Abstract
The debate about the desirability of using drugs to enhance human skills encompasses cognitive abilities such as memory and attention, and moral capacities such as emotional empathy and a sense of fairness. These two strands of literature in bioethics have grown relatively independent from each other, and an implicit framing assumption has emerged suggesting that apparently morally neutral cognitive capacities and paradigmatically moral capacities are distinct and vary independently of each other. Here, we identify key distinctions between competing accounts of cognitive enhancement and moral enhancement and argue that, despite the polarized nature of the bioethical debate, cognitive and moral capacities are intertwined. For example, moral behavior can be improved by enhancing “morally neutral” abilities such as attention span; and cognitive skills can be honed by means of socio-moral interaction. Further, cognitive skill is frequently assigned the abstract status of virtue and treated in the same way as more paradigmatically “moral” traits. We argue that the distinction between moral and cognitive enhancement is more apparent than real, since despite being nominally treated as distinct, cognitive and moral skills are frequently interdependent. As such we present evidence to support the claim that the enhancement of these two kinds of capacities cannot be clearly disaggregated from each other in the way that the theoretical poles of the debate in the literature suggest. We synthesize relevant scientific and bioethical literature and combine it with a line of analysis derived from Peter Hacker to show more clearly the terms of what can be said intelligibly about cognitive and moral skills and their enhancement. As a result of this analysis, we conclude that ethical questions in human bioenhancement are only fully intelligible at the level of persons imbued with feelings, thoughts, intentions, desires, values, and abilities, embedded within a particular social context, rather than at the level of pharmacological modulation of particular cognitive or affective capacities which, though conceptually distinguishable, in the embodied context of moral agency are profoundly intertwined.
Highlights
Cognitive enhancers are normally defined as drugs or other biological methods aimed at boosting cognitive capacities, including mental energy, attention, working memory, wakefulness, or task-orientated motivation (Bostrom and Roache, 2008; Bostrom and Sandberg, 2009)
In the following sub-sections, we present a synthesis of evidence indicating that (a) cognitive enhancement can lead to improvements in moral capacities, and that (b) moral enhancement can lead to improvements in cognitive capacities
Implicit across much of the cognitive enhancement literature is the general notion that morally neutral cognitive skills such as attention or working memory can be selectively enhanced without an impact on one’s sense of morality
Summary
Cognitive enhancers are normally defined as drugs or other biological methods aimed at boosting cognitive capacities, including mental energy, attention, working memory, wakefulness, or task-orientated motivation (Bostrom and Roache, 2008; Bostrom and Sandberg, 2009). Assumptions of interest seem to differ: whereas cognitive enhancers to boost performance are typically assumed to appeal to cognitively normal, healthy individuals, the appeal of moral enhancers is often framed in terms of the benefits available to people whose behavior is considered divergent from social norms and causes negative consequences for self and/or others (the complexities of defining “a morally normal agent” notwithstanding). Assumptions of interest seem to differ: whereas cognitive enhancers to boost performance are typically assumed to appeal to cognitively normal, healthy individuals, the appeal of moral enhancers is often framed in terms of the benefits available to people whose behavior is considered divergent from social norms and causes negative consequences for self and/or others (the complexities of defining “a morally normal agent” notwithstanding1) These appear to map on to standard categories of therapy and enhancement and the difference between them, namely that the first corrects an abnormal state and the second does not, both may still be said to enhance insofar as they confer an improvement irrespective of the baseline at which the intervention is applied (Scully and Rehmann-Sutter, 2001). These views that emphasize the “collectivist” potential of cognitive enhancement are not commonplace or typical of those presented in the media, or expressed by healthcare providers or the public, which, much as with the literature that is suspicious of cognitive enhancement, instead tend to focus on the elective use of cognitive enhancers as a mean to promote individual, rather than societal, interests, and achievement (Schelle et al, 2014)
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