Self-control enhancement in children:Ethical and conceptual aspects

Childhood self-control is currently receiving great scientific and public attention because it could predict much of adult’s life success and well-being. Specialized interventions based on findings in social psychology and neuroscience potentially enhance children’s capacity to exercise self-control. This perspective triggers hopes that self-control enhancement allows us to say good-bye for good to potentially unsafe psychopharmacological agents and electronic brain stimulants. This chapter provides an in-depth ethical analysis of pediatric self-control enhancement and points toward a series of serious conceptual and ethical concerns. First, it gives an overview of current psychological as well as neuroscientific research on self-control, and it presents longitudinal studies that emphasize the importance of childhood self-control for adult life success. Second, it critically discusses the concept of self-control presupposed in these approaches and points to crucial limitations. Going beyond an understanding of self-control as a sophisticated means of goal-achievement, i will argue for a comprehensive understanding that takes the inherent normativity of self-controlled behavior seriously. In that context, self-control enhancement appears as not necessarily desirable and occasionally even detrimental. Finally, this chapter questions the notion of childhood implicit in current research and how values typically put on this phase of life could get affected by self-control enhancement. I finish with an exploration of the conditions under which pediatric self-control enhancement is either impermissible, permissible, or maybe obligatory

Public Attitudes Towards Moral Enhancement. Evidence that Means Matter Morally

To gain insight into the reasons that the public may have for endorsing or eschewing pharmacological moral enhancement for themselves or for others, we used empirical tools to explore public attitudes towards these issues. Participants (N = 293) from the United States were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and were randomly assigned to read one of several contrastive vignettes in which a 13-year-old child is described as bullying another student in school and then is offered an empathy-enhancing program. The empathy-enhancing program is described as either involving taking a pill or playing a video game on a daily basis for four weeks. In addition, participants were asked to imagine either their own child bullying another student at school, or their own child being bullied by another student. This resulted in a 2 × 2 between-subjects design. In an escalating series of morally challenging questions, we asked participants to rate their overall support for the program; whether they would support requiring participation; whether they would support requiring participation of children who are at higher risk to become bullies in the future; whether they would support requiring participation of all children or even the entire population; and whether they would be willing to participate in the program themselves. We found that people were significantly more troubled by pharmacological as opposed to non-pharmacological moral enhancement interventions. The results indicate that members of the public for the greater part oppose pharmacological moral bioenhancement, yet are open to non-biomedical means to attain moral enhancement. [248 words]

Deflating the deep brain stimulation causes personality changes bubble: the authors reply

To conclude that there is enough or not enough evidence demonstrating that deep brain stimulation (DBS) causes unintended postoperative personality changes is an epistemic problem that should be answered on the basis of established, replicable, and valid data. If prospective DBS recipients delay or refuse to be implanted because they are afraid of suffering from personality changes following DBS, and their fears are based on unsubstantiated claims made in the neuroethics literature, then researchers making these claims bear great responsibility for prospective recipients' medical decisions and subsequent well-being. Our article “Deflating the ‘DBS causes personality’ bubble” reported an increase in theoretical neuroethics publications suggesting putative DBS-induced changes to personality, identity, agency, autonomy, authenticity and/or self (PIAAAS) and a critical lack of supporting primary empirical studies. This special issue of Neuroethics brings together responses to our initial publication, with our own counter-responses organized according to common themes. We provide a brief summary for each commentary and its main criticisms as well as a discussion of the way in which these responses can: 1) help clarify the meaning of PIAAAS, suggesting supplementary frameworks for understanding the impact of DBS on PIAAAS; 2) provide further empirical evidence of PIAAAS by presenting results from the researchers’ own work; and/or 3) offer a critique of our research approach and/or findings. Unintended postoperative putative changes to PIAAAS remain a critical ethical concern. It is beyond dispute that we need to develop reliable empirical and conceptual instruments able to measure complex cognitive, affective, and behavioural changes in order to investigate whether they are attributable to DBS alone

The ethical desirability of moral bioenhancement: A review of reasons

Background: The debate on the ethical aspects of moral bioenhancement focuses on the desirability of using biomedical as opposed to traditional means to achieve moral betterment. The aim of this paper is to systematically review the ethical reasons presented in the literature for and against moral bioenhancement. Discussion: A review was performed and resulted in the inclusion of 85 articles. We classified the arguments used in those articles in the following six clusters: (1) why we (don't) need moral bioenhancement, (2) it will (not) be possible to reach consensus on what moral bioenhancement should involve, (3) the feasibility of moral bioenhancement and the status of current scientific research, (4) means and processes of arriving at moral improvement matter ethically, (5) arguments related to the freedom, identity and autonomy of the individual, and (6) arguments related to social/group effects and dynamics. We discuss each argument separately, and assess the debate as a whole. First, there is little discussion on what distinguishes moral bioenhancement from treatment of pathological deficiencies in morality. Furthermore, remarkably little attention has been paid so far to the safety, risks and side-effects of moral enhancement, including the risk of identity changes. Finally, many authors overestimate the scientific as well as the practical feasibility of the interventions they discuss, rendering the debate too speculative. Summary: Based on our discussion of the arguments used in the debate on moral enhancement, and our assessment of this debate, we advocate a shift in focus. Instead of speculating about non-realistic hypothetical scenarios such as the genetic engineering of morality, or morally enhancing 'the whole of humanity', we call for a more focused debate on realistic options of biomedical treatment of moral pathologies and the concrete moral questions these treatments raise

Forensic Screening and Prevention in Children and Adolescents: Public Health Ethical Aspects

This is the introduction to the special symposium section entitled Prevention of antisocial behaviour in children and adolescents: Ethical, social and philosophical aspects

Self-control and normativity: Theories in social psychology revisited

The exercise of self-control is of great significance in people's daily lives and in the organization of social institutions. The reasonableness of the self-control concept, however, has been challenged by recent developments in cognitive, behavioral, and neurosciences that identify human behavior as a result of complex automatic processes generated by people's environments. Collating more data on self-control and developing new theoretical approaches is crucial to meeting this challenge. Still, this article argues that a conceptual analysis of the meaning of self-control is also needed. Reflecting on recent work in philosophy, it discusses how self-controlled behavior is characterized not only by distinct causal mechanisms, but also by fundamental normative evaluations. Four conceptualizations of self-control will be presented to highlight why the corresponding self-control failures are essentially also normative failures. Furthermore, it discusses how the normativity of self-controlled behavior can contribute to further theorizing in social psychology

Self-control revisited: Varieties of normative agency

Contains fulltext : 77388.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)RU Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 03 september 2009Promotores : Bransen, J.A.M., Kennett, J.192 p