1 Introduction

Moral bioenhancement (MBE) is probably the most widely discussed bioethical issue in recent years. Several arguments have been developed, both to justify and to criticize scientific research aimed at improving our moral capacities; a recent survey identified no less than 25 arguments that have been discussed in a literature of approximately a hundred contributions (Specker et al. 2014), and many more have appeared since then. This development is striking, if one reflects that the first two papers on this issue were published in 2008 (Douglas 2008; Persson and Savulescu 2008). Interest in MBE is dictated, in part, by the more general interest in the issue of enhancement, but probably, in a high degree, by the fact of involving substantial concerns relative to what morality actually is, and to what might really count as enhancing our moral faculties (DeGrazia 2014; Jebari 2014; Harris 2016). We could say that the peculiar interest in MBE is fueled by its being a two-level moral topic, combining a normative discussion on the permissibility of certain biomedical interventions with an analytic discussion concerning the definition of morality and moral behavior.

Several of the arguments raised in this ongoing discussion are important and deserve attentive scrutiny; I discussed some of them in a previous contribution (Reichlin 2015). In this paper, I wish to concentrate on one single point, which seems to me particularly important because it lies at the heart of many of the worries that have been raised with reference to MBE: the question of whether there is any significant, or perhaps decisive, difference between traditional and biotechnological ways of enhancing moral capacities. The relevance of this question stems from the fact that it is the point at which the two levels of discussion intertwine: assessing the permissibility of MBE, as compared to traditional ways of moral education and enhancement, in fact presupposes a stance on the nature of moral capacities and of moral enhancement. I will claim: (i) that a significant difference exists between traditional moral improvement and MBE; (ii) that this difference is often not fully well characterized, in the current literature; and (iii) that clarifying this difference helps to see why MBE is particularly controversial, as compared to other forms of biomedical enhancements, in particular to cognitive enhancement. Since the difference I will suggest between traditional and biotechnological means of moral improvement centers on the negative effects that the second is likely to have on our moral agency, I will refer to my strategy as the ‘moral agency argument’ against MBE.

2 Moral parity principles

One common and convincing defense of many forms of biomedical enhancement is an argument to the effect that there is nothing really new in the proposed technology. Humans have always tried to devise technologies that could improve their condition by enhancing some relevant capacity, for example cognition; the fact that nowadays they do the same through biotechnological devices—either drugs, genetic manipulations, or some technological machinery—does not really modify the situation. It is simply an upgrade of the enhancing process that humankind has always been carrying out and in which its progress in fact consists.

For instance, arguing in favor of several forms of enhancement, John Harris observes:

If the goals of enhanced intelligence, increased powers and capacities, and better health is something that we might strive to produce through education, including of course the more general health education of the community, why should we not produce these goals, if we can do so safely, through enhancement technologies or procedures? If these are legitimate aims of education, could they be illegitimate as the aims of medical or life science, as opposed to educational science? (Harris 2007, p. 2).

A similar point is given systematic formulation by Neil Levy, who, adapting from the discussion on the extended mind, advocates an ‘ethical parity principle’, according to which the mere fact that one intervention in the mind is internal—e.g., a drug acting on the brain—and another external—an intervention on the environmental scaffolding, such as some form of mental training—is not in itself a ground of moral objection, unless there are special reasons of moral concern with the one that do not apply to the other. Thus, rejecting the proposal to establish a presumption in favor of psychotherapy, rather than neuro-pharmacological treatment or some other directly manipulating intervention, Levy declares:

Interventions in the mind can proceed from the inside, via direct manipulations, or from the outside, by environmental alterations, and the difference between these ways of proceeding is not, by itself, significant: it does not predict outcomes and has no moral import (Levy 2007, p. 130).

According to the ‘moral parity principle’, there is no reason to pass differential moral judgment on two human practices if they are embarked on with the same goal, their expected outcomes are similar, and the only difference lies in the means they use, i.e., technological versus more traditional ones (provided, of course, that the means are not in themselves morally objectionable). As a matter of fact, defenders of enhancement technologies tend to consider the technological route preferable to the traditional ways, since, in most cases, bioenhancements accomplish better results, or at least similar results in a shorter period of time. Of course, it must be added that the new technique should not have undesirable side-effects, such that may override its expected benefits. For example, assuming that certain ‘smart pills’ really have a positive impact on such cognitive tasks as memorizing or concentrating, they should be considered morally acceptable and even welcome, if their outcomes are better than any traditional memorizing strategy, if they have no undesired effects on human bodily function, and if they do not impact negatively on some other mental process, such as reasoning or computing.

