Emma C. Gordon

One common cultural critique of media users who move regularly between the real and the digital (cf., Chalmers 2018) to express their agency (e.g., through planning, inquiring, desire-fulfilment, etc.), is that they risk ‘losing touch with reality’, or more weakly, that they prioritise to their detriment their digital lives over their non-digital lives. Such a critique, for instance, has been explored in connection with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as World of Warcraft - where one major concern is that digital well-being comes at the expense of physical and psychological health. With VR investment from Meta and AR/VR investment from Apple Vision Pro, it is worth considering to what extent 'losing touch with reality’-based criticisms familiar from MMORPG extend more generally to cases of prioritisation of our virtual over non-virtual lives. It will be argued that even if we sharply distinguish the virtual and the real, ‘losing touch with reality’ based criticisms are misguided in so far as they are taken to be grounded in insights about reality and well-being. While increasing prioritising of digital lives and relationships (in both MMORPGs and in VR) can have a detrimental effect on well-being, the best way to conceptualise this is not in terms of a claimed detachment from reality.

One common cultural critique of media users who move regularly between the real and the digital (cf., Chalmers 2018) to express their agency (e.g., through planning, inquiring, desire-fulfilment, etc.), is that they risk ‘losing touch with reality’, or more weakly, that they prioritise to their detriment their digital lives over their non-digital lives. Such a critique, for instance, has been explored in connection with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as World of Warcraft - where one major concern is that digital well-being comes at the expense of physical and psychological health. With VR investment from Meta and AR/VR investment from Apple Vision Pro, it is worth considering to what extent 'losing touch with reality’-based criticisms familiar from MMORPG extend more generally to cases of prioritisation of our virtual over non-virtual lives. It will be argued that even if we sharply distinguish the virtual and the real, ‘losing touch with reality’ based criticisms are misguided in so far as they are taken to be grounded in insights about reality and well-being. While increasing prioritising of digital lives and relationships (in both MMORPGs and in VR) can have a detrimental effect on well-being, the best way to conceptualise this is not in terms of a claimed detachment from reality.

A prominent critique of cognitive or athletic enhancement claims that certain performance‐improving drugs or technologies may ‘cheapen’ resulting achievements. Considerably less attention has been paid to the impact of enhancement on the value of moral achievements. Would the use of moral enhancement (bio)technologies, rather than (solely) ‘traditional’ means of moral development like schooling and socialization, cheapen the ‘achievement’ of morally improving oneself? We argue that, to the extent that the ‘cheapened achievement’ objection succeeds in the domains of cognitive or athletic enhancement, it could plausibly also succeed in the domain of moral enhancement—but only regarding certain forms. Specifically, although the value of moral self‐improvement may be diminished by some of the more speculative and impractical forms of moral enhancement proposed in the literature, this worry has less force when applied to more plausibly viable forms of moral enhancement: forms in which drugs or technologies play an adjunctive or facilitative, rather than a determinative, role in moral improvement. We illustrate this idea with three examples from recent literature: the possible use of psychedelic drugs in certain moral‐learning contexts, ‘Socratic Al’ (a proposed Al‐driven moral enhancer) and empathy enhancement through virtual reality (VR). We argue that if one assumes that these technologies work roughly as advertised (which is an open empirical question), the ‘cheapened achievement’ objection loses much of its bite. The takeaway lesson is that moral enhancement in its most promising and practical forms ultimately evades a leading critique of cognitive and athletic enhancement. We end by reflecting on the potential upshot of our analysis for enhancement debates more widely.

