abstract As history shows, some human beings are capable of acting very immorally. 1 Technological advance and consequent exponential growth in cognitive power means that even rare evil individuals can act with catastrophic effect. The advance of science makes biological, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction easier and easier to fabricate and, thus, increases the probability that they will come into the hands of small terrorist groups and deranged individuals. Cognitive enhancement by means of drugs, implants and biological (including (...) genetic) interventions could thus accelerate the advance of science, or its application, and so increase the risk of the development or misuse of weapons of mass destruction. We argue that this is a reason which speaks against the desirability of cognitive enhancement, and the consequent speedier growth of knowledge, if it is not accompanied by an extensive moral enhancement of humankind. We review the possibilities for moral enhancement by biomedical and genetic means and conclude that, though it should be possible in principle, it is in practice probably distant. There is thus a reason not to support cognitive enhancement in the foreseeable future. However, we grant that there are also reasons in its favour, but we do not attempt to settle the balance between these reasons for and against. Rather, we conclude that if research into cognitive enhancement continues, as it is likely to, it must be accompanied by research into moral enhancement. (shrink)

Transformar el modo de vida individual es necesario para abordar la crisis ecosocial, y resulta perentorio que las políticas comprometidas con su resolución promocionen una capacidad individual de acción ecosocial. Sin embargo, parece que cierta brecha motivacional está obstaculizando la transformación del modo de vida individual. A fin de dar respuesta a esta brecha, ensayamos una mixtura del enfoque de las capacidades con las teorías de Hartmut Rosa. Argumentamos que la resonancia natural funge de factor personal de conversión necesario, si (...) bien no suficiente, para la capacidad de acción ecosocial; y que una política que promocione la resonancia natural se adecuaría también a los requisitos impuestos al desarrollo humano tanto por el enfoque de las capacidades como por la sostenibilidad. (shrink)

This paper critically compares the philosophy of Günther Anders and the contemporary transhumanists, like Julian Savulescu, Ingmar Persson, or Thomas Douglas. The Andersian concepts of moral blindness, promethean gap, and promethean shame will be discussed in order to understand human beings’ outdatedness; parallel to this, we will also expose the transhumanist analysis on the unfitness of human beings in evolutive and cognitive terms. We will show that much of the transhumanist analysis is a reformulation of the Andersian thesis, now under (...) scientific terminology. Finally, we will approach the transhumanist proposal of moral enhancement, explaining and confronting some critics raised on the grounds of freedom and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Moral enhancement is an ostensibly laudable project. Who wouldn’t want people to become more moral? Still, the project’s approach is crucial. We can distinguish between two approaches for moral enhancement: direct and indirect. Direct moral enhancements aim at bringing about particular ideas, motives or behaviors. Indirect moral enhancements, by contrast, aim at making people more reliably produce the morally correct ideas, motives or behaviors without committing to the content of those ideas, motives and/or actions. I will argue, on Millian grounds, (...) that the value of disagreement puts serious pressure on proposals for relatively widespread direct moral enhancement. A more acceptable path would be to focus instead on indirect moral enhancements while staying neutral, for the most part, on a wide range of substantive moral claims. I will outline what such indirect moral enhancement might look like, and why we should expect it to lead to general moral improvement. (shrink)

The debate on the ethical aspects of moral bioenhancement focuses on the desirability of using biomedical as opposed to traditional means to achieve moral betterment. The aim of this paper is to systematically review the ethical reasons presented in the literature for and against moral bioenhancement.

The moral enhancement (or bioenhancement) debate seems stuck in a dilemma. On the one hand, the more radical proposals, while certainly novel and interesting, seem unlikely to be feasible in practice, or if technically feasible then most likely imprudent. But on the other hand, the more sensible proposals – sensible in the sense of being both practically achievable and more plausibly ethically justifiable – can be rather hard to distinguish from both traditional forms of moral enhancement, such as non-drug-mediated social (...) or moral education, and non-moral forms of bioenhancement, such as smart-drug style cognitive enhancement. In this essay, I argue that bioethicists have paid insufficient attention to an alternative form of moral bioenhancement – or at least a likely candidate – that falls somewhere between these two extremes, namely the (appropriately qualified) use of certain psychedelic drugs. (shrink)

Although transhumanism offers hope for the transcendence of human biological limitations, it generates many intrinsic and consequential ethical concerns. The latter include issues such as the exacerbation of social inequalities and the exponentially increasing technological capacity to cause harm. To mitigate these risks, many thinkers have initiated investigations into the possibility of moral enhancement that could limit the power disparities facilitated by biotechnological enhancement. The arguments often focus on whether moral enhancement is morally permissible, or even obligatory, and remain largely (...) in the realm of the hypothetical. This paper proposes that psilocybin may represent a viable, practical option for moral enhancement and that its further research in the context of moral psychology could comprise the next step in the development of moral transhumanism. (shrink)

Anders was a preeminent critic of technology and critic of the atomic bomb as he saw this hermeneutico-phenomenologically in the visceral sense of beingand time: the sheer that of its having been used as well as the bland politics of nuclear proliferation functions as programmatic aggression advanced in the name of defense and deterrence. The tactic ofsheerly technological, automatic, mechanical, aggression is carried out in good conscience. The preemptive strike is, as Baudrillard observed, the opponent’s fault: such are the wages (...) of evil. Violence in good conscience characterizes the postwar, cold war era and the present day with its mushrooming effects ofneo-fascism under the titles of national security and anti-terrorism. Karl Krauss’ 1913 bon mot regarding psychoanalysis as the very insanity it claims to cure [Psychoanalyse ist jene Geisteskrankheit, für deren Therapie sie sich halt] has never been more apt for political translation—straight into the heart of what Lacan called the Real which has ‘always been’ the political register. Where Habermas and heirs have tended to disregard Anders , just as most philosophers of technology have ignored the political as well as theethical in their eagerness to avoid suspicion of technophobia, we continue to require both critical theory and a critical philosophy of technology, a conjunction incorporating Ander’s complicated dialectic less of art in Benjamin’s prescient but still innocent age of technological reproduction but and much rather “on the devastation of life in the age of the third industrial revolution.” Thus rather thanreading Anders’ critique of the bomb as limited to a time we call the Atomic Age—as Anders himself varied Samuel Beckett’s 1957 Endgame asEndzeit that is “Endtime,” here invoking the eschatological language of Jacob Taubes as Anders does—this essay connects his reflections on the bomb with his critique of technology and the obsolescence of humanity as of a piece with our dedication to hurling ourselves against our own mortality. This concern with the violence of technology, this hatred of the vulnerability of having been born and having been set on a path unto death inspires Anders’ engagement with the sons of Eichmann—the heirs of those who designed and executed the Nazi death camps and extermination chambers of the Holocaust—and the sons of Claude Eatherly—the heirs ofboth those who designed and those who as pilots deployed the bombings that exploded nothing the stuff of the sun itself against the Empire of the Sun in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We, embroiled as we are in wartime after wartime, suppressing public protest on a scale like never before, in country after country across the globe, cannot dispense with Anders today. (shrink)