Natasha Mitchell: And this is All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, Natasha Mitchell on deck. Modafinil, coffee, Propranolol all substances we've discussed on the show before, so called cognitive enhancers. Do they boost your attention, help you stay alert and awake, even help you diminish the impact of traumatic memories?

Well cognitive enhancement hit prime time this year with the Hollywood flick Limitless starring Bradley Cooper as a writer hard on his luck until...

Excerpt: You know how they say that we can only access 20 per cent of our brains, is that you access all of it.

They've done clinical trials and it's FDA approved.

Just out of curiosity and that's all. I was blind but now I see.

A tablet a day and I was limitless.

Since when do you speak Italian?

I finished my book in four days.

I'm rattled by this guy, so Eddie Morra you do know you're a freak, what's your secret?

Medication.

Natasha Mitchell: Our guest today makes cognitive enhancement look like child's play, he wants us to consider the case for moral enhancement using science, perhaps drugs, perhaps genetic modification to make us better, kinder and here's the nub - less evil people.

Julian Savulescu: We've produced mice with enhanced memory, mice which live twice as long, monkeys which are more hardworking, voles or small rodents that are monogamous instead of polygamous so all of these characteristics, even sexual behaviour is obviously affected by our biology and can be changed. Could we change our moral dispositions by doing these sorts of things?

Natasha Mitchell: Could we indeed? As promised I'm taking you back to the 2011 Adelaide Festival of Ideas where I introduced a lecture given by Professor Julian Savulescu harking from Australia he's now director of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University. He's also Director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and the Institute for Science and Ethics with countless other gongs to his name.

He's known as a provocateur in the ethics community. He argues the case for a sort of 'new eugenics' and that we have a moral obligation to pursue human perfection. Enhancement he says, is no different from treating disease. But today he's taking on our moral failings.

Julian Savulescu: Thanks very much Natasha. Today I'm going to talk about a different kind of enhancement, not physical enhancement, not cognitive enhancement but moral enhancement. And my idea for the Adelaide Ideas Festival is that we can and should enhance peoples' moral capacities by using technology and I'll talk a little bit about how we could do it using biotechnology.

So, many of you will be familiar with Anders Brevik who earlier this year killed 77 people with automatic weapons, another eight with a bomb outside of government buildings in Oslo. Most of his victims were young people at a Labour party camp. He said that the Labour party had to pay the price for letting down Norway and the Norwegian people, published a 1500 page manifesto and in fact was an avid cognitive and physical enhancer; he took a number of drugs to improve his performance in various ways. He was worried that Norway and Western Europe were being taken over by Muslims. There's been interest in whether there is evil intrinsic to human nature, whether some people are born evil, this film We Need to Talk about Kevin is about a boy who comes to become a mass murderer.

Steven Pinker the famous Harvard psychologist in a book called the Science of Evil said that genetics and neuroscience is showing that the heart of darkness cannot always be blamed on parents and society. There's a famous psychologist in London called Essi Viding who's done a lot of work on what's called callous unemotional personality in children. These are children who are very cold and torture animals, a large proportion of these children come to be psychopaths as they enter later life.

So the idea that evil can be a part of our nature obviously goes back to the beginning of human history itself. John Steinbeck wrote 'as a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or potential of conscience'. Now modern science is starting to reveal the moral human limitations in the most extreme cases; psychopathy and sociopathy. Now our world today is utterly different to the world that existed for any of our forefathers. First of all we have much more powerful technology than any human has ever had before. Brevic killed 77 people with automatic weapons but in fact we could kill many more people with the sort of technology that's available today.

Around the middle of last century humans acquired the capacity to destroy the whole of humanity through nuclear war. A number of experts including the Astronomer Royal, president of the Royal Society Martin Rees estimated that perhaps the chances of us doing this this century with either nuclear, biological or computing technologies is 20 per cent to 50 per cent. So it only takes one Anders Brevic to not access some fairly crude fertiliser and automatic weapons but to access this kind of technology to kill many more people than 77.

More scary still the nuclear weapons are biological weapons because these in general are cheaper to produce and can be produced with much less sophisticated technology. Now given this hugely powerful range of technologies that we now have we also need to consider the nature of the beast that uses them and as I said ever since human history began and literature and art, evil has been portrayed as being a part as well as the goodness in our nature as a part of human nature. We are all familiar with sociopaths and psychopaths like Brevic, fanatics and ideologs. These disorders are not just things that arise through bad parenting or social injustice, there is a strong biological component to these sorts of personality traits and this biological story is starting to be unravelled by people like Essi Viding and others.