The current revival of interest in classic psychedelics and other psychoactives such as ketamine and MDMA, coupled with changes to their regulatory status in many jurisdictions, necessitates rigorous ethical guidelines both within and beyond clinical and scientific contexts. This paper examines crucial ethical, philosophical, and policy considerations needed to ensure psychedelic use across various settings remains equitable, beneficial, consensual, and safe, with appropriate accountability mechanisms for addressing potential harms. We seek to broaden the lens beyond the medical model of psychedelics to include potentially valuable non-medical applications that could benefit individuals, communities, and society. With popular interest in psychedelics growing outside of therapeutic and research settings, there is a need to determine which aspects of any proffered guidelines, or underlying principles, should be applied similarly across contexts and in what ways there should be flexibility and/or context-sensitivity in their interpretation or application. In developing such guidelines, we suggest the “treatment versus enhancement” distinction – and associated debates familiar from bioethics and philosophy of medicine – requires renewed attention. We argue that neglecting non-medical and broad scientific use cases for psychedelics may have important implications for a range of ethical issues surrounding psychedelic use and research, including concerns about psychedelic hype and exceptionalism (both positive and negative), therapeutic touch, informed consent, data-gathering, and balancing access and safety. We conclude with suggestions for future directions in research and policy in the burgeoning area of psychedelic bioethics, stressing the importance of incorporating the perspectives of a diversity of stakeholders and fostering cross-sector collaboration.

New technologies and medicines make it increasingly possible to enhance human functioning in new ways: to become smarter, more emotionally attuned, and perhaps even morally better. But just because we can use the latest science to improve ourselves, should we? This book has two main aims. First, it outlines and criticises the six main contemporary arguments for scepticism about the role of human enhancements in promoting well-being. These arguments concern, respectively, (i) the value of achievements; (ii) freedom; (iii) hyperagency; (iv) human nature; (v) authenticity and (vi) inequality. It will be shown—for the first time in a book-length treatment—why the overarching bioconservative case against enhancement doesn’t hold water. The second central aim of the book is positive; as we’ll see, each of the bioconservative critiques considered and rejected will be shown to nonetheless motivate a distinctive kind of theoretical desideratum that a viable positive enhancement proposal should satisfy. The remainder of the book then defends a two-part enhancement proposal that will be shown to clearly satisfy the theoretical desiderata that emerged from reflecting on the earlier critique of bioconservativism. The first part of the positive proposal motivates and outlines the general role of an enhancement counsellor in facilitating voluntary enhancement; I then offer an applied case study of this role in the special case of enhancement for the purpose of facilitating romantic and parental relationships. Human Enhancement and Well-Being: A Case for Optimism will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in applied ethics, bioethics, philosophy of technology, philosophy of well-being, and social epistemology.

Recent literature suggests that intellectual humility is valuable to its possessor not only morally, but also epistemically-viz., from a point of view where (put roughly) epistemic aims such as true belief, knowledge and understanding are what matters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, epistemologists working on intellectual humility have focused almost exclusively on its ramifications for how we go about forming, maintaining and evaluating our own beliefs, and by extension, ourselves as inquirers. Less explored by contrast is how intellectual humility might have implications for how we should conduct our practice of asserting. The present entry aims to rectify this oversight by connecting these two topics in a way that sharpens how it is that intellectual humility places several distinctive kinds of demands on assertion, and more generally, on how we communicate what we believe and know.

This chapter investigates connections between Knowledge-First epistemology and a meta-epistemological thesis defended elsewhere by the authors (and in opposition to robust forms of virtue epistemology) under the description of _epistemic anti-individualism._ Epistemic anti-individualism is a denial of the epistemic individualist’s claim that warrant—i.e. what converts true belief into knowledge—supervenes on internal physical properties of individuals, perhaps in conjunction with local environmental properties. The chapter has two central aims. First, it argues that ‘epistemic twin earth’ thought experiments which reveal robust virtue epistemology (RVE) are problematically committed to epistemic individualism also show that _evidentialist mentalism_ is likewise committed to individualism. Second, it argues that, even though a _knowledge-first_ approach in epistemology is in principle (unlike RVE and evidentialist mentalism) consistent with epistemic _anti_-individualism, this approach fails to offer a plausible account of epistemic supervenience. The chapter suggests this point is a reason to pursue epistemic anti-individualism outside the knowledge-first framework.

