Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

1.2.2.
 
 Moral Enhancement as a change in some aspect of morality that results 
in a morally better agent
Moral enhancement might also refer to making people more moral, thus making 
them morally better in some sense. This is what Persson and Savulescu (2008; 
Savulescu and Persson, 2012b) have in mind when they propose that moral 
enhancement may, theoretically, be an answer to the alleged increased risk posed 
by the cognitively enhanced and morally corrupt minority.
Being moral is a complex ability and there is a wide range of potentially enhancing 
interventions. Making morally better people could include making people more 
likely to act on their moral beliefs (see: Douglas, 2008), improving their reflective 
and reasoning abilities as applied to moral issues (see: Harris, 2011), increasing 
their ability to be compassionate (see: Bloom, 2014), and so on. We could also 
focus on a number of aspects of being moral—acting in a moral way, being more 
virtuous, or having better moral motivations. The assessment of what would make 
for morally better agents might somewhat differ depending on the general moral 
theory one finds convincing (e.g. virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism), as 
well as the exact account of moral action and agency.
There are two parts to the idea of moral enhancement understood as making people 
morally better: the factual claim
2
that the enhancement in question in some way 
affects the moral sphere, and a normative claim about whether that intervention 
makes for a morally better person. Those two components may at first seem 
necessarily coexistent. But the distinction between the factual and the normative 
claims about moral enhancement is important, as our discussion will be constructed 
differently depending on whether we take the combined factual-normative claims as 
the basis for our discussion, or only the factual one.
3
2
I do not suggest that those kinds of claims are purely factual, and accept that 
prima facie 
factual claims might have elements of normativity embedded. However, the proposed crude 
distinction is sufficient for the current purposes. 
3
I also understand that drawing the scope for what is to be considered moral might be 
dependent on the moral theory one subscribes to. However, I propose that we draw that 
scope widely, to accommodate various possible conceptions of the good and morality and 
argue whether a given intervention is indeed morally enhancing all-things-considered and 
including one’s 
exact
account of morality later.

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The first reason for this is pragmatic—keeping the distinction in mind will make the 
discussion clearer. Secondly, considerations of moral enhancement based solely on 
the factual claim are interesting in their own right, and we would be missing an 
important part of the ethical enquiry if we focused only on enhancement understood 
as making people more moral. In later parts of this thesis, for example, I suggest 
that we have good reasons to ethically consider the effects of SSRIs on our moral 
capacities.