The Kantian Promise and Peril of Moral Bioenhancement

A Kantian ethics approach to moral bioenhancement

It seems, at first glance, that a Kantian ethics approach to moral enhancement would tend towards the position that there could be no place for emotional modulation in any understanding of the endeavour, owing to the typically understood view that Kantian ethics does not allow any role for emotion in morality as a whole. It seems then that any account of moral bioenhancement which places emotio...

Moral bioenhancement, freedom and reasoning.

This issue includes a number of papers on reproductive ethics, broadly construed. In a recent book, Anja Karnein proposed that embryos created in vitro should be offered up for adoption before being discarded or used in research; here Timothy Murphy offers a critical response (see page 392). Elsewhere, Tak Chan and Stark & Delatycki debate the role of medical professionals in providing parentag...

Stem cell research: magical promise v. moral peril.

Is moral bioenhancement dangerous?

In a recent response to Persson and Savulescu's Unfit for the Future, Nicholas Agar argues that moral bioenhancement is dangerous. His grounds for this are that normal moral judgement should be privileged because it involves a balance of moral subcapacities; moral bioenhancement, Agar argues, involves the enhancement of only particular moral subcapacities, and thus upsets the balance inherent i...

Public Reason and Moral Bioenhancement

The Rawlsian model of public justification is proposed for the assessment of politics of moral enhancement, in alternative to the neo-republican model proposed in these debates by Robert Sparrow. The central idea of the Rawlsian model of public justification is represented by the liberal principle of legitimacy, although it is extended in relation to the domain that Rawls sees as proper for its...