Abstract: Imagine a world where bio-medical moral enhancement is widely available. Anyone can buy 'virtue-pills' which work by altering motivations and emotions so as to make it easier to act virtuously. In this world, there will be two groups of people: those who opt for taking virtue-pills (pill-poppers) and those who opt for more traditional means of moral enhancement (meditators).
Suppose there is one Pill-Popper and one Meditator who start off being equally vicious and whose enhancement leaves them disposed to act, feel, and reason in the same ways. Despite their similarities, many of us will have the following intuition:
Less-Virtuous: The Pill-Popper is less virtuous than the Meditator.
One potential explanation for this intuition has to do with effort. Pill-poppers choose to take the easy route. That feels like cheating.
My goal in this talk is to better understand the relationship between effort, virtue, and moral enhancement. In doing so, I attempt to explain away the Less-Virtuous intuition. Bio-medical moral enhancement, I argue, is not cheating. Nor is it inherently less virtuous.
Ockham Society Convenors: Rian Coady, Lucas Janz and Isabel Weir | Ockham Society Webpage