“Knowledge-First” constitutes what is widely regarded as the most significant innovation in contemporary epistemology in the past twenty-five years. Knowledge-first epistemology is (in short) the idea that knowledge per se is an epistemic kind with theoretical importance that is not derivative from its relationship to other epistemic kinds such as rationality. Knowledge-first epistemology is rightly associated with Timothy Williamson in light of his influential book, Knowledge and Its Limits (KAIL). In KAIL, Williamson suggests that although knowing might be characterized as a very general kind of factive mental state, meeting the conditions for knowing is not constitutively explained by meeting the conditions for anything else, e.g. justified true belief. Accordingly, knowledge is conceptually and metaphysically prior to other cognitive and epistemic kinds. In this way, the concept know is a theoretical primitive. The status of know as a theoretical primitive makes it particularly suitable for using it to make substantive constitutive and causal explanations of a number of other phenomena, including the nature of belief, the nature of evidence, and the success of intentional actions. One of the principal virtues of the knowledge-first approach in epistemology is the way that it connects epistemology to other areas in philosophy. This virtue explains in part some of the wide-ranging impact the knowledge-first approach has had over the past decade or so, and it is a virtue that this volume shares. Specifically, the volume explores not merely the knowledge-first approach in epistemology, but also its ramifications for a variety of areas in philosophy, including the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the philosophy of action, and value theory.

An emerging line of research in bioethics questions whether enhanced love is less significant or valuable than otherwise, where "enhanced love" generally refers to cases where drugs (e.g., oxytocin, etc.) are relied on to maintain romantic relationships. Separate from these debates is a recent body of literature on the philosophy and psychology of "Virtual Reality (VR) dating," where romantic relationships are developed and sustained in a way that is mediated by VR. Interestingly, these discussions have proceeded largely independently from each other. This article considers whether and to what extent philosophical arguments leveled against the value of enhanced love in the pharmacological case extend to cases where loving relationships are technologically mediated via VR rather than pharmacologically mediated. It will be argued that, while some worries about the pharmacological case do not extend over in a way that will be particularly problematic for VR, two (of the four arguments considered) are more prima facie serious. I conclude by suggesting why even these stronger argument strategies are not insurmountable and, thus, that there is reason to be cautiously optimistic that VR-mediated love can largely withstand variations on the bioconservative critiques that target pharmacologically enhanced love.

The Orthodox View (OV) of the relation between epistemic justification and knowledge has it that justification is conceptually prior to knowledge—and so, can be used to provide a noncircular account of knowledge. OV has come under threat from the increasingly popular “Knowledge First” movement (KFM) in epistemology. I assess several anti-OV arguments due to three of KFM’s most prominent members: Timothy Williamson, Jonathan Sutton, and Alexander Bird. I argue that OV emerges from these attacks unscathed.

A monitoring-based strategy for repairing ruptured institutional trust is motivated and defended, bringing together insights about both interpersonal and institutional trust breakdown. The strategy pursued identifies and exploits important differences between interpersonal and institutional trust relations, insofar as monitoring in each case mitigates against the kind of risks that by trusting one makes oneself vulnerable. Once the relevant differences are appreciated, certain kinds of monitoring are shown to have special promise in the case of repairing institutional trust following institutional abuses of power. Particular strategies are then outlined and compared favourably to alternatives.

What is the aim of inquiry? One notable answer in recent epistemology answers this question with “understanding,” rather than just with true belief or knowledge. A common rationale is that true belief and knowledge can be gained by “offloading” cognitive work to others, where offloading cognitive work prevents one from satisfying curiosity of the sort that is needed to properly “close” inquiry. If this is right, then it looks like the very idea that understanding is the aim of inquiry seems to fit closely with the related idea that the aim of inquiry is one we attain not through outsourcing or epistemic dependence, but just through our own efforts. This chapter challenges this association by bringing together work on the nature of understanding in epistemology with recent work on transactive memory and cognitive enhancement. It is shown that even if we grant the premise that only through the satisfaction of curiosity is the aim of a given inquiry properly closed, this aim can be attained through (even extensive) offloading; the argument develops appeals to (i) via offloading in the case of interactive cueing in the case of transactive memory systems and (ii) understanding via offloading in the case of biomedical cognitively enhanced understanding. The result is a new space for vindicating understanding as the aim of inquiry that is not essentially tied to the idea that to play this role understanding must stand in tension with (various kinds of) offloading, outsourcing, and dependence.

