I. THE ARGUMENT

God had important things to say on the subject of moral enhancement. If God's feelings on the subject have been reliably reported by John Milton, the verbatim account to be found in Paradise Lost1 is important because it contains, in a most concise form, many of the most cogent reasons for suspicion as to the viability of moral enhancement as a coherent project, at least as it is being understood in the emerging literature.

Another good reason to listen to2 Milton's God is his insistence on the obligation that we all have to take responsibility for ourselves and for our world and in contradiction of so many recent writers who claim the hubris of attempting to do so exposes us to a myriad of dangers.3 Equally the failure to exercise such responsibility is far from the path of safety4 and hot baths.5

The recent history of bioethics is marked by its commitment, by a move from ethics as etiquette to ethics as engagement.6 This is all the more vital because from many sources we are receiving warnings of the necessity for early and decisive action to save both humanity and indeed the planet. Climate change, new diseases such as Avian and Swine Flu, the various forms of Creutzfeldt‐Jacob Disease (CJD) and HIV/AIDS, the population explosion, and increasingly diffused access to weapons of mass destruction all urgently require solutions and are all posing extraordinarily difficult problems and presenting unprecedented dangers. While bioethics is hardly plausible as the saviour science for all these ills, it does have,and has exercised, a vital role in both highlighting problems and in clearing away many of the tenacious and bad arguments that are constantly produced for avoiding or postponing radical solutions.

Against this background, Moral Enhancement is coming to the forefront of bioethical scholarship for an interesting combination of reasons. On the one hand it harnesses one of the central areas of traditional philosophy, namely ethics, to very recent developments in neuroscience and in psychology and on another it highlights the centrality of both human curiosity and our passion for self improvement to our decisions about, and hopes for, the future of humanity. Thus moral enhancement combines cutting‐edge science with mainstream philosophy and with the hopes and fears of ordinary people. In what follows I hope to show why the idea of moral enhancement is being fundamentally misunderstood by many of those interested in further research in this field, and in particular, why mistakes about the nature of both the opportunities it offers and the very nature of ‘right conduct’ are presenting dangers for the present and the future of humanity.

But let's return (or turn) to God for a moment. Famously, in Book III of Paradise Lost Milton reports God saying to his ‘Only begotten Son’ that if man is perverted by the ‘false guile’ of Satan he has only himself to blame:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.7

These lines have inspired many writers about the human condition and about the precious nature of freedom and in particular free will. William Golding echoed these famous lines and discussed their theme in his novel Free Fall.8 I first read Free Fall as an undergraduate in the 1960s9 (and it was Golding that pointed me to Milton). Golding asks two crucial questions in that book: ‘when did I lose my freedom?’, and ‘how did I lose my freedom?’ Here is how they are posed on the first page of Free Fall:

When did I lose my freedom? For once I was free. I had power to choose. The mechanics of cause and effect is statistical probability yet surely sometimes we operate below or beyond that threshold. Free will cannot be debated but only experienced, like a colour or the taste of potatoes. I remember one such experience. I was very small and I was sitting on the stone surround of the pool and fountain in the centre of the park. There was bright sunlight, banks of red and blue flowers, green lawn. There was no guilt but only the plash and splatter of the fountain at the centre. . . . The gravelled paths of the park radiated from me: all at once I was overcome by a new knowledge. I could take whichever I would of these paths. There was nothing to draw me down one more than the other. I danced down one for joy in the taste of potatoes. I was free I had chosen.10

Leaving aside Golding's rather suspect views about statistical probability and the assertion that free will cannot be debated (which is demonstrably contradicted in the passage just quoted), Golding vividly illustrates a feeling that surely everyone has had, the feeling of what it is like to be free in an existential sense.11 With the exhilaration of that feeling, I hope, coursing through our veins (and not, I hope, clouding our judgement) let's return to Milton.

When God says of man that ‘he had of me all he could have’ he qualifies this in two ways. Firstly by the vainglorious claim ‘I made him just and right’, and second by a wonderful analysis of freedom: ‘sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’. Milton's God was certainly overestimating her role in making humankind just, right and all the rest, but nature, or more particularly, evolution, has done most of this for us. We have certainly evolved to have a vigorous sense of justice and right, that is, with a virtuous sense of morality. God was, of course, speaking of the fall from Grace when congratulating herself on making man ‘sufficient to have stood though free to fall’; she was underlining the sort of existential freedom Golding spoke of which allows us the exhilaration and joy of choosing (and changing at will) our own path through life. And while we are free to allow others to do this for us and to be tempted and to fall, or be bullied, persuaded or cajoled into falling, we have the wherewithal to stand if we choose. So that when Milton has God say mankind ‘had of me all he could have’, he is pointing out that while his God could have made falling impossible for us, even God could not have done so and left us free. Autonomy surely requires not only the possibility of falling but the freedom to choose to fall, and that same autonomy gives us self‐sufficiency; ‘sufficient to have stood though free to fall.’

It would be tempting to conclude at this point that we humans, although we need many forms of enhancement and often desire much more enhancement than we need, do not need and are irrational to seek, specifically moral enhancement. This is because we already have not only an extensive moral endowment but because the ways being canvassed to enhance that endowment are unlikely to leave us sufficient to stand though free to fall. However that would not be quite right either. There are many very attractive and effective forms of moral development including enhancement, available; it is simply that they are not the ones so far being spoken of12 as either relevant to moral or to neuro‐enhancement.

These tried and tested methods include the traditional ones of bringing children up to know the difference between right and wrong, to avoid inflicting pain or suffering on or doing harm to others; and instilling in them habits of respect for others. These modes of respect include altruism, sensitivity and consideration and perhaps above all of being able to put ourselves in others' shoes so that we not only understand, but imaginatively experience, what it might be like to be on the receiving end of the conduct of others. Equally, more general education, including self education, wide reading and engagement with the world and with ways in which the world is mediated, (including mass media, computers and the internet), are powerful tools of moral development and improvement or enhancement. These must include, of course, sophisticated understanding of cause and effect, in particular of the ways in which to allow things to occur is as effective a way of determining the state of the world as is making positive interventions.13