Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

status quo
bias 
served to us under the guise of usefulness and value.
In his 2011 paper, Davies argues that the Western narrative of suffering has broadly 
shifted in recent decades to generally favour a negative over a positive conception 
of suffering. He also argues that this shift has been hastened by what he calls 
‘rationalization of suffering,’ by which he refers to the development of biomedical 
means of addressing suffering. Insofar as medicalization impairs our ability to 
understand the causes and context of our ills and find a fitting remedy (e.g. if we 
propose that ‘work stress’ should be remedied by anxiolytic drugs where anxiety is 
due to lack of basic financial security traceable to social and economic relations) or 
prevents us from using better solutions (e.g. drugs are a first-line remedy for mild 
depression even if psychotherapy, social contact and exercise are all-things-
considered more cost-effective), I agree with the doubts raised by the critics. 
However, I would rather worry about another ‘rationalization of suffering’ that may 
afflict us: the one in which we justify the value of the bad in a self-defeating feat of 
rationalization. Carl Sagan in 
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in 
the Dark writes that:
‘One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been 
bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of 
the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the 
truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful 
to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.’ 
(Sagan, 1996, p. 230) 
The value of suffering 
qua
suffering is a prime candidate for being described as a 
claim that has bamboozled people for years. We are better off facilitating the 
acquisition of the same gains without the associated pain when possible, asking the 

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89 
question of whether the negative experiences and effort are worth the pain, and 
whether the pain comes with sufficient gain to justify it. 
Karney Osborne, in a poem written about the effects of a volcano eruption which 
destroyed the Montserrat Island’s capital, killed 19 people and disrupted the lives of 
the islands inhabitants (about 4,000 of whom still remain ‘in exile’ [Romeo, 2012]), 
wrote about the beauty of the landscape: 
She was my pride and joy 
―I will lift mine eyes unto the hills 
Emerald Isle, green hills, green fields… 
…The sun shines again and again 
No trees, no grass 
my love is naked and bare. 
Now I see her as she really is; strong, proud, defying 
All giving me strength to fight, to survive. 
Now she is beautiful. 
There is beauty too in nakedness. 
(Osborne, 1966) 
Would the narrator choose for the eruption to happen, if she had the control over it? 
I would hope that no advocates of the value of effort and pain would promote living 
through the calamities of war or concentration camps so that we learn from the 
experience, have an opportunity to endure pain and realise the fragility of life. 
Humans can make the most of and learn from even extreme hardship, and 
sometimes very valuable lessons come from the most difficult experiences 
(retrospectively), but it often is not a sufficient reason for (prospectively) preferring 
to have that experience over not having it. Where effort or hardship is valuable, we 
might prefer to have the ability to choose to experience it, rather than be forced to.