“Ethical Minefields” and the Voice of Common Sense: A Discussion with Julian Savulescu

Theoretical ethics includes both metaethics (the meaning of moral terms) and normative ethics (ethical theories and principles). Practical ethics involves making decisions about every day real ethical problems, like decisions about euthanasia, what we should eat, climate change, treatment of animals, and how we should live. It utilizes ethical theories, like utilitarianism and Kantianism, and principles, but more broadly a process of reflective equilibrium and consistency to decide how to act and be

Autonomy and the Ethics of Biological Behaviour Modification

Much disease and disability is the result of lifestyle behaviours. For example, the contribution of imprudence in the form of smoking, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, and drug and alcohol abuse to ill-health is now well established. More importantly, some of the greatest challenges facing humanity as a whole – climate change, terrorism, global poverty, depletion of resources, abuse of children, overpopulation – are the result of human behaviour. In this chapter, we will explore the possibility of using advances in the cognitive sciences to develop strategies to intentionally manipulate human motivation and behaviour. While our arguments apply also to improving prudential motivation and behaviour in relation to health, we will focus on the more controversial instance: the deliberate targeted use of biomedicine to improve moral motivation and behaviour. We do this because the challenge of improving human morality is arguably the most important issue facing humankind (Persson and Savulescu, forthcoming). We will ask whether using the knowledge from the biological and cognitive sciences to influence motivation and behaviour erodes autonomy and, if so, whether this makes it wrong

Genetic interventions and the ethics of enhancement of human beings

There has been considerable recent debate on the ethics of human enhancement. A number of prominent authors have been concerned about or critical of the use of technology to alter or enhance human beings. I want to argue that far from being merely permissible, we have a moral obligation or moral reason to enhance ourselves and our children. Indeed, we have the same kind of obligation as we have to treat and prevent disease. Not only can we enhance, we should enhance.Los aspectos éticos del mejoramiento humano han sido objeto de un intenso debate. Numerosos autores bien conocidos se han involucrado en él o se han mostrado críticos con el uso de tecnologías capaces de modificar o mejorar a los seres humanos. Quiero argumentar que tenemos una obligación moral o una razón moral para mejorarnos a nosotros mismos y a nuestros hijos, no solo que se trata de algo meramente permisible. En realidad, tenemos el mismo tipo de obligación que tenemos de tratar y prevenir enfermedades. No solo podemos mejorar: deberíamos mejorar.- Grupo de investigación Antropología y Filosofía (SEJ-126). Universidad de Granada. - Área de Antropología Social. Universidad de Jaén. - Laborarorio de Antropología Social y Cultural (HUM-472). Universidad de Almería. - Departamento de Filosofía II. Universidad de Granada

Great Minds Think Different: Preserving Cognitive Diversity in an Age of Gene Editing

It is likely that gene editing technologies will become viable in the current century. As scientists uncover the genetic contribution to personality traits and cognitive styles, parents will face hard choices. Some of these choices will involve trade‐offs from the standpoint of the individual's welfare, while others will involve trade‐offs between what is best for each and what is good for all. Although we think we should generally defer to the informed choices of parents about what kinds of children to create, we argue that decisions to manipulate polygenic psychological traits will be much more ethically complicated than choosing Mendelian traits like blood type. We end by defending the principle of regulatory parsimony, which holds that when legislation is necessary to prevent serious harms, we should aim for simple rules that apply to all, rather than micro‐managing parental choices that shape the traits of their children. While we focus on embryo selection and gene editing, our arguments apply to all powerful technologies which influence the development of children

Moral Neuroenhancement

In this chapter, we introduce the notion of “moral neuroenhancement,” offering a novel definition as well as spelling out three conditions under which we expect that such neuroenhancement would be most likely to be permissible (or even desirable). Furthermore, we draw a distinction between first-order moral capacities, which we suggest are less promising targets for neurointervention, and second-order moral capacities, which we suggest are more promising. We conclude by discussing concerns that moral neuroenhancement might restrict freedom or otherwise “misfire,” and argue that these concerns are not as damning as they may seem at first

Enhancement and Civic Virtue

Opponents of biomedical enhancement frequently adopt what Allen Buchanan has called the “Personal Goods Assumption.” On this assumption, the benefits of biomedical enhancement will accrue primarily to those individuals who undergo enhancements, not to wider society. Buchanan has argued that biomedical enhancements might in fact have substantial social benefits by increasing productivity. We outline another way in which enhancements might benefit wider society: by augmenting civic virtue and thus improving the functioning of our political communities. We thus directly confront critics of biomedical enhancement who argue that it will lead to a loss of social cohesion and a breakdown in political lif

Stem Cell Research and Same Sex Reproduction

Recent advances in stem cell research suggest that in the future it may be possible to create eggs and sperm from human stem cells through a process that we term in vitro gametogenesis (IVG). IVG would allow treatment of some currently untreatable forms of infertility. It may also allow same-sex couples to have genetically-related children. For example, cells taken from one man could potentially be used to create an egg, which could then be fertilised using naturally produced sperm from another man to create a genetically-related child with half of its DNA from each of the men. In this chapter, we consider whether this technology could justifiably be denied to same-sex couples if it were made available as a fertility treatment to different-sex couples. We argue that it could not

Disability: a welfarist approach

In this paper, we offer a new account of disability. According to our account, some state of a person's biology or psychology is a disability if that state makes it more likely that a person's life will get worse, in terms of his or her own wellbeing, in a given set of social and environmental circumstances. Unlike the medical model of disability, our welfarist approach does not tie disability to deviation from normal species’ functioning, nor does it understand disability in essentialist terms. Like the social model of disability, the welfarist approach sees disability as a harmful state that results from the interaction between a person's biology and psychology and his or her surrounding environment. However, unlike the social model, it denies that the harm associated with disability is entirely due to social prejudice or injustice. In this paper, we outline and clarify the welfarist approach, answer common objections and illustrate its usefulness in addressing a range of difficult ethical questions involving disability

Chapter 4 Welfarist Psychiatry Goes Global

We begin by describing welfarist psychiatry before outlining the relevant challenges to improving global mental health and explaining how welfarist psychiatry meets those challenges