an animal is capable of altruism in this sense,

acial differences signify lack of kinship, and markoff strangers from neighbours.

We have made some moralprogress owing to cultural forces, although moral knowledge has turned out to beharder to come by than scientific knowledge (this is another reason why moral progresshas been less impressive than scientific progress).

For if an increasing percentage of us acquires the power to destroya large number of us, it is enough if very few of us are malevolent or vicious enoughto use this power for all of us to run an unacceptable increase of the risk of death anddisaster.

Modafinil also allows sleep when appropriateand has frontally acting cognition-enhancing effects

aps followed by a modafinil dose may be moreefficient than either individually.30

The US military routinely uses both modafiniland Ritalin for its pilots

Bygiving choline supplementation, which is abundant in eggs, to pregnant rats theperformance of their pups was enhanced, apparently by changes in neural develop-ment.16 Given the ready availability of choline such prenatal enhancement may already(inadvertently) take place

So far in history the cognitive enhancement of human beings has taken the shape ofeducation, or knowledge which has been transmitted from earlier generations to laterones, first orally, then by writing as well.

What is prudentially good for you may, however, be prudentially bad for others, foryour success in respect of fulfilling your prudential goals may make it more difficultfor others to fulfil their prudential goals.

What is instrumentally good relative to a certain end may be bad, however, ratherthan good because the end itself is bad rather good.

But we shall here focus on enhancement of cognitive facultiesbecause it offers the greatest possibility of making us better in attaining our ends.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie version sparked a discussion in whichmany argued that we could never be justified in depriving someoneof his free will, no matter how gruesome the violence that wouldthereby be prevented

RELATEDMore From The StoneRead previous contributions to thisseries.refused, they might be required to wear a tracking device that wouldshow where they had been at any given time, so that they wouldknow that if they did commit a crime, they would be detected

or only 23 of 30 rats freed their trappedcompanions

Scientists have been exploring questions like this for decades. In the1960s and early ’70s, famous experiments by Stanley Milgram andPhilip Zimbardo suggested that most of us would, under specificcircumstances, voluntarily do great harm to innocent people

Last October, in Foshan, China, a 2-year-old girl was run over by avan. The driver did not stop. Over the next seven minutes, morethan a dozen people walked or bicycled past the injured child. Asecond truck ran over her.

just as requiring an employee tomove to another city, take a flu shot, learn a language,attend a compliance seminar, or complete a degree may benecessary

This policy would allow Zach to mandate that Alice useneurointerventions for her job and would also require Aliceto disclose any use of non-medical neurointerventions toZach. This policy would maximize the value of employerliberty and minimize employee liberty and flexibility.

However, the opennessmeans that employers make take neurointerventions intoaccount in evaluations of the employees

Ethical concerns for this policy would then be abouthow much employers should be restricted from knowingwhen evaluating employees and how to balance employ-ees’ liberty with the potential for developing a hypercom-petitive culture

This policy would still prohibit Zach from requiring neu-rointerventions in his company and prohibit his consider-ation of Alice’s use of them. Alice, however, would be freeto use neurointerventions. This policy would maximize thevalue of protecting employees from exploitation but wouldgive considerable leeway to employee choices.

How similar would this be to currentpolicy

One might discount therelevance of neurointerventions of the sort focused on inthis paper since they are not about treating disabilities butare about moving a person beyond normal ability and, assuch, would neither be protected nor prevented by ADAconcerns.

butalso as a financial incentive to increase employment bymaking it less expensive for employers to hire moreworkers rather than to require more hours from existingworkers—i.e., a job creation law.

Equally danger-ous, it could be easy to simply increase work until we areall wagging tails and no dogs, instrumentalizing ourselvesto be optimally productive but forgetting that sheer pro-ductivity itself was not the goal (widgets are to be used forsomething and simply making more and more of themfaster and faster makes human work serve widgetry, nothumanity)

People already willingly,often enthusiastically, seek out nootropics, performancedrugs, and innumerable gadgets in order to enhancethemselves.

We should guard againstthe naivete ́that super-duper employees will inexorablymake things better. Super-duper can quickly become thenew normal (Vincent and Jane2014), in which case pro-ductivity may have increased but there would be littlerelative advantage

Or is she exceptionally virtuous because ofher drive for self-improvement?

Zach’s company be allowed to require neurointerventions?Should Zach’s company be allowed to restrict neurointer-ventions? Is Alice a bad person for taking enhancers?

