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Human Enhancement: Arguments from Virtue Ethics

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Abstract

Although dominated by consequentialist and deontological thinking, the debate about human enhancement has been enriched by several arguments from virtue theory and from virtue ethics. This article provides an overview of the virtue ethical arguments in the debate and identifies several topics in the ethics of human enhancement where the argumentative resources of virtue ethics have not yet been sufficiently considered.

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Notes

  1. Due to a lack of space we cannot further discuss historical context as well as the reception of Plato and Aristotle in late antiquity and medieval scholastic philosophy. For an extended discussion see for example the German Aristotle compendium Aristoteles-Handbuch edited by Christof Rapp and Klaus Corcilius (2011), Aristoteles by Otfried Höffe (2006), or Part VII of The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle edited by Christopher Shields (2012). For a short overview of the later medieval and scholastic version by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and a recent discussion of the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition, see for instance the collective work edited by Timpe and Boyd (2016).

  2. For the various forms of virtue ethics, see Hursthouse and Pettigrove (2016). Plato need not necessarily be interpreted as a virtue ethicist. However, Plato’s important contributions have a widely acknowledged influence on contemporary debates.

  3. This may be seen differently by some critics who disapprove of the concepts of virtue ethics for presupposing a static self as given, as highlighted for example by DeGrazia (2000). However, it is questionable whether this presupposition is necessary in order to formulate a virtue ethical concept, because it depends on the notion of human nature.

  4. We only consider Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics because it is his most sophisticated and best known work on ethics. We use the English standard edition edited by Jonathan Barnes (Aristotle 1984). In all references, we abbreviate “Nicomachean ethics” as “NE” and “Politics” as “Pol.” followed by the reference of the book, chapter and the Bekker numbering. For a broad overview of Aristotle’s ethics see also The Blackwell guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics edited by Richard Kraut (2006) and Hutchinson (1998) in The Cambridge companion to Aristotle edited by Jonathan Barnes.

  5. There is a closely related but more nuanced background to this particular virtue beyond the Western tradition, which can help guide the modern secular use of the concept. As Shannon Vallor recognises, humility has close analogues in Buddhist and Confucian thought. The core ability referred to by humility seems to be a form of reflective self-evaluation that accepts the current limits of knowledge and predictive power. Phrased slightly more elaborately, it is “a recognition of the real limits of our technosocial knowledge and ability; reverence and wonder at the universe’s retained power to surprise and confound us; and renunciation of the blind faith that new technologies inevitably lead to human mastery and control of our environment” (Vallor 2016: 126 f.).

  6. A singular predecessor of this idea should be noted. Long before the current enhancement debate, Wallace I. Matson (1962) discussed the moral aspects of what he termed “morality pills”.

  7. It has been noted that any version of moral enhancement that overrides human decision making for allegedly moral reasons might be used to produce greater utility in the world at the expense of any moral value, because people lose their freedom of agency (Harris 2011). Other authors have made it clear that any conception of moral enhancement presupposes a narrow understanding of morality (Beck 2015) and that what counts as moral enhancement in one system will likely be some kind of pharmaceutical tyranny according to another (Shook 2012).

  8. The connection of virtue and knowledge originates in Aristotle’s critique of the Socratic-Platonic intellectualism, which asserts that only knowledge is able to motivate action, only later giving rise to the debate on how virtue and norms are connected.

  9. Originally, epistemic virtues were distinguished in the following three subgroups by Aristotle: (i) theoretical virtues of wisdom (sophia), epistemic knowledge (epistēmē) and rational intuition of basic principles or self-evident truths (nous); (ii) the practical virtue of practical wisdom (phronēsis); and (iii) the productive virtue of craftsmanship (technē). (See NE VI; MacIntyre 2007: 154).

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Acknowledgements

We want to thank our colleagues at the Institute for Ethics in the Neurosciences at Forschungszentrum Jülich, and at the German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Science, who provided ample and helpful input in several debates. A special thanks goes to Markus Rüther, who co-authored one part of this little series and significantly helped to shape the whole.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Neurowissenschaften und Medizin, INM-8: Ethik in den Neurowissenschaften, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, 52425, Jülich, Germany

    Jan-Hendrik Heinrichs

  2. Deutsches Referenzzentrum für Ethik in den Biowissenschaften, Bonner Talweg 57, 53113, Bonn, Germany

    Mandy Stake

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Heinrichs, JH., Stake, M. Human Enhancement: Arguments from Virtue Ethics. ZEMO 2, 355–373 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-019-00050-7

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