Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

8.2.4. Conclusions
I have argued that there is no good reason to see MB as necessarily impairing moral 
review. Even if in effect MB makes people experience compulsions to act pro-
socially, this does not undermine the ability to take a moral stance; it does not 
preclude the ability for online and offline moral review. Moreover, even if such 

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compulsions are irresistible – an agent has to act on them – they cannot be said to 
impair moral review. They are better conceptualised as impairing freedom by 
decreasing the amount of effective moral 
control
. Thus, the argument against 
Persson and Savulescu (2008)-style MB needs to be qualified and sharpened to 
refer primarily to moral control.
Moreover, the distinction between moral review and moral control makes a 
difference for the ethical assessment of MB. MB needs not preclude taking a moral 
stance, i.e. considering actions from a moral perspective, nor the ability to assess 
one’s actions from a moral perspective. Moreover, if MB’s influence is known to 
the agent, this can be accounted for in the process of review, just as the impact of 
SSRIs on person’s mood is accounted for when people reason about the influence 
of SSRIs on their lives and decide whether or not to continue the medication. The 
influence on the control of one’s actions, and its moral importance, is a separate 
issue.
The fact that moral review does not appear to be significantly impaired constitutes a 
big difference between the likely real-world pharmacological or brain-stimulation 
enhancements and the God Machine scenario – the God Machine impairs the ability 
for moral review significantly more as it precludes any resistance or meaningful 
reasoning about the sources of one’s actions. I have argued that the God Machine 
does not simply introduce the irresistible compulsion that one may view as such 
and take a stance towards. The loss of the ability to govern one’s actions 
independently and rationally is covert, unknown to agent and achieved exactly by 
affecting the beliefs and structures that makes the moral review the 
agent’s own
moral review. Contrary to the Rational Persuader Machine, in the God Machine 
scenario the changes in the agent’s beliefs do not come in a way that the agent can 
appropriately engage with, in a way that would constitute a process of learning and 
revising one’s view on the basis of reasons. Voluntary MB does not suffer from 
similar pitfalls and, as a result, MB does not diminish moral review to the extent 
that the God Machine does. In other words, the real-world MB does not necessarily 
undermine the crucial precondition for freedom and the meaningful talk about 
freedom as the God Machine does.

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This conclusion has to be qualified to account for cases where the MB-induced 
emotions overwhelm the agent to the point of precluding moral review and 
seriously and negatively affect judgement. We have strong reasons to avoid such 
outcomes. At times, however, we experience strong emotions, but they need not 
render us incapacitated with regard to the ability for moral review, especially 
insofar as we are talking about moral agency that involves offline moral 
deliberation such as talking about collective, state and supra-state solutions to the 
world's problems. As a result, we have a strong reason to use biomedical ME with 
continued evaluation of their effects and reflective guidance. This justified caution, 
however, does not mean that there is a strong reason to abandon the pursuit of MB.