This kind of argument is also offered in the context of defending the permissibility of MBE. One paradigmatic formulation of it can be read in the largest case presented heretofore in its favor, that is, in Persson and Savulescu’s Unfit for the Future. The authors claim that, in order to effectively pursue their project of morally enhancing humanity, so as to prevent its otherwise foreseeable destruction, children should be subjected to moral bioenhancement from early childhood. This poses no serious problem, according to Persson and Savulescu, since this is exactly what we have been doing for centuries with traditional methods of moral education: and for very good reasons, since it is much easier to instill moral values and dispositions in some human individual during her development than it is to modify already settled dispositions and patterns of behavior. They write:

There is no reason to assume that moral bioenhancement to which children are exposed without their consent would restrict their freedom and responsibility more than the traditional moral education to which they are also exposed without their consent. It is of course true that if some children become more morally motivated through bioenhancement, they have not chosen to be more moral, but this is also true of the children who become more moral as the result of moral education and natural endowments. It is quite unlikely that later in life the moral bioenhanced individuals will regret the fact they have undergone this treatment, since otherwise they might have been criminals who would have been punished and condemned by society (Persson and Savulescu 2012a, p. 113).

The idea, therefore, is that the traditional and the biomedical methods of moral education are on a par, as far as their moral acceptability is concerned, and particularly in terms of their capacity to preserve human freedom and responsibility; in fact, it is certainly true that effective means of MBE could be employed so as to undermine the freedom and responsibility of the enhanced, “but so could more traditional means if the application of them is so intense that it amounts to brainwashing” (Persson and Savulescu 2012a, p. 121).

A partly similar point is also made by David DeGrazia, while discussing another risk of MBE: the risk of reducing moral pluralism through the imposition of a specific set of moral values that may not be shared by others, and particularly by the individual that has been educated so as to profess them. According to DeGrazia, it is controversial to count as moral enhancement a greater conformity to some set of moral norms, or a greater motivation to act in accordance with them, if, due to moral pluralism, we cannot be sure that those norms are appropriate or true. However, this concern applies in general to all projects of moral improvement and is not specific to MBE at all:

This is a significant challenge to any enthusiast of moral enhancement—including traditional moral enhancement. Thus, parents who believe in providing moral instruction to their children face this challenge. One should not inculcate moral values that are wrong, so how can a parent be sure that she or he is justified in providing a particular type of moral instruction? Also facing this challenge are public school teachers who attempt to inculcate in students certain moral virtues such as civility, respect for differences and concern for the poor (DeGrazia 2014, p. 363).

DeGrazia, who actually wants to defend MBE, proposes to face the problem by sticking to those moral improvements that “represent points of overlapping consensus among competing, reasonable moral perspectives” (ibid., p. 364). And this applies to MBE, as well as to traditional forms of moral education, for, in line with Levy’s moral parity principle, DeGrazia sees no inherent difference between teaching the moral virtues through discourse, narratives and models, and genetically engineering them via germ-line gene therapy. As one prominent defender of this last project briefly put it: “any objection raised against the GVP [i.e., Genetic Virtue Program] has an analogue in socialization and educational efforts. Since such objections are not understood as decisive against nurturing attempts, they should not be considered decisive against the GVP” (Walker 2009, p. 34). This ‘companions in innocence strategy’ is in fact quite analogous to the moral parity principle:

An enormous amount of energy is spent attempting to socialize people into being virtuous, as in teaching children to be truthful, just, and caring. If the GVP is wrong in attempting to promote virtue as a means of making people morally better, then much current socialization and education is mistaken as well (Walker 2009, p. 35).

