MORAL NEUROENHANCEMENT

In recent years, philosophers, neuroethicists, and others have become preoccupied with “moral enhancement.” Very roughly, this refers to the deliberate moral improvement of an individual’s character, motives, or behavior. In one sense, such enhancement could be seen as “nothing new at all” (Wiseman, 2016, 4) or as something philosophically mundane: as G. Owen Schaefer (2015) has stated, “Moral enhancement is an ostensibly laudable project. … Who wouldn’t want people to become more moral?” (261). To be sure, humans have long sought to morally enhance themselves (and their children) through such largely uncontroversial means as moral education, meditation or other “spiritual” practices, engagement with moral ideas in literature, philosophy, or religion, and discussion of moral controversies with others. What is different about the recent debate is that it focuses on a new set of potential tools for fostering such enhancement, which might broadly be described as “neurotechnologies.” These technologies, assuming that they worked, would work by altering certain brain states or neural functions directly, in such a way as to bring about the desired moral improvement.