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) enable direct communication between the brain and external computers, allowing processing of brain activity and the ability to control external devices. While often used for medical purposes, BCIs may also hold great promise for nonmedical purposes to unlock human neurocognitive potential. In this Essay, we discuss the prospects and challenges of using BCIs for cognitive enhancement, focusing specifically on invasive enhancement BCIs (eBCIs). We discuss the ethical, legal, and scientific implications of eBCIs, including issues related to privacy, autonomy, inequality, and the broader societal impact of cognitive enhancement technologies. We conclude that the development of eBCIs raises challenges far beyond practical pros and cons, prompting fundamental questions regarding the nature of conscious selfhood and about who—and what—we are, and ought, to be.

One common cultural critique of media users who move regularly between the real and the digital (cf., Chalmers 2018) to express their agency (e.g., through planning, inquiring, desire-fulfilment, etc.), is that they risk ‘losing touch with reality’, or more weakly, that they prioritise to their detriment their digital lives over their non-digital lives. Such a critique, for instance, has been explored in connection with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as World of Warcraft - where one major concern is that digital well-being comes at the expense of physical and psychological health. With VR investment from Meta and AR/VR investment from Apple Vision Pro, it is worth considering to what extent 'losing touch with reality’-based criticisms familiar from MMORPG extend more generally to cases of prioritisation of our virtual over non-virtual lives. It will be argued that even if we sharply distinguish the virtual and the real, ‘losing touch with reality’ based criticisms are misguided in so far as they are taken to be grounded in insights about reality and well-being. While increasing prioritising of digital lives and relationships (in both MMORPGs and in VR) can have a detrimental effect on well-being, the best way to conceptualise this is not in terms of a claimed detachment from reality.

One of the central bioconservative objections to pursuing human enhancement technologies highlights the risk that the development and dissemination of such technologies will exacerbate existing inequalities, with a particular focus on general considerations of distributive justice. This line of objection, typically framed to target cognitive enhancement's potential to exacerbate inequality, has also been extended to moral enhancement, which will be this chapter's focus. What will be suggested here is a comparatively more optimistic picture of the relationship between moral enhancement and inequality. It will be shown that there are at least two very specific kinds of moral enhancement proposals—i.e. Socratic artificial intelligence (AI) and psychedelic moral enhancement—which offer promising resources for combatting existing patterns of marginalisation and injustice in the case of both gender and race, and with important relevance to both feminism and social equality and justice effort more broadly. By exploring these benefits, we'll see that the question of whether moral enhancement would threaten to exacerbate existing inequalities is much more complex than some critics have appreciated, and consequently, that inequality-related risks identified by such critics should be suitably weighted against the kinds of benefits outlined herein.

Should we regard Jennifer Lackey’s (2007) ‘Creationist Teacher’ as understanding evolution, even though she does not, given her religious convictions, believe its central claims? We think this question raises a range of important and unexplored questions about the relationship between understanding, factivity and belief. Our aim will be to diagnose this case in a principled way, and in doing so, to make some progress toward appreciating what objectual understanding—i.e., understanding a subject matter or body of information—demands of us. Here is the plan. After some ground clearing in §1, §2 outlines and motivates a plausible working model—moderate factivity—for characterising the sense in which objectual understanding should be regarded as factive. §3 shows how the datum that we can understand false theories can, despite initial suggestions to the contrary, be assimilated straightforwardly within the moderate factivity model. §4 highlights how the inverse kind of case to that explored in §3—viz., a variant of Lackey’s creationist teacher case—poses special problems for moderate factivity. With reference to recent work on moral understanding by Hills (2009), §5 proposes a solution to the problem, and §6 attempts to diagnose why it is that we might originally have been led to draw the wrong conclusion.