Implicit racial bias—propranolol has been used tovirtually abolish implicit racial bias in subjects, withoutaffecting any explicit racial prejudice measures

The easiest examples of thiswould be RFID implants under the skin to serve as trackingdevices

including preventingmemories of secret negotiationsor proprietary products fromever forming in the first place (obviating the need for confi-dentiality clauses), immunizing workers such as soldiers orpolice officers against developingpost-traumatic stress disor-der, inserting temporary knowledge, eliminating the need forsleep, creating the ability to see in the dark, and implant tech-nology allowing for direct communication with computersystems or with other people. Existential technology would gobeyond what applications and employees currently hav

‘‘di-minishment’’ might be desired—for example, reducingone’s memory consolidation or temporarily reducingone’s empathy (cases we will discuss below).

job seekerswill be interested in how they can boost their competi-tiveness and earning potential,

The company, of course, wouldprovide the modifications or reimburse the cost

Is this enhancement, or a matter of removing the cloud over our better selves?” he said

‘Sure, you’ve got the talent for this, but we require you to take Adderall.’ Now, maybe you do start to care about the ethical implications.”

productive as possible to make everybody’s lives better

What happens if you’re in a fast-paced surgical situation and they’re not available?” he asked. “Will you be able to function at the same level?

The main purpose is to try to learn things, to get experience, to write papers, to do experiments.

widen the gap between those who have access to the medications and those who don’t —and even erode the relationship between struggle and the building of character

ome argue that such use could be worse, given the potentially deep impact on society. And the behavior of academics in particular, as intellectual leaders, could serve as an example to others

least 20 respondents have said that they used the drugs for nonmedical purposes, according to Philip Campbell, the journal’s editor in chief.

dozen of their colleagues had admitted to regular use of prescription drugs like Adderall, a stimulant, and Provigil, which promoteswakefulness

For instance, when an encoder’s brain and decoder’sbrain are connected and the decoder initiates a sequenceof actions, who is responsible for them? With thenumber of possible messages sent to a decoder and theircomplexity potentially increasing, and possibly involvingmovement, memory, emotion, it will be more andmore complex to understand agency, responsibility andliability

or example, when a new BCI is unsuccessful, wasit due to a technology failure or an uncooperative or otherwiseunsuitable participant?)

however, givenhow neurotechnologies are developing and given that the use ofinvasive neurotechnologies might become more common in thefuture, it might become an area where clear ethical regulationneeds to be developed

Thus, such techniques may raise concerns inrelation to free will, privacy, agency, and liability, giventheirpotential ability to “read” or otherwise “assess” someone’sthoughts, emotions, states or attitudes, potentially affectingpeople’s moral or social behavio

Morespecifically, the synaptic activity in the motor cortex of theencoder rat was invasively recorded while performing oneof two different tasks, and transmitted to the decoder ratwith invasive intracortical micro stimulation. This allowed thedecoder rat to learn to perform the same task.

Taxonomy of neuroscience technologies for observing andinfluencing brain activity based on temporal resolution, spatial resolution,invasiveness (circle vs. square), and portability (color

ranscranialmagnetic stimulation (TMS)

Nonetheless, human cognitiveaugmentation applications based on ECoG exis

fNIRS, like fMRI, uses hemodynamic responses to assesslocation and intensity of brain activity (Ferrari and Quaresima,2012). Its main advantages are that it is portable (Sagara et al.,2009; McKendrick et al., 2015), much cheaper than fMRI,and less susceptible to electrical noise than EEG. These havemade this technology suitable for human cognitive augmentationapplications

the question of whether an interventionthat simply attempts to restore function lost due to illness, injury,or disability could still be identified as enhancement

an inferior technology withno significant ethical issuesmay thrive while a superior technology causing widespread ethical concerns may endup being outlawed.

f you have a computer, that's good you can do a lot of things with it, but part of what makes having your computer so valuable is that hundreds of millions of other people have computers

It would be better if we would bring these cognitive enhancement drugs out of the closet, and do regular clinical double-blind trails with them, and genotype the people that take them and later if there's an adverse effect, see if it only affects people with a certain genotype, and be in a better position to prevent the wide diffusion of these drugs before they're safe.

It's also a concern with the off-label use of drugs like Adderall, drugs that have not been developed specifically for the kind ofcognitive enhancement they are often used for.

It's the old problem of hubris, and it's important to recognize that it doesn't just apply to cognitive enhancement or even biomedical enhancement more generally, it applies to all human interventions, technological or social or economic or political.

