Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

participation and awareness, creating systems that direct and compound the 
individual efforts, increasing motivation for acting using public campaigns, making 
MB available, facilitating a society in which basic needs are satisfied so individuals 
do not have to focus on achieving basic security and freedom for themselves. MB 
via emotion modulation is only one of those methods.
One could argue that perhaps it is self-indulgent to focus on biomedical means 
where the traditional means of moral enhancement provide, in Harris’ (2011) 
words, ‘a blueprint’ for effective interventions aimed at making better moral agents. 
Perhaps we only need more of the same. However, I think that the reasons to do the 
kind of research that lays the foundation for MB do not only come from the 
response to great moral issues. The very idea of MB via emotion modulation 
came
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after
the booming neuroscience finally extended to investigations of the 
social aspects of emotions, cognition and behaviour and provided us with some new 
insights into its workings.
The research will likely continue to be fuelled by the need for addressing the 
economic and human impacts of emotion-related conditions such as clinical 
depression and anxiety, as well as other conditions such as Autism, the interest in 
addressing problems related to crime, and scientific curiosity. We might as well use 
this research to aid us in understanding the necessary and motivationally effective 
underpinnings of pro-social and moral action and apply the gained knowledge and 
tools in support of autonomy and moral agency. Biomedical emotion modulation 
as applied to aiding moral agency is no different here than biomedical cognitive 
enhancement. We also have reliable non-biomedical means of enhancing cognition, 
but we do not expect cognitive enhancement to either replace traditional education 
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Or re-surfaced with renewed force. 

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or to provide knowledge or wisdom. Rather, we expect that it helps individuals to 
do what they do anyway, or want to do, more effectively. I suggest that we extend 
the same reasonable (if modest) expectations to MB.
.