Recent literature suggests that intellectual humility is valuable to its possessor not only morally, but also epistemically-viz., from a point of view where (put roughly) epistemic aims such as true belief, knowledge and understanding are what matters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, epistemologists working on intellectual humility have focused almost exclusively on its ramifications for how we go about forming, maintaining and evaluating our own beliefs, and by extension, ourselves as inquirers. Less explored by contrast is how intellectual humility might have implications for how we should conduct our practice of asserting. The present entry aims to rectify this oversight by connecting these two topics in a way that sharpens how it is that intellectual humility places several distinctive kinds of demands on assertion, and more generally, on how we communicate what we believe and know.

Hyperagency objections appeal to the risk that cognitive enhancement may negatively impact our well-being by giving us too much control. I charitably formulate and engage with a prominent version of this objection due toSandel (2009)—viz., that cognitive enhancement may negatively impact our well-being by creating an “explosion” of responsibilities. I first outline why this worry might look prima facie persuasive, and then I show that it can ultimately be defended against. At the end of the day, if we are to resist cognitive enhancement, it should not be based on a Sandel-style hyperagency argument.

My main aim is to contribute to the exploration of the nature of the epistemic state of understanding. It seems that the most productive way in which this might be done is by investigating what sort of conditions must be fulfilled in order for one to understand, and comparing understanding’s place in certain contemporary debates to the place that knowledge has in those debates. Regarding conditions for understanding, I will argue that there are two types of understanding that are most relevant to epistemology—objectual understanding and atomistic understanding. I will contend that atomistic understanding is entirely factive while objectual understanding is moderately factive, that objectual understanding admits of degrees, that both types involve some sort of grasp of explanatory relations, that both possess a measure of luck immunity, and that both are cognitive achievements with instrumental, teleological, contributory and final value. It must be stressed that the general accounts of both types of understanding that I attempt to provide are not supposed to be exhaustive sets of necessary and sufficient conditions—I remain particularly open to the possibility that there are further necessary conditions that are as yet undiscovered, especially for objectual understanding. Regarding understanding’s place in contemporary debates, it is perplexing that existing work does not capitalise on the thought that treating understanding in conjunction with many of the most prominent issues in recent epistemology is a worthwhile project that could yield interesting and important results. I will summarise understanding's potential significance for a number of these topics, looking at all of the following : factivity, coherentism, norms of assertion, the transmission of epistemic properties, epistemic luck, the nature of cognitive achievement, and epistemic value. This last topic is one that I think is particularly important to an investigation into understanding, because it is quite plausible that there is a particularly strong revisionist theory of epistemic value focused on understanding. Such a view would be one on which knowledge is not finally valuable, but one by way of which we could nonetheless explain why we might pre-theoretically think that knowledge is finally valuable. Since revisionist views often involve a claim that we should think of a different, closely related epistemic state as distinctively valuable, it is natural to consider understanding as a prime candidate for the focus of such a theory.

Bioconservative bioethicists (e.g., Kass, 2002, Human Dignity and Bioethics, 297–331, 2008; Sandel, 2007; Fukuyama, 2003) offer various kinds of philosophical arguments against cognitive enhancement—i.e., the use of medicine and technology to make ourselves “better than well” as opposed to merely treating pathologies. Two notable such bioconservative arguments appeal to ideas about (1) the value of achievement, and (2) authenticity. It is shown here that even if these arguments from achievement and authenticity cut ice against specifically pharmacologically driven cognitive enhancement, they do not extend over to an increasingly viable form of technological cognitive enhancement – namely, cognitive enhancement via augmented reality. An important result is that AR-driven cognitive enhancement aimed at boosting performance in certain cognitive tasks might offer an interesting kind of “sweet spot” for proponents of cognitive enhancement, allowing us to pursue many of the goals of enhancement advocates without running into some of the most prominent objections from bioconservative philosophers.