Even legalsystems have been moral enhancements in some respect because they've enabled us to control our aggressive impulses, to find ways of settling disputes that are more morally acceptable.

is there a fear that they might make society more likely to produce certain outliers on the continuum of human personality--say, evil genius figures capable of horrific atrocities. If this technology increases the set of highly intelligent individuals within a certain population, won't it also increase the chances that those individuals will overlap with the small set of homicidal, or even genocidal maniacs within a population? I'm thinking of someone like Pol Pot with the intellectual capacities of a figure like Richard Feynman

So yes in the future there might be a period when these drugs are on patent, and are expensive, but when they go off patent they could become very inexpensive

Now that's a lot cheaper than the cognitive enhancement drug that you get at Starbucks.

primordial being pulling itself out of primordial soup, sort of a half fishhalf mammal sort of thing,

In fact it might turn out that the only way to prevent us from going extinct, or to prevent some great worsening ofour condition, is to enhance some of our capacities

pre-Darwinian view, then you're almost bound to conclude that anything we try to do to improve ourselves is bound to be a disaste

They tend to think that an individual organism, a human being, is like the work of a master engineer---a delicately balanced, harmonious whole that's the product of eons of exacting evolution.

Part of your response to that argument, if I understand it correctly, has been to say that the drive toward enhancement is actually very much a part of human nature.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS) to improve cognition in human beings.

“If a pregnant woman is taken out to be executed, one does not wait for her to give birth; but if her pains of parturition have already begun [lit. she has already sat on the birth stool], one waits for her until she gives birth.”

But if the greater part was already born,

no differently than if he had accidentally injured the woman elsewhere on herbody

personhood isdefined as having a will, self-awareness, emotions, being able to recognize others,speaking, etc

The declaration, originally agreed in May 2010,contains the statements "every individual cetaceanhas the right to life", "no cetacean should be held incaptivity or servitude, be subject to cruel treatment, orbe removed from their natural environment", and "nocetacean is the property of any state, corporation,human group or individual"

t is based on years of research that has showndolphins and whales have large, complex brains anda human-like level of self-awareness.

Recognising their rights would mean an end to whaling and their captivity, or their use inentertainment

Ninety-eight percent of abortions in this country are performed within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy anyway, and most of the rest occur when the mother’s life or health is at risk or in cases of severe fetal abnormality

Prior to 20 weeks, although billions of neurons have already migrated to the cerebral cortex, there are almost no synaptic connections between them or with the thalamus, which mediates sensory perception.

alive, the case for changing the law is compelling to me, whether or not they would then be considered appropriate sources of transplant organs.But if whole-brain death remains the legal standard, should the "dead-donor" rule be modified to permit organ harvesting prior to whole-brain death? Imagine that someone were to state in their living will that should they succumb to PVS, their body may be maintained on life-support and used not only as a sourceof organs but for testing drugs, training medical and nursing students on intubation and other procedures, or even dissection. This initially seemed an attractive option to me, but now I’m more troubled by it, seeing as it would set a precedent of using individuals who were not legally dead simply for the benefit of others. So I would prefer if higher-brain death became legally recognized as sufficient for declaring the death of a person, though I doubt that this will be politically possible for many years.Do patients and surrogates have the moral right to insist on life-sustaining treatment even after permanent loss of consciousness?

Imagine that someone were to state in their living will that should they succumb to PVS, their body may be maintained on life-support and used not only as a sourceof organs but for testing drugs, training medical and nursing students on intubation and other procedures, or even dissection

the case for changing the law is compelling to me, whether or not they would then be considered appropriate sources of transplant organs

assaults producing this appalling condition could be charged as homicides; and money now spent on utterly futile treatments could be used instead to benefit living persons

By this definition, human beings in permanent comas and persistent vegetative states would be dead persons.

These points effectively refute the claim that persons exist from conception.

when there is only an undifferentiated embryo with a full complement of human DNA.

and in particular the capacity to feel pain

analogous to wetness as an emergent property of water molecules,

On the other hand, if they’re asserted instead to be material beings, then their presence ought to be measurable through controlled scientific tests—none of which has ever proven their

sight, hearing and touch

qualitative distinction between brain and mind is to regard them as fundamentally different substances, one material, the other immaterial.

Here, the duty of beneficencerequires that the physician intervene on behalf of saving the patient's life orplacing the patient in a protective environment, in the belief that the patientis compromised and cannot act in his own best interest at the moment.

