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Moral Enhancement, Instrumentalism, and Integrative Ethical Education
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2018
Abstract
In this chapter I will discuss some of the arguments presented in Unfit for the Future, where the authors stress the necessity of moral enhancement to prevent a global catastrophe. Persson and Savulescu promote a reductionistic view of moral intuitions suggesting that oxytocin, serotonin, and genetic treatments could save humanity from the perils of contemporary liberalism, weapons of mass destruction, and uncontrolled pollution. I will contend that although we need a moral enhancement it cannot be a brute manipulation of our biology but something where human plasticity is seen as paramount. Following the lesson of Dewey's instrumentalism, I advocate a non-reductionistic, pluralistic view where neuroscientific data may be used to develop a more effective moral pedagogy. In my opinion, this prospect is currently much more feasible (and less risky) than a hypothetical mass psycho-civilisation created using drugs and electrodes.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 83: Moral Enhancement: Critical Perspectives , October 2018 , pp. 293 - 311
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2018
References
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6 Persson and Savulescu also emphasise a third problem: the conception of responsibility as causally-based, according to which we tend to consider ourselves more responsible for harm we physically cause than for harm we let happen by omission. Moreover, causally-based responsibility is ‘proportionally diluted when we cause things together with other agents’, and this has led to climate change because individuals tend not to worry about how much they pollute as they believe their damage is negligible on global scale. See Persson and Savulescu, Unfit for the Future, 22–26.
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8 See Persson and Savulescu, Unfit for the Future, 110–111, 118–120.
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43 Current research in neuroscience is trying to find the mechanisms underlying so-called experience-dependent plasticity. This concept relies on the Hebbian theory that ‘neurons that regularly fire together, wire together’ and holds that the grey matter volume of a brain region is influenced by its use. For example, some longitudinal imaging studies show that juggling training leads to increased grey matter concentration in occipital-parietal regions; whereas training of working memory impacts on the structural connectivity of white matter – for a review see Zatorre, Robert J., Fields, Douglas R., and Johansen-Berg, Heidi, ‘Plasticity in Gray and White: Neuroimaging Changes in Brain Structure During Learning’, Nature Neuroscience 15:4 (2012), 528–531CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Regarding moral education, a finding that would need further exploration is the increased grey matter volume in the bilateral ventromedial pre-frontal cortex (vmPFC) and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) of those subjects that ‘judge moral issues based on deeper principles and shared ideals’ – for the experiment, see Prehn, Kristin, et al. , ‘Neural Correlates of Post-Conventional Moral Reasoning: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study’, PLoS ONE 10:6 (2015)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122914.
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50 Interestingly, this is the same problem Persson and Savulescu want to solve with enhancement: the context has changed, but humanity has underdeveloped moral intuitions that must be rewritten.