Abstract
Recent discussions of cognitive enhancement often note that drugs and technologies that improve cognitive performance may do so at the risk of “cheapening” our resulting cognitive achievements (e.g., Kass, Life, liberty and the defense of dignity: the challenge for bioethics, Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2004; Agar, Humanity’s end: why we should reject radical enhancement, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2010; Sandel, The case against perfection. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2007; Sandel, The case against perfection: what’s wrong with designer children, bionic athletes, and genetic engineering?”. In: Holland (ed) Arguing about bioethics, Routledge, London, 2012; Harris in Bioethics 25:102–111, 2011). While there are several possible responses to this worry, we will highlight what we take to be one of the most promising—one which draws on a recent strand of thinking in social and virtue epistemology to construct an integrationist defence of cognitive enhancement. (e.g., Pritchard in Synthese 175:133–151, 2010; Palermos in Synthese 192:2955–2286, 2015; Clark in Synthese 192:3757–3375, 2015). According to such a line, there is—despite initial appearances to the contrary—no genuine tension between using enhancements to attain our goals and achieving these goals in a valuable way provided the relevant enhancement is appropriately integrated into the agent’s cognitive architecture (in some suitably specified way). In this paper, however, we show that the kind of integration recommended by such views will likely come at a high cost. More specifically, we highlight a dilemma for users of pharmacological cognitive enhancement: they can (1) meet the conditions for cognitive integration (and on this basis attain valuable achievements) at the significant risk of dangerous dependency, or (2) remain free of such dependency while foregoing integration and the valuable achievements that such integration enables. After motivating and clarifying the import of this dilemma, we offer recommendations for how future cognitive enhancement research may offer potential routes for navigating past it.
Highlights
In contemporary bioethics, the human enhancement debate focuses on the ethical ramifications of improving ourselves through the use of increasingly sophisticated forms of medicine and1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)technology.1 Some of this literature focuses on the possibility of enhancing our moral motivations and behaviour,2 while other work in this area focuses instead on the ways in which drugs might improve our emotional lives and our closest relationships.3 In this paper, our primary interest will be in cognitive enhancement, which involves improving or augmenting “internal or external information processing systems” [8]—in particular, we will consider one way in which cognitive enhancement might, counterintuitively, make us worse off
In the literature on the nature and normativity of achievement, Gwen Bradford [27] argues that overcoming difficulty is a necessary component of achievements, and that exerting the kind of effort demanded by difficulty is responsible for their value
The natural question at this juncture is this: what, is required for the kind of integration that matters for achievement? Here we find a range of answers in social epistemology
Summary
The human enhancement debate focuses on the ethical ramifications of improving ourselves through the use of increasingly sophisticated forms of medicine and. When we think about the well-being of society more broadly, there is good reason to suppose that PCEs could help to increase the speed at which important new developments emerge to improve quality of life—treatments for currently fatal diseases, for example. This reveals the Problem of Cheapened Achievements to be more difficult to address than has been appreciated. As we’ll see, whether the Problem of Cheapened Achievements can be resolved via an integrationist strategy depends very much on the future state of science and medicine
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