What action is morally allowable, or, what isour duty?

appealing to the Juvenile Court Judge who is authorized by thestate to protect the lives of its citizens, particularly minors, until they reachthe age of majority and can make such choices independently.

Four commonly accepted principles of health care ethics, excerpted fromBeauchamp and Childress (2008), include th

prima facie

Finally, medical benefits should be dispensed fairly, so thatpeople with similar needs and in similar circumstances will be treated withfairness, an important concept in the light of scarce resources such as solidorgans, bone marrow, expensive diagnostics, procedures and medications.

. But go odpeopledo goodbeca use it’s

Thre ats of violencedo not crea te a mor al obligation

He that cursethhis fa ther or his mother,sha ll surel y be put to deat h.(Ex od. 21:17)• Whosoeverdoethany workin the Sab bat h da y, he shall sur ely be pu t todeath.(Exod.31:15)• He that sacrificethunto any god, save unt o the Lord only , he sh all be ut -ter ly destroyed.(Exod. 22:20)

God can’tdo thingsthat are logicallyimp oss i

bl e. She mightarg ue, for ex am ple, that God wou ld nev er condonekilling,raping, stealing,an d to rturingbecause God is all -goo d. But if God isby definitiongood,th en God can’t be used to de fine goo dnessbec ause su ch adefinitionwould be circular— the conc ept bein g defin ed would be cont ai ne din th e concept s doingthe defi n

According to Asch,peoplein dif fe rent culturesar rive at diffe rent moral jud g-mentsnot becausethey hav e diff ere nt view s ab ou t the nat ure of morality, butbecausethe y have differentvie ws about the natur e of

Moralstandard+ Fa ctu al be li efs = Moraljudgmen

Consequently,culturalre la tivismcannotbe cor re

Cult ures make the mora l law, soculturescan do no wro

r. Accordingto subj ective relativism, however,th ey don’t disagree be -caus e wh at Ja ck is rea ll y sa ying is that he approves of abort ion and what Ji ll isreallysayingis that she do es n’t app rove of abo rti on. These stat ementsdon’tcontradictone anotherbecause the subjects of these st atem ent s ar e differ ent(Jac k vs. Jill) and the y say different thingsaboutthose su bj

. But what Hitleran d Stalin did wa s wrong,even if they appr oved of whatthey

Wheneversomeone says that an act ionis rig ht, whatshe meansis that it is rightfo r he

Yo u can’tmakea st at ementtrue sim pl y by believingit to be true, and you can’t makean act ion rig ht sim -ply by believingit to be righ

nd “t he Sir ionoIndi ans of th e upperAmazonap pea r to thinklit tle of copulatingin full vi ewof othersbut may be shamed int o exi le if they ar e cau ght eati

The oriesof moralitytry to answerthe ques tion:What mak es an acti onrigh t? or Wha t makesa perso n go

oughtor shou

just as havingcertainphysicalfeaturescan give one an advantage in thestrugglefor survival,so can havingcertainmora l beliefs

ot e: “The empiricis t arg ume nt holdsthat if we explo re the bio log ic al roo ts of moralbeh avio r, and ex plaintheirmate rial origins and bia se s, we sh ould be able to fas hion a wi se and enduringethi cal consensus.”3

ad, “Wh oevercu rs es hisfath er or his mothershall be pu t to de at h.” You are abo ut to kill you r childwhenhe poi nts out that Exo dus 20:13 sa ys “T

a y. To der ive an an -swer from them,we must inte rp re t th em, an d to int erpr et th em, we mus t ap -peal to mor al

r ong. The rightnessof an act ion doe s not dependon the good -ness of the pe rson perf

f pho nies.” You can’ t mak e a valid gener aliza -tion about an entire class of thing s from obs erving only one or even anum ber of them. An inference from a samp le of a gr oup to the wholegrou pis legitim ate only if the sample is repres enta tiv e— that is ,onl yif thesampl e is sufficiently large and every memberof the group has an equalchanceto be part of the sa

The fact that people have alw ay s done or believ edsomething is no reason for believingthat we should cont inue to do or be -li eve somethin

ou.” These argumentsare fall acio us becaus e tra dit ions can bewron

king, “If everyonejumpedoff a cli ff, wou ld you do

rent se nses here : in th e firs tpremi se, it means hum an being; in the second,it me ans

o ssibili ties. It ’s pos sible, forexample,that she was cu re d by so me natural cau se that scient ists don ’t yetunde rsta

way: “Ent itie s sho uld not be mult ipliedbeyondneces sity.” In othe r words , yo u shouldn’tas sume the exis tence of any -thing that’s not neede d to exp lain the phenomena.This prin cipl e has cometo be known as “Oc cam’ s razor” be caus e it ’s used to sh ave off unne ede d en ti -ties from the