In a series of recent works, Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson insist that, given the ease by which irreversible destruction is achievable by a morally wicked minority, (i) strictly cognitive bio‐enhancement is currently too risky, while (ii) moral bio‐enhancement is plausibly morally mandatory (and urgently so). This article aims to show that the proposal Savulescu and Persson advance relies on several problematic assumptions about the separability of cognitive and moral enhancement as distinct aims. Specifically, we propose that the underpinnings of Savulescu's and Persson's normative argument unravel once it is suitably clear how aiming to cognitively enhance an individual will in part require that one aim to bring about certain moral goods we show to be essential to cognitive flourishing; conversely, aiming to bring about moral enhancement in an individual must involve aiming to improve certain cognitive capacities we show to be essential to moral flourishing. After developing these points in some detail, and their implication for Savulescu's & Persson's proposal, we conclude by outlining some positive suggestions.

Although therapists often work with clients with whom they share a great many beliefs, there remain many cases where the therapist and client have very little in common. Spirituality is, especially in the latter kind of case, one specific area in which clashes and similarities may be important. However, recent evidence suggests spirituality is to a surprising extent ignored in therapy when exploring it would be therapeutically relevant and, even more, that counsellors often struggle when training to more effectively engage with client spirituality. These results are problematic, especially when taken together. In this paper, I attempt to address this vexing issue in a way that brings together work on counselling and spirituality with recent discussions of intellectual virtue in contemporary epistemology. In particular, I show why it is important for the therapist to cultivate and maintain the virtue of intellectual humility with respect to spirituality in a counselling context. To this end, I explore, with reference to a particularly promising model of intellectual humility, how the therapist can be attentive to—and own—their limitations in a productive way when dealing with a wide range of spiritual backgrounds.

The World Anti-Doping Code (2021) includes a substance on the prohibited list if it meets at least two of the following: (1) it has the potential to enhance or enhances sport performance; (2) it represents an actual or potential health risk to the athlete; (3) it violates the spirit of sport. This paper uses a case study to illustrate points of tension between this code and enhancements that are appropriate to ban; we argue that there are banned drugs (e.g., acetazolamide and dexamethasone) the use of which we have good reason to not only permit but encourage for high-altitude sports. Drawing on lessons from this case study, we propose a reformulation of the Code that requires (1–3) be met but offers preferable ways of unpacking conditions (1) and (3) – and in a way that better preserves how the spirit of sport condition should be indexed to particular sports. Our formulation is inclusive enough to rule in drugs like acetazolamide and dexamethasone as permissible in high-altitude sports while at the same time ruling out problem cases – including many drugs already on the prohibited list. The result is an attempted alignment between the conditions specified and those drugs that should be banned.

An emerging line of research in bioethics questions whether enhanced love is less significant or valuable than otherwise, where "enhanced love" generally refers to cases where drugs (e.g., oxytocin, etc.) are relied on to maintain romantic relationships. Separate from these debates is a recent body of literature on the philosophy and psychology of "Virtual Reality (VR) dating," where romantic relationships are developed and sustained in a way that is mediated by VR. Interestingly, these discussions have proceeded largely independently from each other. This article considers whether and to what extent philosophical arguments leveled against the value of enhanced love in the pharmacological case extend to cases where loving relationships are technologically mediated via VR rather than pharmacologically mediated. It will be argued that, while some worries about the pharmacological case do not extend over in a way that will be particularly problematic for VR, two (of the four arguments considered) are more prima facie serious. I conclude by suggesting why even these stronger argument strategies are not insurmountable and, thus, that there is reason to be cautiously optimistic that VR-mediated love can largely withstand variations on the bioconservative critiques that target pharmacologically enhanced love.