The Morality of Moral Neuroenhancement

This chapter reviews recent philosophical and neuroethical literature on the morality of moral neuroenhancements. It first briefly outlines the main moral arguments that have been made concerning moral status neuroenhancements. These are neurointerventions that would augment the moral status of human persons. It then surveys recent debate regarding moral desirability neuroenhancements: neurointerventions that augment that the moral desirability of human character traits, motives or conduct. This debate has contested, among other claims (i) Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu’s contention that there is a moral imperative to pursue the development of moral desirability neuroenhancements, (ii) Thomas Douglas’ claim that voluntarily undergoing moral desirability neuroenhancements would often be morally permissible, and (iii) David DeGrazia’s claim that moral desirability neuroenhancements would often be morally desirable. The chapter discusses a number of concerns that have been raised regarding moral desirability neuroenhancements, including concerns that they would restrict freedom, would produce only a superficial kind of moral improvement, would rely on technologies that are liable to be misused, and would frequently misfire, resulting in moral deterioration rather than moral improvement

Neurofeedback-Based Moral Enhancement and the Notion of Morality

Some skeptics question the very possibility of moral bioenhancement by arguing that if we lack a widely acceptable notion of morality, we will not be able to accept the use of a biotechnological technique as a tool for moral bioenhancement. I will examine this skepticism and argue that the assessment of moral bioenhancement does not require such a notion of morality. In particular, I will demonstrate that this skepticism can be neutralized in the case of recent neurofeedback techniques. This goal will be accomplished in four steps. First, I will draw an outline of the skepticism against the possibility of moral bioenhancement and point out that a long-lasting dispute among moral philosophers nourishes this skepticism. Second, I will survey recent neurofeedback techniques and outline their three features: the variety of the target human faculties, such as emotion, cognition, and behavior; the flexibility or personalizability of the target brain state; and the nonclinical application of neurofeedback techniques. Third, I will argue that, by virtue of these three unique features, neurofeedback techniques can be a tool for moral bioenhancement without adopting any specific notion of morality. Fourth, I will examine the advantages and threats that neurofeedback-based moral enhancement may have. Finally, I will conclude that neurofeedback-based moral enhancement can become a new and promising tool for moral bioenhancement and requires further ethical investigations on its unique features

The Jurisprudential Turn in Legal Ethics

When legal ethics developed as an academic discipline in the mid-1970s, its theoretical roots were in moral philosophy. The early theorists in legal ethics were moral philosophers by training, and they explored legal ethics as a branch of moral philosophy. From the vantage point of moral philosophy, lawyers’ professional duties comprised a system of moral duties that governed lawyers in their professional lives, a “role-morality” for lawyers that competed with ordinary moral duties. In defining this “role-morality,” the moral philosophers accepted the premise that “good lawyers” are professionally obligated to pursue the interests of their clients all the way to the arguable limits of the law, even when doing so would harm third persons or undermine the public good. More recent scholarship in legal ethics has rejected the moral philosophers’ premise that lawyers’ ethical duties demand instrumentalist partisan interpretation of the “bounds of the law.” In what I call the “jurisprudential turn” in legal ethics, legal scholars are now increasingly looking to jurisprudential and political theory to explore the interpretive stance that it is appropriate for lawyers to take with respect to the “bounds of the law” that limit their partisan advocacy. Just as jurisprudential theories of adjudication ground judges’ duties of legal interpretation in the role of judges in a democratic society, jurisprudential theories of lawyering ground lawyers’ interpretive duties in analysis of the role lawyers play in a democratic system of government. This Article critically examines the emerging uses of jurisprudential theory in legal ethics. It argues that jurisprudential theory presents an attractive alternative to moral theory in legal ethics because it provides a rubric for limiting lawyers’ no-holds-barred partisan manipulation of law that springs directly from the lawyer’s professional duties rather than competing with them. It critiques the two major schools of thought in the “jurisprudence of lawyering” based on Dworkian and positivist jurisprudence. And it questions the common framework within each jurisprudential school, which assigns lawyers a role as case-by-case lawmakers, suggesting that this framework imposes an inappropriately lawyer-centered focus on assessments of the legitimacy of law that more properly belong to clients

The Need for Strict Morality Clauses in Endorsement Contracts

The increasing significance of morality clauses seems to directly correlate with the increase of social media platforms and avenues to live-stream events, including but not limited to Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter. News of an athlete’s behavior can go viral in a matter of seconds. This leads company brands to seek broader terms in their morality clauses to allow them to disassociate themselves from the athlete. However, this is not always fair to the athlete, who might not have any idea that their personal-life choices could lead to the end of an endorsement contract

Moral enhancement: do means matter morally?

