Daniel Moseley

Joshua May’s Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science is a landmark achievement in the field. I discuss May’s chapter on the topic of moral enhancement. May examines whether it is morally permissible to go beyond treatment and enhance our moral capacities and character via direct brain interventions. May argues for a permissive stance in which the safe experimentation by individuals of some currently available forms of direct brain interventions are permissible. I contend that May’s discussion overlooks some central distinctions and arguments in the literature on moral enhancement. Specifically, I argue that the discussion would benefit from: a closer look at the Bioethics literature on the treatment/enhancement distinction, the relevant sense of ‘moral’ in this debate, arguments in favor of a moral duty to develop and widely deploy neurotechnologies that could be used for moral enhancement, and examining how radical enhancements, transhumanism and moral status issues are central to the topic.