75 per cent of people in gaols have an anti-social personality disorder and 25 per cent are psychopaths. Now even if this is not genetic or biological in any way the fact is that if one of these people accesses the sorts of technology that I've been talking about there will be much greater disaster in this century than there has been so far. So that's one end of the spectrum of why we need to consider our own moral dispositions.

But the second one is a much more important pervasive problem, the second issue is that we all have not capacities for enormous evil like Brevic but very limited moral dispositions and these limited moral dispositions have profound consequences when we collect them together in a modern world. Our moral dispositions, how we behave towards each other, whether we say we're sorry when somebody steps on our toes, or whether we become angry when somebody offends us are the results of the way we've developed as social animals. So over the last 2 to 300,000 years human beings have evolved from the first Homo sapiens. But while our technology and society have gone through enormous changes in the last 10,000 years, particularly over the last 100 years our biology and our basic set of dispositions are the same as those that occurred in the very brief time in evolutionary terms from when we first emerged as Homo sapiens.

Now what was life like through virtually all of human history? Humans had to compete with each other for resources; they had to be fit to survive, with their own hands and their own abilities by the time they reached adulthood. It was much easier for them to bring harm to their fellow human beings than it was to benefit them. Something like 40 per cent of humans through most of human history died of homicide, being killed by another human competing for resources. Morality, what we call our moral norms, the sorts of things that we punish people for evolved to enable humans to be stable enough to co-operate in small groups and survive as a group to pass on their genes to the next generation.

But because of this very limited set of dispositions and this particular history our basic dispositions are extremely limited. We tend to be biased to what can happen in the very near future because through most of our past we couldn't affect things in one century, we couldn't even affect things in five years from the time at which we acted. So we tend to focus on the near future. We also are much more concerned about what happens to the people close to us, our friends and family, those who we co-operate with. The basic size of a human group was roughly 150, most tribes, most groups of humans existed in groups of 150 because at that point you can internally co-operate and enforce norms without some need for external policing or external law enforcement.

We tended to co-operate with each other but only when we were observed. So when humans aren't observed there is a basic tendency to free ride, to let others make sacrifices while you benefit. We also are distrustful of strangers and people who are from different races or groups because through all of human history we had to be wary of our group members because they represented a threat to us and to the resources we sought to gain. So we're partial, we are altruistic, we do make sacrifices but typically for our friends and family and there's a reason for this because if we made sacrifices for strangers we wouldn't have survived because the strangers would have tended to exploit us or to free ride on us.

So xenophobia is a part of human nature and in fact science demonstrates that even people, even the best people when you look at their reaction times and look at subtle measures of their reactions to out group members have an element of fear and distrust of out groups. Because it was very easy for us to kill we had strong proscriptions, strong rules in every society against harming members of your group. But that didn't extend to members of other groups, in fact in many cases you were required to kill members of other groups. What was most important to us was that we didn't cause people harm but there was no obligation to benefit people. We believed that we are responsible for what we've done, what we caused but not for what we allowed to happen. We are able to empathise and sympathise with single individuals but not with large groups. There's a striking finding that people's willingness to give aid decreases as the number of people presented would be the recipients of aid. So if you want people to provide aid in a crisis you show them a picture of a single individual.

Now the second feature of our world today that differs from the world in the past is hugely globalised. Events in one part of the world affect very distant parts of the world with lightening speed and together with technological advance this means we can affect other people to a huge degree that we could never do so in the past. So many modern problems are not just local problems, they're what are called global collective action problems and I'll talk a little bit about climate change as an example of that.

We won't solve climate change is my prediction through voluntary co-operation. First of all because it's uncertain what the effects are, we're very poorly set up to deal with uncertainty and secondly the effects will occur in 50 years time after many of us are dead, we're not psychologically set up to care about what happens in 50 or 100 years time. The effects will be born with people outside of Australia, Australia will be alright with climate change, we'll find ways of adapting to climate change. It's countries like Bangladesh and South-East Asian countries that won't be able to adapt, that's where people will die or be dispossessed.

And lastly to deal with climate change properly would require quite significant sacrifice. If all six billion people alive today reached our standard of living the impact on the environment would be twelve times as great as it is today, which is clearly unsustainable. Not everyone can live at our standard of living. So unless we are prepared to reduce our standard of living quite significantly we're not going to be able to deal with climate change. The sorts of figures we are aspiring to reduce carbon by won't deal with climate change. We won't restrain our consumption or give up our lifestyles. One survey after the Kyoto Protocol found that 52 per cent of US citizens wouldn't support Kyoto if it cost them $50 a month and only 11 per cent would support it if it cost $100 or more. What this shows is that it's wishful thinking to think that people are going to voluntarily deal with climate change.

