emergence
Emergence’s devil haunts the moral enhancer’s kingdom come
It is 2025. Society has increasingly realised the importance of breaking evolution’s chains and enhancing the human condition. Large grants are awarded for building sci-fi-like laboratories to search for and create the ultimate moral enhancer. After just a few years, humanity believes it has made one of its most major breakthroughs: a pill which will rid our morality of all its faults. Without any side-effects, it vastly increases our ability to cooperate and to think rationally on moral issues, while also enhancing our empathy and our compassion for the whole of humanity. By shifting individuals’ socio-value orientation towards cooperation, this pill will allow us to build safe, efficient and peaceful societies. It will cast a pro-social paradise on earth, the moral enhancer kingdom come.
I believe we better think twice before endeavouring ourselves into this pro-social paradise on the cheap. Not because we will lose “the X factor”, not because it will violate autonomy, and not because such a drug would cause us to exit our own species. Even if all those objections are refuted, even if the drug has no side-effects, even if each and every human being, by miracle, willingly takes the drug without any coercion whatsoever, even then, I contend we could still have trouble.
Recent Posts
- Video Interview: Introducing Oxford Uehiro Centre’s Academic Visitor, Prof Dr Matthias Braun
- Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Turning up the Hedonic Treadmill: Is It Morally Impermissible for Parents to Give Their Children a Luxurious Standard of Living?
- Why Actions Matter: The Case for Fluid Moral Status
- Do we have an Obligation to Diversify our Media Consumption ?
- Announcing the Winners and Runners Up in the 9th Annual National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Popular posts
- If you’re a Conservative, I’m not your friend
- What if schizophrenics really are possessed by demons, after all?
- 7 reasons not to feel bad about yourself when you have acted immorally
- Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: When is Sex With Conjoined Twins Permissible?
- Rethinking ‘Higher’ and ‘Lower’ Pleasures
Recent Comments