3 Moral differences

Prominent advocates of MBE do not see any difference between the biological manipulation of behavior and motivation and the traditional methods of moral education and improvement. Nevertheless, that a relevant disanalogy exists between these two practices has been claimed by several critics. John Harris, most notably, has identified the central difference between the traditional practice and the proposed innovation in the threat posed by the latter, but not by the former, to human freedom. While traditional ways of pursuing moral improvement relied on the individual’s capacity to make free decisions concerning her intentions and actions, MBE acts through the manipulation of the individual’s biological hardware, thus compromising our ‘freedom to fall’: “The space between knowing the good and doing the good is a region entirely inhabited by freedom. Knowledge of the good is sufficiency to have stood, but freedom to fall is all. Without the freedom to fall, good cannot be a choice; and freedom disappears and along with it virtue. There is no virtue in doing what you must” (Harris 2011, p. 104, 2012, 2014; see also). This argument is important and highlights one central distinction between the two practices. However, I wish to emphasize that it is not the only element of the distinction. Moreover, it is also a controversial one, since it may be viewed as implying long-standing metaphysical discussions concerning free will, and the compatibility or incompatibility of freedom with neural determinism. Taking for granted such implication, Persson and Savulescu proceed to reject this line of criticism by observing that, if compatibilism is true, then freedom is compatible with causal determination, and MBE simply makes it the case “that we are more often, perhaps always, causally determined to do what we take to be the good” (Persson and Savulescu 2012a, p. 112); if, on the other hand, incompatibilism and libertarianism are true, than the effectiveness of MBE is limited by our indeterministic freedom, which cannot be curtailed by its use. Similarly, DeGrazia argues that, on the compatibilist conception, there is no reason to believe that MBE would threaten freedom: “I help the person in need because I want to help that fellow, or because I think I ought to, not because I am forced to do so. Moreover, I sought the motivational assist that I received from MB. There is no threat to freedom here.” (DeGrazia 2014, p. 366). Replying to such criticisms, Harris has claimed that his position makes no assumption on the free will debate, being concerned only with “common or garden freedom, the freedom which any rational person accepts is inhibited by threats, diminished by the foreclosure of options, and enhanced by education and civil liberties” (Harris 2016, p. 79). Moreover, Harris has even declared that he is inclined to accept some forms of compatibilism (ibid.); that being the case, it is unclear whether the argument from freedom is actually able to point to a decisive difference between MBE and traditional forms of moral improvement.

A partly different way to frame the distinction between old and new ways of pursuing moral enhancement has been proposed by Robert Sparrow, who, in the wake of Habermas’ critique of genetic enhancements, insists on the inequality that necessarily characterizes MBE, as compared to the moral equality inherent in the educational relationship:

Moral education, even moral education of a young child, proceeds—for the most part—via language and, as such, is fundamentally structured by the logic of communicative action. As an address to another member (or potential member) of a linguistic community, education acknowledges a fundamental moral equality between educator and educated. Implicit in this relationship is the requirement that the educator must, if called upon to do so, be able to justify the norms that have shaped the educational project and its content with reasons that the person being educated should accept. In doing so, the interaction is also open to the possibility that the person being educated will respond with counterarguments of sufficient force to change the mind of the educator. […] Biomedical interventions to reshape the agency of others, on the other hand, operate in an instrumental or technical mode. They involve a subject acting towards an object and as such are fundamentally structured by a profound inequality (Sparrow 2014, p. 26).

Sparrow correctly draws from this difference in the logic of the two practices—one acting through communicative reciprocity, the other treating the enhanced as an object—the conclusion that MBE, contrary to moral education, reduces the freedom of the morally enhanced. This argument is different from Harris’, because it bypasses all metaphysical concerns with free will, insisting on the practical freedom involved in the reciprocity between the educated and her educator, as compared to the objective manipulation of the former by the latter that is in question in MBE.

One more way to frame the distinction between traditional and biotechnological ways of moral improvement has been proposed by Alfred Archer, who, in the context of an argument aimed at showing the negative effects of MBE for the unenhanced, remarked that one important different between the two practices is that “biomedical enhancement involves an interference with a person’s body in a way that traditional forms of enhancement do not. If we take seriously the right to bodily integrity then it seems that this would make it inappropriate to force anyone to take such an enhancement. Traditional forms of moral enhancement, on the other hand, involve no such interference with bodily integrity, so the same problem would not arise for these forms of enhancement” (Archer 2016, pp. 9–10).

