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Genetic virtue, reconsidered

Enhancing genetic virtue?
Nicholas Agar
School of History, Philosophy, Political Science, and International Relations
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington 6140
New Zealand
Nicholas.Agar@vuw.ac.nz

including measures designed to boost responsiveness to

ethical or moral reasons to levels properly considered
normal for humans. Moral enhancement has the
purpose of boosting responsiveness to ethical or moral
reasons to levels beyond that considered normal for
human beings. My purpose in this commentary is to
suggest that moral enhancement is a much more
problematic undertaking than moral therapy.
Moral therapy is defined by reference to what we
consider normal for humansit aspires to preserve or
restore a capacity to respond to the range of moral
concerns that normal humans respond to. For example,
psychopaths exhibit a pathological lack of empathy.
They can intellectually grasp that their actions cause
suffering, but they lack the negative affects experienced
by others who find themselves in sufferings proximity.
Some researchers hope to find genes that contribute to
psychopathy. Suppose we were both to find them and
to discover a way to fix them, thereby endowing the
likes of John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy with a normal
sensitivity to suffering. This improvement should be
viewed by Walker as moral therapy. It gives recipients
a capacity for empathyand therefore a degree of
responsiveness to moral concernsthat we consider
normal. Damage to the brains frontal lobe can affect a
persons capacity to evaluate the consequences of his or
her actions. Since the evaluation of consequences is
central to many views of morality, a procedure that
used stem cells to remedy frontal lobe damage might be
counted as moral therapy.
Walker wants to do more than fix the ethical defects
of psychopaths or of those oblivious to other kinds of

ark Walkers fascinating paper calls for a

Genetic Virtue Program (GVP)an interdisciplinary effort to enhance human ethics.
He urges that we achieve this by promoting genes that
influence the acquisition of the virtues.1 Although the
GVP is a worthy focus of philosophical debate, I have
to confess to some doubts about its viability. We
patently dont live in the best of all possible worlds, but
Im skeptical about the notion that the way to improve
the world is to make deliberate and specific ethical or
moral enhancements.
First, we need to clarify what kinds of changes to
humans would count as specifically ethical or moral
enhancements. Some philosophers distinguish between therapy, which includes measures to maintain
people at levels of functioning considered normal for
human beings, and enhancement, which encompasses
measures whose purpose is to boost levels of functioning beyond human norms. Fixing the version of the
huntingtin gene linked with the ruinous neurodegenerative disorder Huntington disease is gene therapy. A
genetic modification whose purpose is to boost
memory beyond human norms is, in contrast, a genetic
enhancement. People with normal powers of memory
are candidates for enhancement, but not for therapy,
which is addressed only at those who fall below a level
of functioning considered normal for humans. The
therapy/enhancement distinction is not without philosophical detractors but it does help us to get a fix on
Walkers GVP. We can understand moral therapy as
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Agar
moral reasons. The idea of moral enhancement certainly
seems coherentmany of us subscribe to moral theories
that leave quite a distance between us and our moral
ideals. I find Walkers decision to call his program the
Genetic Virtue Program slightly puzzling considering
that the idea of moral enhancement seems against the
spirit of virtue ethics. One of the central themes of virtue
ethics is the importance of striking a balance between
the moral and nonmoral aspects of our lives. Virtue
ethicists think that you can be too moral. One cost of
greater responsiveness to moral reasons could be
reduced responsiveness to nonmoral reasons. Moral
enhancement could leave us with less time to work on
the various nonmoral projects that we find enjoyable or
admirable, such as perfecting tennis backhands or
becoming experts on comic opera.
Suppose we restrict our attention to conceptions of
morality more open to enhancement. We still find
problems at the level of the psychological mechanisms
that must be adjusted to arrange these moral improvements. The moral sensibilities of normal humans
provide a relatively stable reference point for moral
therapy. In repairing the moral disabilities of psychopaths we make them more like the rest of us. But moral
enhancement is addressed at those who fall within the
normal range and must therefore look to a moral
theory for guidance. Heres where we run into trouble.
Utilitarians, Kantians, virtue ethicists, and advocates of
various religious ethics can agree that a world that
contained agents more prone to help victims of famine
and less prone to murder would be morally better than
the one we currently inhabit. But they disagree about
the moral reasons that should guide us as we confront
these issues. Their disagreements over which are the
genuine moral reasons leads to disagreement about the
modifications we should introduce to make people
more responsive to morality.
The central character of the Showtime series Dexter
is a psychopath who resolves to do the morally correct
thing. He restricts his killing to evil types who would
otherwise escape justice. Its possible that Dexters
actions make the world a happier place. He enjoys
killing and we can presume that the individuals who
become his victims would otherwise long continue
their murdering ways.
Is Dexter a morally enhanced being? Utilitarian
moral enhancers might say so. In addition to boosting
sensitivity to the veridical, utilitarian moral reasons,