One of the reasons why moral enhancement may be controversial, is because the advantages of moral enhancement may fall upon society rather than on those who are enhanced. If directed at individuals with certain counter-moral traits it may have direct societal benefits by lowering immoral behavior and increasing public safety, but it is not directly clear if this also benefits the individual in question. In this paper, we will discuss what we consider to be moral enhancement, how different means may be used to achieve it and whether the means we employ to reach moral enhancement matter morally. Are certain means to achieve moral enhancement wrong in themselves? Are certain means to achieve moral enhancement better than others, and if so, why? More specifically, we will investigate whether the difference between direct and indirect moral enhancement matters morally. Is it the case that indirect means are morally preferable to direct means of moral enhancement and can we indeed pinpoint relevant intrinsic, moral differences between both? We argue that the distinction between direct and indirect means is indeed morally relevant, but only insofar as it tracks an underlying distinction between active and passive interventions. Although passive interventions can be ethical provided specific safeguards are put in place, these interventions exhibit a greater potential to compromise autonomy and disrupt identity

Time series predictive analysis based on hybridization of meta-heuristic algorithms

This paper presents a comparative study which involved five hybrid meta-heuristic methods to predict the weather five days in advance. The identified meta-heuristic methods namely Moth-flame Optimization (MFO), Cuckoo Search algorithm (CSA), Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Firefly Algorithm (FA) and Differential Evolution (DE) are individually hybridized with a well-known machine learning technique namely Least Squares Support Vector Machines (LS-SVM). For experimental purposes, a total of 6 independent inputs are considered which were collected based on daily weather data. The efficiency of the MFO-LSSVM, CSLSSVM, ABC-LSSVM, FA-LSSVM, and DE-LSSVM was quantitatively analyzed based on Theil’s U and Root Mean Square Percentage Error. Overall, the experimental results demonstrate a good rival among the identified methods. However, the superiority goes to FA-LSSVM which was able to record lower error rates in prediction. The proposed prediction model could benefit many parties in continuity planning daily activities

Does Contract Law Need Morality?

In The Dignity of Commerce, Nathan Oman sets out an ambitious market theory of contract, which he argues is a superior normative foundation for contract law than either the moralist or economic justifications that currently dominate contract theory. In doing so, he sets out a robust defense of commerce and the market-place as contributing to human flourishing that is a refreshing and welcome contribution in an era of market alarmism. But the mar-ket theory ultimately falls short as either a normative or prescriptive theory of contract. The extent to which law, public policy, and the-ory should account for values other than economic efficiency is a longstanding debate. Whatever the merits of that debate, we conclude that contract law does not need morality as envisioned by Oman—a fluid, subjective, and seemingly instinctual approach to the morality of markets

Can society nurture humanistic marketing?

For more than four decades, academic debates on the morality of marketing have focused mainly on the advantages and disadvantages of marketing as an institution. This essay questions the usefulness of such debates to addressing many challenges of life in contemporary society and argues that engagement in such discussions will only entrap us in vicious circles of argumentation. The author calls for collective social responsibility and argues that humanistic marketing can only be realised in a humanistic society

Neoliberalism’s Market Morality and Heteroflexibility: Protectionist and Free Market Discourses in Debates for Legal Prostitution

In August of 1999, not too long before narratives of sex trafficking began to dominate prostitution policy debates, the residents of a small town in Nevada debated closing the city’s legal brothels. Citizens crowded the hearing hall, holding signs about protecting family and community values. But instead of opposing prostitution, as one might have expected, most public commenters echoed a sign that read, “Pro Family, Pro Prostitution.” Drawing on an analysis of the testimony of the 51 citizens in attendance at that public hearing and ethnographic data gathered in four visits to Evenheart over a one-year period, this paper examines the arguments that framed support for, and opposition to, legal prostitution at this critical historic juncture. The research finds important differences in the ways particular neoliberal discourses can be deployed to the wide range of sexual, gender, and relationship values that constitute heterosexuality. Both supporters and opponents drew on market logics – defined for purposes of this paper as a neoliberal individualism and economic rationality of free trade, scarcity, competition, and self-regulation – as well as on discourses of morality and the family, but each side used them in strikingly different ways. Brothel supporters drew on market logics to defend and support individualized family values and a marketdriven morality, while brothel opponents deployed market logics that supported conservative heteronormative values and morals. I suggest that these deployments of market logics, particularly among brothel supporters, are instances of “heteroflexibility” in neoliberal governance, that is, flexibility in the various gender, sexual, and relationship norms that collectively make up heterosexuality as an institution. Key to the intensity of heteroflexibility’s challenge to heterosexuality, both then and today, is whether market logics use free choice or protection discourses in the neoliberal governance of sexuality