4 The moral agency argument

While important and correct, these arguments do not exhaust the distinction between the two practices. In order to fully capture this difference, it may be useful to compare MBE with other forms of enhancement, such as the cognitive one. In this case, the technological devices used to improve human performances act on certain conditions enabling the cognitive tasks; cognitive bioenhancement does not substitute our thinking, nor acts on the content of our thought, but simply facilitates the performance of our cognitive tasks by acting on its enabling conditions. By contrast, MBE tends to substitute traditional ways of reaching moral insights and to directly determine the content of our thoughts, and, as a consequence, our moral behavior.

Let’s illustrate the point a little bit. Effective cognitive enhancements—such as ‘smart pills’ or direct stimulations of brain activity through TMS or tDCS—would make me faster in calculating, more resistant to prolonged intellectual efforts, more efficient in memorizing data, and the like. It is highly dubious, of course, that this would make me, in any relevant sense, ‘more intelligent’: what is certain is that cognitive enhancement would not modify my thoughts, or somehow push me into entertaining any particular belief, for these technologies act on background or enabling conditions. If, for example, I am an enthusiast of poetry, cognitive enhancement is likely to make me much more accurate in quoting by heart many Dantesque tercets, or even whole cantos; if, however, I am a fanatic football fan, it may simply improve my capacity to declaim the members of my preferred team over the last quarter of a century. Nothing suggests that cognitive enhancement may have any effect on my preferences, that is, on my choosing poetry rather than football or the other way around. This means, importantly, that cognitive enhancement does not substantially affect the individual’s identity and intellectual performances: whatever the cognitively enhanced individual is going to do, will be a direct and faithful expression of his or her personality, even though the expression of his or her beliefs, values and insights will be made easier and more simple by the smart drugs, or by any other treatment that the subject has undergone. By contrast, by shaping our emotional reactions and interfering with the formation and the retention of our moral beliefs, MBE deeply interferes with our moral agency. This claim, which I propose as the heart of the distinction between traditional and biotechnological ways of pursuing moral improvement, can be fully spelled out in four critical points.

  1. (A)

    One obvious point is the already mentioned loss of freedom deriving from interventions that affect the subject’s behavior without involving her conscious deliberation; if a significant part of the moral value of actions depends on their being freely chosen by someone who could ‘have done otherwise’ (in one of the possible meaning of this controversial phrase), then it is clear that, as long as the chemical modifications induced by MBE directly cause a stable pattern of moral behavior, the subject’s liberty is infringed. As I said, this point received much attention, and I am not going to dwell much on it. I will only make two observations. First, Persson’s and Savulescu’s reply to this point fail to take notice of one possibility: that we do have freedom of an indeterministic kind, but that MBE would curtail it, perhaps to the point of erasing it. For it may well be that our neural biochemistry is so organized as to enable alternative possibilities of moral choice, but that the alterations induces by MBE take away this possibility, predetermining one single choice. This lack of different open futures would certainly be realized in the hypothesis of Persson’s and Savulescu’s God MachineFootnote 1: for, as noted by Harris (2016, pp. 103–104), it makes all the difference if people aren’t free to act immorally because the law prohibits some behavior on pain of punishment, and if the God Machine makes it “literally impossible to do these things” (Persson and Savulescu 2012b, p. 413).

    The second observation is that, although it is true that freedom is not the only value at stake, it is far from clear that “where technology is able to remove the freedom to act in gravely immoral ways, the loss of such freedom could be outweighed by the suffering such behavioural modification prevents” (Persson and Savulescu 2012b, p. 417). This balancing in favor of using MBE is also advocated by DeGrazia, who appeals again to the ‘parity strategy’: he remarks that “parallel skepticism would be warranted about whether one acts sufficiently freely under the influence of such traditional means of moral enhancement as moral instruction or appropriate socialization” (DeGrazia 2014, p. 366). It does not help—according to DeGrazia—to invoke the fact that traditional means of moral enhancement appeal to reasons for moral conduct, while MBE exerts causal influence on the agent’s motivations. In fact, “this oversimplifies matters. Traditional means often do exert psychological and therefore causal influence, yet unless truly excessive, this influence is compatible with the agent’s acting freely” (ibid.). We should thus attempt to quantify the reduction of freedom induced by MBE, compared with the average degree of freedom with which we act: then, if we imagine that “as a result of MB, there were no more wars or starvation and everyone in the world had access to the basic necessities of life” (ibid., p. 367), it is reasonable to accept a reduction, say, of 25% of our freedom, to favor such welcome consequences. Leaving behind the problem of quantifying the degree of freedom, the problem with this argument is that there are very serious reasons to believe that the bad consequence is actually going to come true, whereas the good one is simply unbelievable. As noted by many commentators, in fact, it is unconceivable that the end of such evils as wars, terrorism, starvation and the lack of medical resources can be brought about by MBE: first, because this would imply coercively extending the treatment to the entire human population; second, because, since most of these evils are caused by the economic and political inequalities existing in today’s world, it is to these structural issues that we should look, in order to bring them to solution: “Removing the institutional incentives that reward selfish behaviour and the pursuit of short-term goals over long-term goals would do more to produce ‘more moral’ behaviour than any program of biomedical interventions” (Sparrow 2014, p. 29).

