Enhanced Cognition, Ethics, and Some Problems of Self-Knowledge

Advances in neuroscience and its related technologies promise significant forms of cognitive enhancement, chiefly through the development of drugs, genetic engineering and screening, and electronic devices for augmenting brain functions. Such advances, however, raise a complex cluster of ethical questions that should increasingly concern us in the future as these technologies become more prevalent, powerful, and wide ranging in their effects. Most ethical dilemmas and debates about enhanced cognition seem to focus on our relation to others. These ethical controversies typically concern two kinds of issues. The first is whether our enhanced knowledge about others may be unethically used to limit their freedom, which would not be so limited if our cognition was not thus enhanced. An example of this issue would be whether enhanced biological knowledge of an individual's physiological or psychological predisposition to violence should be used to limit that person's access to firearms or to certain professions, even if that person has not yet displayed any excessive or disturbing violence in actual behavior. The second kind of ethical problem case, which seems more a matter of fairness than freedom, relates to whether the enhanced cognition that an individual (or group) achieves provides an unfair advantage over others in the competitive situations that pervade our social lives. Examples here include the taking of various drugs (legal or illegal) that promote greater mental acuity or energy but that are not available (for financial or other reasons of access) to everyone competing, and competition is widely construed to include greater success at school or at work, not just official competitions with formal prizes and rankings.

Both kinds of problems involve important and complex issues and consequently generate considerable discussion. Both essentially concentrate on one's relation to others, an orientation that obviously lies at the heart of our ethical tradition, if not all ethical traditions. In this essay, however, I wish to focus on a different orientation: the ethical problems that enhanced cognition raises for one's ethical relationship to oneself. Before considering these problems, I perhaps should offer a brief justification of this alternative self-related orientation as a legitimately ethical one. Though ethics is crucially other-directed, this does not preclude its being involved with caring for oneself. Historically, in ancient Western and Asian philosophical traditions, ethics was very much about care for the self and involved the project of self-cultivation rather than being a mere matter of proposing or justifying a code of duties for the self with respect to others.

Ethics, in any case, must be involved with a relationship to self because the very task of the ethical agent in dealing ethically and effectively with others inescapably involves matters of self-knowledge, self-discipline, and self-care. We need to know our own capacities and limits in order to know how we can best help others and how not to disappoint them by promising more than we can deliver. A person ignorant of his inability to swim who jumps in the lake to save a drowning child is making things worse, not better. We need to know our capacities and limits so that we can know the directions for increasing those capacities and overcoming some of the limits that hamper our ethical performance. Thus the nonswimmer can increase his potential for virtuous action by learning to swim. We also need to take care of ourselves in order to take better care of others. This is evident from simple matters such as the airline emergency instructions for parents to put on their own oxygen masks before they take care of helping their children to put on such masks. But the same principle also extends to much larger matters through the basic logic (shared by Plato, Confucius, Laozi, and many others) that the essential key to proper government of others is proper self-government. And this brings us back to this essay's focus on cognition, because what seems fundamentally crucial to projects of governing, caring for, and cultivating oneself is to know oneself. Hence Socrates took the ancient maxim "Know thyself" from Apollo's Temple at...