They arg ue that the cas e befor e thecourt is similar to one that has been deci ded in the past , and sinc e the courtdecidedone way in that ca se, it should decide the

ct B pr

ider ed to berepr esen tative of a gro up when eve ry memberof th e group has an equalchan ce to be pa rt of th

This would be astrong argume nt only if your sa mp le is sufficiently lar ge an d su fficientl y repr e-sentati ve of the entir e group of co llege students

Therefore , Chicagois the capita l o

The re are many valid arg um ent fo rms , and it is not fe asible to memorizethem all. But once you have asce rta ined the form of an argument, you cantest it for vali dity by de terminingwhetherthe re is an other argum ent with thesame form that would al lo w the premisesto be true and th e conclusion fals e.If so, th e argumentis inv alid. Such an interpr etatio n ser ves as a co unt er -exampl e to th e claim that the arg

Becausevalidityis a matter of form, any ar gumenttha t exhibit s any of thes eform s is valid, regard le ss of whetherthe stat ement s it cont

DisjunctiveSyllogism

s t. So, unli ke deduct iveargu ments, which can estab lish thei rconclusionswit hcert ainty ,induct ive ar -gumentscan establi sh thei r conclusionwit h only a hig h deg ree of

duct ive. Go od de -ductiveargumentsdi ff er from good induct iv e on es in

e s.An argumentwith an unstatedpremis eor conclus ion is known as anenth ymeme

In these argum ents, the co nclusio n come

lus io n. Theconclusion of an argume nt is th e ma in point it

What distinguishesa rationalclaim from an ir rat ional one is that it’ sbacked by good

Because philosophical theories explain how it’s logically possible for a con-cept to apply, they cannot be tested by physical experiments in a scientist’s laboratory.

The fundamental law of logic is the law of noncontradiction, which says that nothing can have a property and lack it at the same time.

He points out that what is pleasing to one of the gods may not be pleasing to the others—for example, what is pleasing to Zeus may not be pleasing to Hera.

Socrates refused to leave, however, arguing that because he had enjoyed the benefits of Athenian citizenship throughout his life, he owed it to the people of Athens to abide by their decision.

for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him

the sun was a molten mass of rock

“the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”

He asserts that there is no feature or set of features that is shared by all of them

Furthermore, if there were nothing more to something’s being right than our believing it to be right, we would be morally infallible.

But how much and in what ways must someone change in order to be considered a different person

We should reshape our society so that we all would be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do.

need to be reprogrammed at a behavioral reconditioning center.

indwelling agent.

It is commonly believed that we can be held responsible only for those actions that we freely perform. If we are forced to do something against our will, we aren’t to blame.

we can’t survive the death of our bodies. When our bodies die, we cease to exist

The astonishing hypothesis is that you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it, ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’”

Given that we can’t be certain of what we’ve learned through our senses, how can we have knowledge of the external world?

The problem of evil arises from the beliefs that the world was created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being (namely, God) and that there is evil in the world. If God is all-knowing, God knows that evil exists; if God is all-good, God doesn’t want evil to exist; and if God is all-powerful, God can prevent evil from existing. So how can there be evil in a world created by such a being?

The problem of free will arises from the beliefs that every event has a cause and that humans have free will. Yet if every event is caused by some prior event, how can anything we do be up to us?

mind-body problem

What makes definitive answers to philosophical questions so hard to come by is that conflicting views of reality, knowledge, and value often appear equally plausible.

assent.

Whatistruth?

Canthemindsurvivethedeathofthebody?

Howisthemindrelatedtothebody?

Because our lives are shaped by our philosophy, many have been willing to die for their philosophy. Revolutions, for example, are often inspired by a phi-losophy.

But if we never question those answers—if we never critically evaluate them in light of the alternatives—then our beliefs aren’t truly our own.

Every society, every religion, and every ideology provides answers to philosophical questions.

While everyone may have a right to an opinion, not every opinion is right.

As you construct your own philosophy, you don’t want to commit the same mistakes made by others,

ctions based on true beliefs

Philosophical questions are unavoidable because any attempt to avoid them requires taking a stand on them. As Pascal put it, “To ridicule philosophy is to philosophize.”