    In short, that MBE is going to cause a substantial restriction of freedom is highly likely, and acknowledged also by some of its advocates. Claiming that the benefits of MBE will outweigh the harm of such restriction, presupposes (i) that MBE is really effective and (ii) that it does not cause any other serious harm. I believe it is fair to say that, as to now, we can be far from confident about condition (i); that MBE is going to impact significantly on our moral capacity is dubious, and even its most wholehearted advocates admit that “A moral enhancement of the magnitude required to ensure that this [i.e., the misuse of weapons of mass destruction] will not happen is not scientifically possible at present and is not likely to be possible in the near future” (Persson and Savulescu 2008, p. 174). That condition (ii) is also not met should become evident in the following.

  2. (B)

    The second way in which MBE is likely to interfere negatively with our moral agency is by making us, from a certain perspective, ‘less moral’ than we presently are. This is because interventions that bypass all moral reasoning, affecting the subjects’ behaviour in ways that do not involve any conscious reflection or evaluation of evidence by the subject, cannot qualify as moral enhancements proper: moral agency requires acting for reasons, and, ideally, after reflection on all the considerations counting in favour or against one’s final choice. If, however, MBE acts by directly modulating emotions, so that the individual’s reviewing of reasons for action is bypassed, then our moral agency is seriously undermined: for, if an individual’s avoidance of counter-moral stimuli “is not achieved by cognition-improving means” (Douglas 2013, p. 162), then there is nothing authentically ‘moral’ in her doing x for reasons she does not know and without having considered, not even implicitly, the evidence of favour or against it. As noted by Sparrow:

    [T]he claim that we are acting for the right reasons implies that our motives for action are tracking the reasons that we have to act. Acting ‘for the right reasons’ therefore requires that agents should respond in the right way to counterfactuals: if we praise someone for helping another person who is in need, our assessment that their action is morally admirable rests upon the thought that they should not have been motivated to help them in the same way if the other person were not in need. (Sparrow 2014, p. 25).

    Now, if the biochemical modulation of emotions induced by MBE lowers the individual’s susceptibility to certain emotions, it in fact reduces the subject’s capacity to autonomously asses the reasons for or against some action, since a significant part of those reasons emerges from the reflective consideration of one’s emotional reactions. Therefore, while MBE may increase the moral conformity of the agent’s conduct to accepted moral rules, it would not really improve her moral capacities, but only her moral behaviour. If we are interested in morality, and we value the prospect of moral enhancement, we surely have to welcome improvements in moral behaviour. However, if improvement in moral behaviour is coupled with a diminished sensitivity to moral reasons and a diminished capacity to assess and weigh them, the upshot of MBE may well be an overall reduction of the ‘enhanced’ subject’s moral capacities.

  3. (C)

    This is why, contrary to cognitive enhancement, MBE also affects our identity and moral personality (Specker et al. 2014; Focquaert and Schermer 2015). To influence our emotions is in fact to reduce our susceptibility to certain reasons for action, altering the way in which our moral beliefs and intentions are produced and thus changing our views on morality. In DeGrazia’ apt words, behavioral improvements depend, at least in part, on improved insight (DeGrazia 2014, pp. 362–363); and MBE is likely to affect insight, as well as behavior. Thus, apart from the fact that it is accomplished without the involvement of our free decisions, this result is not something which we are likely to welcome. I already recalled that, according to Persson and Savulescu, it is “quite unlikely that later in life the moral bioenhanced individuals will regret the fact they have undergone this treatment” (2012a, p. 113); this may well be true in the case of brutal criminals who might otherwise have been the subject of society’s just condemnation and punishment, but is highly implausible in most other cases: for example, in cases such as those discussed by Douglas, of people subject to conditioning in order to become more willing to help the global poor (Douglas 2014, pp. 78–79).Footnote 2 In most situations in which the individuals’ behavior is suboptimal, but within the range of moral permissibility and decency—for example, when questions of beneficence and willingness to help are at stake—there is no reason to think that one would not regret having been subjected to such influence, rather than having become convinced by oneself of the goodness of the reasons for helping. After all, the reasons for not helping may be, in some cases, moral (if controversial) reasons themselves—perhaps linked to some forms of radical libertarianism, or to more or less sophisticated forms of ethical egoism; to change such ideas would be to change the individual’s moral personality. This would cause a significant reduction of the pluralism of moral ideals—which is in itself valuable, so long as these ideals are not plainly immoral—and a real attack to the welfare and value of the lives of those individuals.

