discuss and argue for it in 
the public sphere) is one of them. Unless we have other strong reasons to treat non-
traditional moral enhancement differently, this also applies to those cases of MB. 

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