So could biology change these dispositions? Could we become more altruistic, more willing to make self sacrifices, more empathetic, better able to understand other people's suffering and emotions through our understanding of biology? Well there are reasons to believe that we can and that we should. So our dispositions as I've indicated are built in to our nature as animals and they're essentially elaborations of what's called tit-for-tat. The way in which we've most effectively co-operated with others is to offer co-operation to others and when they co-operate we continue a pattern of co-operation but if they defect, or harm us we punish them and then you offer them the opportunity to co-operate again. These tit-for-tat dispositions are built into our biology and can yield a sophisticated range of emotional responses like remorse and guilt, shame, pride, admiration and forgiveness.

A number of experiments have been designed to test the disposition in humans and also non-human animals such as chimpanzees towards a sense of fairness or justice. What we think is a just arrangement or division. The so called ultimatum game is a game where we test these moral dispositions. In this game you have a proposer so in the case of chimpanzees; one chimp can offer a division of a reward. So say you have ten raisins the proposer can say I'm going to get eight and you're going to get two and the responder can either accept the two raisins in which case the proposer gets the two, or the responder can throw away all of the rewards so both of them get zero. This is punishment for unfairness. So when it's done with chimps it's found that they will accept quite unfair distributions two and eight is not uncommon.

Humans however will tend to reject the reward altogether if there's any substantial unfairness often greater than six and four OK. So people were prepared to suffer themselves and receive nothing if they judge that a distribution is what they consider to be unfair. But what's really striking about these studies is when you do them with identical twins the correlation between what identical twins accept as a fair offer is much higher than twins that are not identical or between one individual and a stranger. So if one twin accepts six and four the other twin is much more likely to accept six and four. What this research also shows is that a sense of fairness, what you judge to be fair is at least around 50 per cent a part of your genetic makeup. So whether you are prepared to tolerate injustice is not just a decision that you make it's in part biological.

Natasha Mitchell: And All in the Mind this week coming to you from the 2011 Adelaide Festival of Ideas with Oxford University Bioethicist Professor Julian Savulescu and myself, Natasha Mitchell. This is ABC Radio National going out on Radio Australia and as podcast. Now Julian Savulescu is arguing the case for using science, using technology, using whatever means to help us overcome our moral failings. He's making the case for moral enhancement.

Julian Savulescu: I've talked about the enhancement revolution and the sorts of things that we're already doing to enhance our appearance, to improve our cognitive abilities, to improve our sexual function, to improve our physical function. There are many currently effective cognitive enhancers, Limitless was based on a currently available drug Modafinil which was produced to treat narcolepsy but improves attention and working memory; costs about the same price as smoking two packets of cigarettes per day to take every day. One study showed that 20 per cent of academics are using drugs like this to improve cognitive performance. But much more powerful forms of cognitive enhancement lie in modifying the basic genes and biological dispositions that shape our behaviour and who we are.

Now if you're sceptical about the power of biology to affect fundamental behaviour you only have to look at the greatest genetic experiment ever conducted which is the breeding of dogs from a small group of wolves over 10,000 years. You all know the difference between the 300 different breeds of dogs, an Alsatian is smart but vicious, a Rottweiler is vicious, a Labrador is placid, a Chihuahua is irritable. These characteristics are genetic caused by selective breeding but what we did over 10,000 years could be done in a single generation now by genetic engineering. On the left you can see a rabbit which fluoresces in the dark, this shows that it was produced 15 years ago or more, it shows that you can transfer genetic material from one species a jelly fish into another species, a rabbit and it expresses that trait, that thing that the gene is responsible for. It makes the rabbit fluoresce in the dark. There are also fluorescent monkeys and so on. On the right you can see an embryo that is fluorescing in the dark, that's a human embryo caused by doing exactly the same thing a couple of years ago in the United States. Now that embryo was destroyed but if it allowed to develop and you produced a baby that that person would fluoresce in the dark this is not moral enhancement but what it shows is that you can change fundamentally the way that we look and the way that we are by using our knowledge of biology and the biological revolution.

The message of this is that inside ourselves is a huge power that can be modified and changed. We've done this to animals we've produced mice with enhanced memory, mice which live twice and long, monkeys which are more hard working, voles or small rodents that are monogamous instead of polygamous so all of these characteristics, even sexual behaviour is affected, obviously affected by our biology and can be changed. Could we change our moral dispositions by doing these sorts of things? Of course in principle we can and there's even emerging evidence that pharmacology the state of the hormones and neurotransmitters the sort of chemicals in our body the level of those chemicals affects how we behave towards each other.