  4. (D)

    One last way in which MBE is likely to negatively affect the people’s moral agency is by imposing them some moral viewpoints that they may not have shared in the first instance. In fact, in order for MBE to produce good consequences on moral insight and moral behavior, we need to know what behavior is morally appropriate and to have an adequate insight into the moral truths (or the moral principles that are more appropriate, fit, or useful to accept and follow). This shows that MBE must presuppose a pattern of moral thought and behavior to which all individuals should willy-nilly conform. This may be looked upon with suspect for its likely consequences on society in general. As noted by Sparrow:

    [A]ny state that embarked upon moral bioenhancement would thereby be committed to moral perfectionism […] The moment it becomes plausible to claim on the basis of investigations of genetics or neurochemistry, etc., that some portion of the population are ‘more moral’ than other citizens, the door opens to argue, as Plato did, that society should be ruled by those who are most capable of determining the correct answers to moral questions (Sparrow 2014, p. 29).

But it is also deeply problematic if we consider its effects on the single individual, as compared to traditional strategies of moral education. In fact, while the latter is a process through which an individual acquires the capacity to analyze and discern, among several possible inputs, the appropriate reasons to endorse and to follow, MBE is a method through which the reasons and principles that are presupposed as appropriate are induced into the moral subjects, and the inclinations that are presupposed as inappropriate are simply eradicated. Moral education—in its ideal and uncorrupted shape, for it can of course be transfigured into a despicable form of moral indoctrination—is a process through which the individual independently construes one’s moral personality, creating a personal synthesis of the different inputs offered by her cultural environment; MBE is a process aiming at producing one specified sort of human individual, on the basis of the a priori selection of certain values, principles, kinds and degrees of emotions made by someone else. The first produces a plurality of different moral views and personalities; the latter seriously risks homogenizing and flattening our moral landscape.

This last reason is partly similar to the equality-inequality issue that Sparrow identifies as the main difference between traditional moral education and MBE, but not quite. The fact that certain responses are selectively inhibited, and others induced, objectively creates an inequality, between the enhancing and the enhanced, that is not present in traditional education, and seriously risks to license treating the latter as mere objects. Beyond that, however, there is the worry that, contrary to moral education, MBE operates an a priori, and potentially arbitrary, moral choice, preventing the educated from being sensitive to certain reasons and values. This sort of imposition results in a moral character that it not the expression of the individual personality of the educated, but merely reflects the choices of the educating, with the foreseeable effect of smoothing over the moral variability among people, and reducing moral pluralism. The problem with MBE is thus not simply that the equality between the two elements of the relationship is not preserved; it is also that the relationship has potentially negative effects, both on the moral capacities of the educated, and on the overall moral landscape of society.

5 Autonomous MBE

The four layers of what I have called the ‘moral agency argument’—claiming that MBE is likely to have negative influences on the quality of our moral agency—do clearly apply to the situation envisaged by Persson and Savulescu, in which MBE is coercively applied to prospective children and grown up individuals as a means to fend off the impending catastrophe of the human world. However, it can be objected that they are far less forceful in the hypothesis defended by Douglas, according to which MBE might be an intervention autonomously chosen by some individual who has carefully-weighed reasons to improve one’s moral character. In fact, it could be speculated that (A) since the decision to embark on MBE is freely taken by the individual, the intentions and actions that follow from her modified moral character are authentically hers. Moreover, (B) it may be the case that, by attenuating those emotions that prevent the individual from carrying out an appropriate reflective process, MBE acts so as to facilitate deliberation and to promote sound moral reasoning. This being so, (C) it is also clear that, although MBE does affect one’s identity and moral personality, this is an autonomously chosen process, undertaken for good reasons and not likely to be regretted. Finally, (D) the resulting moral personality will not be one that is somehow imposed on a nonconsenting individual, but one reflecting the individual’s commitment to a moral ideal.

