It is 2025. Society has increasingly realised the importance of breaking evolution’s chains and enhancing the human condition. Large grants are awarded for building sci-fi-like laboratories to search for and create the ultimate moral enhancer. After just a few years, humanity believes it has made one of its most major breakthroughs: a pill which will rid our morality of all its faults. Without any side-effects, it vastly increases our ability to cooperate and to think rationally on moral issues, while also enhancing our empathy and our compassion for the whole of humanity. By shifting individuals’ socio-value orientation towards cooperation, this pill will allow us to build safe, efficient and peaceful societies. It will cast a pro-social paradise on earth, the moral enhancer kingdom come.

I believe we better think twice before endeavouring ourselves into this pro-social paradise on the cheap. Not because we will lose “the X factor”, not because it will violate autonomy, and not because such a drug would cause us to exit our own species. Even if all those objections are refuted, even if the drug has no side-effects, even if each and every human being, by miracle, willingly takes the drug without any coercion whatsoever, even then, I contend we could still have trouble.

Surprisingly, the scenario imagined in the first paragraph is not that far-fetched. The field of cognitive moral neuroscience and the study of moral cognition have been flourishing; we have already found many neurochemical manipulations which seem to alter our social and moral preferences. Dr. Molly Crocket and Professor Ernst Fehr’s recent review published this August addresses many of the methodological considerations involved with the study of neuromodulation of social and moral behaviour. Such overview was deeply needed as there has been a surge of studies in that area in the last 5 years. The Oxford Martin School recently hosted an event on the psychological and neurological basis of pro-social and cooperative behaviour, which was broadcasted on this blog. Anyone interested in moral or social enhancement should be particularly interested on these areas. However, missing even from the excellent methodological review conducted by Dr. Crockett was an account of how to address between-groups cooperation. Yet this is arguably the ultimate problem the moral enhancement hopes to fix.

However attractive the cooperative paradise may seem, it is not clear that increasing individual agents’ levels of cooperation will increase overall cooperation on society. Although one might expect an increase in our individual tendency towards cooperation between individuals would increased between groups cooperation on higher levels, it should be made clear that what we want is the latter. That is, we want to increase higher level, between groups cooperation. We already know how to cooperate within small isolated groups fairly well. As Joshua Greene puts it, the problem is when groups collide and their cooperation solutions are incompatible. Then we have the meta-cooperation problem, as he states it.

Hence, the question is: does individual, lower level between individuals cooperation entail between group, higher level cooperation? The answer is no. But not only there is no necessary connection, there are in fact plausible mechanisms whereby lower level cooperation actually decreases higher level cooperation. If we bear in mind many well understood examples of higher level properties, this shall come as no surprise. Here I will understand high level properties (or emergent properties) as patterns or organizations which emerge out of simpler lower properties or interactions. A classical example would be snowflakes’ symmetrical patterns arising out of tiny supercooled cloud droplets.

High level organization can often possess unexpected features. This is true even for the simplest physical processes. Take a paten with water being heated from below. A natural heating convection flux will occur and the process governing heat conduction in the lower microscopic level will follow a disorderly random movement. However, under certain relatively simple settings, macroscopic, orderly and stable hexagonal structures will visibly surface. Flatten the paten, the hexagons turn into spirals; increase temperature too much, the patterns shatter into chaos. Could increasing cooperation too much shatter social institutions?

Individual ants present almost a random and chaotic behaviour. If one were to get acquainted only with individual ants, it would seem such feather-brained creatures were incapable of any complex organization. But, place many of those ants together, and patterns will emerge, synchronizing the ant colony as if it were a single macroscopic creature. Appositely, if we meddle the seemingly chaotic ant’s individual behaviour, the macroscopic pattern can change in dramatic ways. Could meddling with individual cooperation completely reshaped social structures?