Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits

9. Why Moral Status Enhancement Is a Morally Bad Thing

9 Why Moral Status Enhancement Is a Morally Bad Thing In what follows, I present a moral argument for avoiding the creation of post-persons. Degrees of cognitive enhancement that risk moral status enhancement should, by implication, also be avoided. This argument points to bad consequences of moral status enhancement. These consequences are not certain. They are, however, sufficiently probable and bad to justify limiting cognitive enhancement. In this chapter, I style post-persons as especially morally needy beings. The enhancement of their moral status means that their many needs should take precedence over our own. A predictable consequence is that the needs of mere persons will go unmet. We are subject to no obligation to create post-persons in the first place. We can and should avoid creating their morally weighty needs by avoiding creating them. How should we think about the bad, but not inevitable, consequences of moral enhancement? The argument I present resembles the widely discussed consequentialist argument for reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases. This argument draws support from models of the climate that attribute some significant part of global warming to human causes. This model predicts that continuing production of greenhouse gases at current levels will have disastrous consequences for the planet’s human and nonhuman inhabitants. Although not certain, these bad consequences are both sufficiently bad and sufficiently probable to justify reducing greenhouse gas production. This chapter’s argument against moral status enhancement pretends certainty neither in respect of the possibility of moral status enhancement nor in respect of its bad consequences. I argue that the bad consequences are, in moral terms, so bad that a moderate probability of their occurrence makes it immoral and imprudent to not seek to prevent them. 182 Chapter 9 The key objection against further anthropogenic climate change is not that no one will benefit. Technologies that produce greenhouse gases benefit many—they provide employment and returns on investments. Rather, it’s that there are possible or probable consequences of climate change so bad that these jobs, profits, and other good effects do not compensate for them. It’s possible that these benefits will keep their recipients safe in a warmer world. The vast majority of people will not be so fortunate, however . I argue that the consequences of moral status enhancement conform to this pattern. Any benefits received by recipients of moral enhancement do not, in moral terms, make up for the costs imposed on others. Some Assumptions The consequentialist argument against moral status enhancement makes certain assumptions. A first assumption is that the availability of technologies that enhance moral status will lead to mixed societies. A mixed society contains both mere persons and post-persons. Some persons will take advantage of status-enhancing technologies. Others will not, either because they reject the degree of enhancement that would enhance status or because they do not have access to status-enhancing technologies. Perhaps the technologies are very expensive. I assume an orderly transition to mixed societies. An orderly transition to a new social arrangement, such as a mixed society, occurs without high levels of directly treating citizens in ways incompatible with their moral status. Supreme emergencies will be rare—no more common than they are today. Examples of treating a person in ways that are incompatible with their moral status include murdering, enslaving, or torturing them. In an orderly transition there may be some supreme emergencies, natural or humanmade disasters that justify murdering, enslaving, or torturing persons. But they will be rare. Supreme emergencies will not be much more common than they are today. It’s difficult to say with any precision what might count as a high level of treating citizens in ways that are incompatible with their moral status. The level will be inferior to those resulting from the making of slave-holding societies in Europe and the Americas. It will be far inferior to that suffered by mere persons in the Terminator movies in which Why Moral Status Enhancement Is a Morally Bad Thing 183 killer robots detonate nuclear weapons and set about ruthlessly eliminating the human survivors. Orderly transitions are absent from many visions of the future that genetic and cybernetic enhancement will bring. Our cinemas present many dystopian visions of the future in which the moral status of human persons is even more egregiously offended against than in the transatlantic slave trade. Injustices that result from the separation of society into genetically...