This objection deserves consideration. Even if we accept that there are compelling reasons for rejecting the coercive application of MBE on future or non-consenting individuals, are there any intrinsic reasons to be skeptical about the prospects of MBE, when autonomously decided by an individual who has serious reasons to attempt the improvement of one’s moral character? Granted that this project is definitely less objectionable than the one of imposing MBE on others, I do think something can be said in support of such further skepticism. In his remarkable discussion on moral conformity and moral worth, Douglas tries to downplay the hypothesis that MBE would negatively impact on agents’ moral worth by introducing one more kind of parity argument: while conceding that MBE produces moral conformity in an unreliable way, that is, that it may or may not produce it, depending on the circumstances, he adds that “deliberative conformity enhancements are unreliable in precisely the same way” (Douglas 2014, p. 89). In fact, the traditional ways of moral education and self-education—what Douglas calls the deliberative conformity enhancements—are not guaranteed to produce moral knowledge and moral conformity, just as the ability of biotechnological means—which he dubs brute conformity enhancements—to produce moral conformity is contingent on the obtainment of favorable circumstances.

Now, it is true that also the traditional processes of moral imagination and deliberation are unreliable, in the sense of not necessarily producing their ideal results; and this, of course, is necessarily tied to our being fallible, limited human beings. However, one crucial difference exists between the two kinds of unreliability. In fact, in the best of cases, the traditional tools of moral improvement provide means to adjudicate between different reasons, including those provided by our emotional reactions; they do not remove or curtail any of our dispositions or inclinations, but rather provide a way to discern between them, adopting one and silencing another depending on the circumstances. On the contrary, MBE acts by simply curtailing certain dispositions, presupposing that they constitute an obstacle to moral conformity; however, as noted by Douglas himself, the tendency, e.g., to impulsive violence may at times be conducive to moral conformity, “for example, when one is fighting a just war, or perhaps when one is confronted with one person assaulting another on the street” (Douglas 2014, p. 87). Therefore, even though there is a sense in which both practices are unreliable, the failure of deliberative conformity enhancements to promote moral insight and moral conformity depends on contingent circumstantial factors such as temptations, distractions and weakness of the will, whereas the failure of brute conformity enhancements may often be caused by the fact that the moral resources that are necessary in the circumstances are non-contingently no longer available to the agent; in fact, the emotive modulation that she undertook in order to avoid negative consequences in other cases may have removed those resources. In other words, the unreliability of brute conformity enhancements is, in some situations, more structural and hazardous than the one associated to deliberative conformity enhancements.

To this, it can still be objected that, even though MBE is not a panacea, the outcomes of traditional methods are so poor that it is worth attempting other strategies. DeGrazia insists on this point, noting that “we already possess means of enhancing moral capacities. These include explicit moral instruction, mentoring, socialisation, carefully designed public policies, consciousness-raising groups, literature and other media that encourage moral refection, and individual efforts at improvement. But these means have been, at best, modestly effective” (DeGrazia 2014, p. 362); moreover, “The status quo is deeply problematic because there is such an abundance of immoral behaviour, with devastating consequences, and serious risk of worse to come” (ibid.). From this, it can be fairly concluded that it is at least worth trying with MBE. However, I believe that the two premises of the argument are at least controversial, if we measure them with a historically-sensitive parameter. If we think of the moral progress made by human societies, in terms of equality of rights, from ancient societies to the present, and keep in mind what was the condition of such groups as women, ethnic or religious minorities and others in past centuries, to say that the results of traditional methods of moral progress have been modestly effective is at best inaccurate. To say that there is an abundance of immoral behaviour is certainly correct, but again controversial, if we compare our age with other eras that we often judge, with some reason, primitive and underdeveloped. This is not to say that everything is going well with our moral capacities, but only to stress that we should not take the pessimism of the advocates of MBE at face value.Footnote 3 In particular, if the moral agency argument is right in suggesting that, by accepting MBE, we would not be simply complementing our traditional strategies of pursuing moral progress, but attacking central elements of our moral capacities, then the cost-benefit ratio seems to weigh against MBE.

