Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement by Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu (review)

This short, multiply problematic book could have been much shorter, for its authors’ thesis is quickly stated: given humankind’s increasing ability to destroy itself and the possibility of future life, radical solutions need to be adopted to save us all. First, we should set aside alleged rights to privacy in order to support surveillance that could uncover terrorists with access to weapons of mass destruction. Second, given the weaknesses that twenty-five hundred years of traditional moral education have failed to correct, we should support biotechnology that provides the moral enhancement that could increase our chances for survival. As the authors rightly argue, liberal democracies are poorly suited to combat climate change, the most imminent threat we face. Politicians seeking reelection are in no position to impose the drastic reductions in population and the restrictions on travel and on eating meat that are needed to bring consumption in affluent countries down to sustainable levels. Here the authors raise questions that need to be faced: we may acknowledge the ways in which dictatorships have abused (alleged) states of emergency and still be convinced that present conditions require emergency measures involving surveillance. Any right I may have to privacy pales in the face of my, and my fellows’, right not to be extinguished by terrorists who obtain biological or nuclear weapons.

But the authors’ central argument falls spectacularly flat. The reader who wades through nine chapters detailing our grim prospects for survival will hope for a more robust perspective in the final one: “Moral Enhancement as a Possible Way Out.” Alas, the authors’ hopes for biological enhancement rest on a tiny number of experiments with oxytocin and SSRIs, whose results, they acknowledge, raise as many questions as they resolve. Given this, and their skepticism about technological solutions in the case of climate change, it is difficult to see how their hopes for bioenhancement are founded. And when they acknowledge that even a successful program of moral enhancement could not prevent a few morally depraved persons from obtaining those biological or nuclear weapons that were part of the argument for embarking on moral enhancement in the first place, the point of the effort is hard to find.

Although they do not actually assert it, the authors conclude by citing texts arguing that, all things considered, humankind was better off in the Stone Age. Given their uncritical faith in evolutionary psychology’s Stone Age explanations of human behavior, and the improbability of the solutions that they themselves offer to contemporary problems, it’s a conclusion their book is likely to support.