So serotonin is a neurotransmitter, a chemical in the brain that regulates activity in certain areas of the brain. Many people are on drugs which affect this chemical, these drugs are called Prozac, or selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors - the name doesn't matter. But many of the new generation of anti-depressants affect this chemical so around the world there are millions of people and there are probably hundreds of thousands of people taking drugs, perhaps some of you, my mother takes this drug for depression. If you've got lower levels of this drug in your brain you behave more aggressively, if you have lower levels you're also more impulsive. If you've got higher levels you tend to co-operate with people, you tend to be much easier to get along with and get along with people much more easily.

So this affects your willingness to co-operate which is a moral quality. It doesn't affect it hugely but what it shows you is that drugs can have subtle moral effects. Another one which we have studied in Oxford ourselves is a blood pressure lowering drug called Propanolol , this is a drug that was used for many years to treat high blood pressure and after heart attacks. It reduces anxiety, it also reduces our ability to remember things, the American military is using Propanolol to look at reducing stress disorders in soldiers after battle to stop them remembering the traumatic events they've been involved in. It increases conservatism and it has effects on fear and disgust.

We showed in Oxford that if you give people this drug you reduce their tendency to put down or to treat adversely people from out groups so you become more tolerant of people outside of your group when you're on this drug. Oxcytocin is another drug it's also a natural substance in the brain, women release it when they're breast feeding, it's present in the brain and also in the blood. This drug is released by the oral contraceptive pill and glucocorticoids which are used for the treatment of asthma. When you give people this, which you can give in spray, it increases their willingness to trust other people, their trust worthiness, it increases their co-operation within their own groups but reduces their co-operation with out group members. Psychiatric drugs also have moral effects.

Perhaps the most striking of these are drugs that are given to paedophiles to reduce their sex drive, the so called anti-libidinal drugs. These drugs are aimed at controlling the sexual behaviour of people who have committed crimes involving sexual aggression to children. Many of the world's problems like poverty and climate change today require us to behave in ways that we're not naturally disposed to behave. That's not to say that we can't and that's not to say that some revolution might cause us to behave in radically different ways than we have in the past. The human capacity to learn, to conform, to conform to ideologies is enormous. These sorts of pressures could cause us to deal with the problems that we face today. But today we face mass destruction through the actions of individuals, psychopaths, sociopaths, fanatics, ideologs, people like Brevic, people like Kevin, people like Ted Bundy, people like Joseph Stalin. These people will today have access to much greater technologies than they've had in the past.

I haven't talked about how we could deal with that problem but there are also ways in which we could use science to address those sorts of problems. What I talked about today is the much more common dispositions that we all have which are limited that mean that we're unlikely to deal, I think, with the problems that we face in a globalised technologically advanced world. There is natural moral inequality: some people are better people than others, some people are evil. No human characteristic is distributed equally, if you look around you're all differing in height, you're differing in physical status, you're differing in your abilities and your disabilities. Nature has no mind to equality, it has no mind to equality in moral dispositions but the consequences of this kind of equality are profound. Not just in terms of the consequences for an individual but for the whole existence of humanity and society in general of these moral dispositions and inequalities and dispositions.

Now we can intervene by identifying individuals with say a callous unemotional personality or oppositionally defiant personality disorder giving them additional support, giving them interventions to try to increase their empathy. We can use modern techniques of surveillance; we can try to tailor our policies, our political policies to target the psychologically biases and limitations that human beings have. Well you don't see politicians using this kind of science to tailor their policies, what you see typically is some ideological perspective ignorant of the human condition in just the same way that Communism was ignorant of human motivation.

But what I believe we should also do is look at enhancing or moral dispositions, not just through education, not just through psychology but also by understanding our biology, by understanding the biological revolution that I described. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't employ education, psychology, political strategy, social interventions etc. We should do all of those things the problem is so great. But it's time to look not just outside to what we can do outside but to inside and how we can look to improve ourselves not just by reading Socrates or Buddha or the Bible but also by looking at how we're disposed to relate to other people and to react in the world. Thank you.

Natasha Mitchell: Professor Julian Savulescu, Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. If you want to explore his arguments further catch the links on our website. And while you're there, get talking look for 'add your comment' on the webpage for this week's show all at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind.

I'm Natasha Mitchell and thanks to co-producer Maria Tickle and the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. Catch you next week.