6 Concluding remarks

The moral agency argument gives us reasons, I think, for being skeptical of MBE. Nothing said so far, however, implies that MBE is inherently wrong, or otherwise immoral. My central claim is that, notwithstanding implications to the contrary often emerging from its advocates, it is not the case that MBE simply follows on the track of traditional ways of moral education and progress, nor that it is not going to have serious negative consequences. This counts in favor of the conclusion according to which “the best, more promising methods we have of moral enhancement are […] the traditional ones: education, parental and peer group guidance, social and personal example, and indeed reflection on what’s rights, namely ethics” (Harris 2016, p. 117), but does not show that MBE is unconditionally wrong. Indeed, there may be cases in which MBE might be, all things considered, the best thing, or at least the least bad thing to do. I have in mind cases such as those of antisocial and highly aggressive individuals who properly qualify as psychopaths. In some of these cases, MBE may be the only, or at least the most rational, thing to do, particularly where the individual is able to consent to such a procedure.

I want to stress, though, that cases such as these would not properly count as moral enhancements, for two reasons. First, because, when the advocates of MBE list, among the “moral defects” that MBE might help to reduce or eliminate, psychopathic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, sadism or narcissistic personality disorder (Persson and Savulescu 2012b, p. 410; DeGrazia 2014, p. 364), they are referring to pathologic conditions, for which therapy may be in order. And it is a much different claim, to say that people with such radically anti-social traits may be subjected to MBE, from the claim according to which a radical change in human nature—and therefore, in healthy human beings as they “normally” are—is needed, lest humanity is extinguished: the former provides a treatment for a condition which is dysfunctional for the subject himself, while the latter is an intervention aiming to improve the suboptimal functioning of a capacity in the interest of society, or of humanity at large. Of course, these authors, together with many other commentators,Footnote 4 unconditionally reject the therapy/enhancement distinction, on grounds of the difficulties of providing clear definitions of concepts such as treatment, medical need, or normalcy. However, it seems to me that the cases in which MBE may find wider consensus, and may perhaps be credited with a real justification, are precisely those in which the “moral defect” is such as to constitute a radical deviation from the normal functioning of human social behavior and motivation. In other words, the moral improvements that “represent points of overlapping consensus among competing, reasonable moral perspectives” (DeGrazia 2014, p. 364) are those that do not sanction one or another positive ordering of moral values or principles, nor eradicate antisocial emotions that may prove useful in some contexts, but consist in the treatment of a condition that clearly counts as a disease. As noted by Specker et al., “it would be much more useful to discuss novel and emerging biomedical interventions that may improve moral capacities or moral behavior in specific target groups and in relation to particular mental health problems. For the near future, biomedical treatment of moral pathologies may be a more realistic option than moral enhancement, and may raise more concrete moral questions” (Specker et al. 2014, p. 15). Since the distinction between therapy and enhancement is not clear-cut, and it may sometimes be unclear whether a certain condition should count as a disease or not, this approach would sanction a presumption against MBE in borderline cases.

The second reason why these “moral therapies” would not count as moral enhancements is that, as already mentioned, these interventions are likely to act only on moral behavior, making immoral actions less likely to happen, but would not constitute a moral improvement, either in the individual’s capacity to have moral insight or in her capacity to weigh reasons in favor and against some course of action and to decide accordingly. This is why I think that having recourse to MBE in these cases would be the least bad thing to do and not something good or right in itself. If MBE weakens our capacity for moral agency, and if moral agency is a central feature of human identity and value, than it should be initiated only in cases in which, due to the severity of the disorder, there are no reasonable possibilities to achieve a substantial change in behavior through other means.

In conclusion, the moral agency argument helps synthesizing the moral worries connected to MBE, centering them on the negative effects that it is likely to have on our moral agency. Contrary to other forms of biomedical enhancements, MBE undermines our freedom, makes us in a substantial sense ‘less moral’, alters our identity and moral personality, and imposes an idea of proper moral behavior that homogenizes and flattens our moral landscape. This suggests that MBE is profoundly different from traditional ways of pursuing moral improvement, and that all moral parity arguments, in this context, are misguided and should be rejected.