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CHAPTER 8. Beyond the God Machine
(…)
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
(…)
T.S. Eliot
8.1. Introduction
Harris argues that MB would likely eliminate a significant measure of our freedom
and that this loss would be unacceptable because it diminishes truly moral action.
Harris proposes that MB bypasses morality and that MB ‘far from raising
consciousness, may well dull it to the point where the individual is no longer
choosing’ (Harris, 2014b, p. 372). On one plausible interpretation, this would seem
to posit that the best MB can do is to create compulsions to act in a morally good
way or compulsions to refrain from immoral acts. As a result, Harris (2011) argues,
MB is not a moral enhancement properly so called (moral enhancement that results
in bettering of moral agency) as there is no virtue in doing what you must.
Before considering this argument further, let us clarify some misconceptions. One
proposed interpretation of this argument is to refer to non-deterministic views of
free will. For example, DeGrazia (2014) considered Harris’ worry by outlining and
then arguing against Chisholm’s (1966) incompatibilist conception of free will
(DeGrazia, 2014, p. 365).
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However, Harris’ argument about bypassing morality can be made sense of within a
compatibilist view of free will and free action such as Frankfurt’s. Indeed, Harris
states that ‘no assumptions about the viability of a non-deterministic account of free
will and, for what it is worth, think some version of compatibilism is probably
right’ (Harris, 2014b).
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Even though in his reflections on the God Machine, Harris
seems to argue that we need to keep PAP in order to preserve the ‘ought implies
can’ principle, I agree with Harris that this line of the debate is not the most
relevant.
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According to compatibilists, what matters is whether the decision was
arrived at in the right way, with the right sort of relationship between one's
preferences and actions – thus, acting on some – and not other – kinds of causal
influences. If one acts with the ability to act in accordance with good reasons
(Wolf, 1990) or if one acts with ‘guidance control’ which consists in part of acting
on a reasons-responsive mechanism
for which one has taken responsibility
(Fischer
and Ravizza, 1998), one
can be responsible for one's actions. This approach is
consistent with Harris’ emphasis on the importance of the all-things-considered
judgement (Harris 2011, 2012, 2013a
, 2014a, 2014b). Thus, according to a
compatibilist account, freedom can be impaired if action is produced by causal
influences that do not satisfy the right criteria.
Moreover, at this point of the debate I think it is important to move beyond the
following line of reasoning. Harris’ argument can be seen as addressing only the
cases brought forward by Persson and Savulescu (2008). Harris sees Persson and
Savulescu (2008) proposing the use of biomedical means in such a way as to
necessarily produce morally good outcomes via modulation of emotions, sentiments
or attitudes. When talking about serotonin and oxytocin’s influence on what
psychologists and neuroscientists call moral judgement, Harris (2014b) states that:
‘[t]he presence of these molecules in particular doses is indeed “freedom-
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Although in another article Harris defends the Principle of Alternative Possibilities
(Harris, 2014a).
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I do not see it as ‘irrelevant,’ as our commitments in the compatibilism/incompatibilism
domain may influence the kinds of arguments we are going to find more or less
compelling. However, I do not think that taking hard positions on those questions is
necessary for continuing a meaningful debate about moral enhancement. Accepting the
'ought implies-can' maxim should lead one to accept that an agent must have genuine
access to the world which renders the 'can-claim' true. Even if unconvinced by my
argument that the agent has such access in overdetermination cases, it remains an open
question to what extent this would apply to more worldly incarnations of MB.
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subverting” – if it were not, it is unlikely they would have the effects vaunted by
their advocates, that is, effects that operate independently of the will or of
judgement ...’ (p. 373). Although the interpretation of the original Savulescu and
Persson paper (2008, and latter proposals) is justified and Harris’ argument works
in this context, this line of discussion seems to me to be a dead-end. For one,
oxytocin and serotonin are very unlikely to produce the type and magnitude of
effects that Savulescu and Persson seem to be after in their early paper – an effect
strong enough to preclude large scale harm. Secondly, as psychopharmacological
means are used more and more to modify mood, cognition and our social
functioning, more plausible uses of MB warrant a careful examination. In
considering biomedical emotion modulation and its potential for moral
enhancement understood as making better moral agents, God lies in the details.
In this chapter I will first examine whether Harris’ worry about the freedom-
subverting effects of psychopharmacological means that act on attitudes or desires
is likely to apply to more plausible attempts at MB. I will ask whether biomedically
created ‘compulsions to do what is good’ preclude moral review, addressing the
question of whether morality is indeed bypassed by MB. Using the example of
obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) to illustrate the issue and considering
biomedical mood modification, I will suggest that even strong impulses to act in a
certain way are not beyond meaningful moral review.
The second part of the chapter addresses issues related to moral control. I consider
MB in the context of a discussion of Aristotelian concepts of virtue, enkrateia,
akrasia and vice. I suggest that inverse-akrasia is the best analogy for Persson and
Savulescu’s (2008) MB and argue that even where the agent acts akratically,
compulsory MB would not be desirable. In further sections I argue that enhancing
individual moral agency is a valuable pursuit and that modulation of inclinations
(including biomedically-aided modulation) not only has a legitimate place in this
pursuit, but is a crucial part of it.
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