Drake Nicholas
J Med Ethics. 2016 Jan;42(1):3-6. doi: 10.1136/medethics-2015-102944. Epub 2015 Nov 9.
In a recent response to Persson and Savulescu's Unfit for the Future, Nicholas Agar argues that moral bioenhancement is dangerous. His grounds for this are that normal moral judgement should be privileged because it involves a balance of moral subcapacities; moral bioenhancement, Agar argues, involves the enhancement of only particular moral subcapacities, and thus upsets the balance inherent in normal moral judgement. Mistaken moral judgements, he says, are likely to result. I argue that Agar's argument fails for two reasons. First, having strength in a particular moral subcapacity does not necessarily entail a worsening of moral judgement; it can involve strength in a particular aspect of morality. Second, normal moral judgement is not sufficiently likely to be correct to be the standard by which moral judgements are measured.
在最近对佩尔松和萨夫勒斯库所著《不适合未来》的回应中,尼古拉斯·阿加认为道德生物增强是危险的。他的这一观点依据是,正常的道德判断应具有优先地位,因为它涉及道德子能力的平衡;阿加认为,道德生物增强仅涉及特定道德子能力的增强,从而扰乱了正常道德判断中固有的平衡。他说,错误的道德判断很可能会产生。我认为阿加的论点因两个原因而不成立。其一,在特定道德子能力方面具备优势并不必然导致道德判断变差;它可能涉及在道德的特定方面具备优势。其二,正常的道德判断并不足够可能正确到足以成为衡量道德判断的标准。