Biomedical Moral Enhancement for Human Space Missions

Biomedical moral enhancement is an idea which states that human moral intuitions and patterns may be artificially improved by biomedical means. The rationale which lies behind moral bioenhancement is rooted in the idea that humans – in a moral and behavioral sense – are not evolutionally adapted to current ecological challenges. This idea is discussed in the paper in relation to human space missions to Mars and beyond. Because the space environment is a hazardous environment, there are some reasons to consider the idea of moral bioenhancement for the purposes of mission success and the safety of astronauts/space settlers. This paper discusses that idea in the context of a broader discussion on moral enhancement, moral bioenhancement related to earthly issues, and the idea of moral progress.

Biomedical Moral Enhancement in the Face of Moral Particularism

Biomedical moral enhancement, or BME for short, aims to improve people's moral behaviour through augmenting, via biomedical means, their virtuous dispositions such as sympathy, honesty, courage, or generosity. Recently, however, it has been challenged, on particularist grounds, that the manifestations of virtuous dispositions can be morally wrong. For instance, being generous in terrorist financing is one such case. If so, biomedical moral enhancement, by enhancing people's virtues, might turn out to be counterproductive in terms of people's moral behaviour. In this chapter, we argue, via a comparison with moral education, that the case for the practice of biomedical moral enhancement is not weakened by the particularists’ stress on the variable moral statuses of the manifestations of our virtues. The real challenge from the particularists, we argue, lies elsewhere. It is that practical wisdom, being essentially context-sensitive, cannot be enhanced via biomedical means. On the basis of this, we further argue that BME ought to be used with great caution, for it may wrongly enhance, for instance, a terrorist financier's generosity, a robber's courage, or an undercover detective's honesty. Finally, we sketch how boundaries can be set on the use of BME, and address some potential objections to our position.

Retributivism and the Moral Enhancement of Criminals Through Brain Interventions

This chapter will focus on the biomedical moral enhancement of offenders – the idea that we could modify offenders’ brains in order to reduce the likelihood that they would engage in immoral, criminal behaviour. Discussions of the permissibility of using biomedical means to address criminal behaviour typically analyse the issues from the perspective of medical ethics, rather than penal theory. However, recently certain theorists have discussed whether brain interventions could be legitimately used for punitive (as opposed to purely therapeutic) purposes. For instance, Jesper Ryberg argues (although he himself is not a retributivist) that there is nothing to prevent retributivists from endorsing brain interventions as a legitimate form of retributive punishment. Legal academics have not yet paid sufficient attention to whether this proposal would be compatible with international human rights law, nor have retributivist philosophers discussed whether their favoured penal theories have the conceptual resources to explain why brain interventions would not be an appropriate method of punishment. This chapter considers whether there is any indication that these interventions are being used at present for punitive purposes and whether this would violate the European Convention on Human Rights. It examines different versions of retributivism and considers which theory is in the best position to challenge the use of brain interventions as a form of punishment. Finally, it considers whether offering these interventions as an alternative to punishment would violate principles of proportionality.

Biomedical Moral Enhancement and Moral Progress

This chapter critically examines a different and highly provocative response to the thesis that evolved human moral psychology poses severe and inflexible limitations on moral progress: the “evoliberal” proposal to re-engineer human moral psychology through biomedical technologies in order to solve some of our most pressing moral problems: war, terrorism, genocide, and climate change. It shows that the evoliberal position is premised on the same problematic evolutionary assumptions that underpin the evoconservative view. Once our world’s great moral problems are recast in terms of failures of moral inclusivity, it becomes clear that biomedical moral enhancement technology is unlikely to be necessary or effective in addressing them. To the contrary, the evolutionary model of moral psychological development sketched in Part II suggests that cultural moral innovations that deploy our best understanding of the evolutionary development of human morality stand the best chance of driving moral progress and preventing moral regression.