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they will seek to reduce sensitivity to false or

misleading moral reasons. Consider an analogous case.
Suppose you set out to enhance humans powers of
scientific reasoning. You would aim to produce a
capacity to recognize truths about the world beyond
unenhanced humans. But you would also aim to make
people less susceptible to false theories, less likely than
the rest of us to be convinced by astrology or
creationism. As moral enhancement increases its
subjects ability to recognize moral truth, it should
also reduce their susceptibility to moral arguments
rejected by their enhancers. Dexters lack of empathy
permits him to commit utility-maximizing killings that
would be psychologically impossible for most of the
rest of us. At the conclusion of the shows first season,
his moral calculations lead him to kill his massmurdering brother. He happily euthanizes a terminally-ill friend who requests it. Dexters psychopathy
seems to make him a candidate for ethics therapy and
at the same time can be viewed as morally enhancing
him.
Utilitarian moral enhancers might find eliminating
empathy to be a dangerous policy. If the result is a
Dexter who unwaveringly maximizes utility, then alls
well. If the unempathetic beings created by genetic
engineers lack Dexters interest in morality, then we
might succeed only in bringing into existence more
Gacys or Bundys. Perhaps a more reliable path of
utilitarian moral enhancement is to boost the capacity
for empathy rather than to eliminate it altogether. The
normal human capacity for empathy makes most of us
feel bad when exposed to suffering. Some psychopaths
act immorally because they lack empathy. But nonpsychopaths are far from perfect in this regard. Most
people felt empathy when watching news reports on
the Haitian earthquake. But the feeling soon fades.
Half an hour later were searching the Internet for
cheap accommodation at a holiday destination where
we hope our only point of contact with poverty is in the
willingness of the hotel staff to accept tiny payments in
exchange for carrying bags and bringing cocktails. A
genetic alteration that made the experience of empathy
stickier might lead it to remain in our consciousness in
the way that unpleasant experiences remain in the
minds of victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. The
need to alleviate suffering wouldnt rapidly fade from
consciousness when we remove ourselves from its
proximity.

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Advocates of other moral theories will be less
enthusiastic about this purported enhancement. For
Kantians, it is not enough that someone does the right
thing. Doing the right thing because it gives you a good
feeling differs from doing it because you recognize its
moral rightness. In the above example, the enhanced
state of empathy is like a toothache that impels us to
visit the dentist because it wont go away. Kantians will
view the heightened state of empathy as a distraction
from our moral mission. It runs counter to the
rationality that Kant thought was moralitys source.
This commentary has described cases in which
enhancements according to one view of morality are
likely to be diminishments according to other views. It
may not be surprising that there is no unambiguous
trajectory of moral enhancement. But morality isnt
just a random topic that philosophers like to argue
about. The many different theories of right and wrong
connect morality to different aspects of a shared
human nature. They encapsulate different views about
the qualities of human beings that are of utmost
importance. For utilitarians, our capacity for suffering
and enjoyment matters the most. Kantians prize
practical rationality. For some advocates of religious
morality, its the fact that were purportedly made in
Gods image. And so on.
Our sensitivity to moral reasons that we may
intellectually reject is a valuable part of being human.
Its a good thing that someone contemplating firebombing a city, on the grounds that this action is clearly the
correct action in terms of the utilitarianism that he
intellectually endorses, hesitates on the grounds that it

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seems to treat innocent people as mere meanseven if he

strongly believes that more innocents will end up dying if
the city is left standing. Someone who has been subjected
to moral enhancement is likely to have a reduced
sensitivity to moral reasons rejected by his or her
enhancer. Moral enhancement therefore has the potential to undermine morally diverse liberal democracies
whose success depends on insight into the different and
diverse moral motivations of fellow citizens.
None of this is to say that the world is morally
optimal. We should strive to improve it. But we dont
need moral enhancement to achieve this. We dont
need superior moral vision to understand that poverty,
climate change, and terrorism are bad things. The
diverse moral views that connect with our shared
humanity are unanimous on the need to do something
about them. We do need enhanced effort and perhaps
enhanced nonmoral powers to fix poverty, climate
change, and terrorism but we dont need enhanced
moral vision to recognize that they need fixing.
Nicholas Agar is Reader in Philosophy at Victoria University
of Wellington, New Zealand. His primary research interests
are in the ethics of the new genetics. Agars latest book,
Humanitys End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement, is scheduled to be published by MIT Press this fall.

References
1. Mark Walker, Enhancing genetic virtue: A project for
twenty-first century humanity? Politics and the Life
Sciences, 2009, 28(2): 2747.

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