Moral enhancement proposals often fail to be both plausible and ethically defensible while remaining distinct from cognitive enhancement or moral education. Psychedelics used as adjuncts to moral development offer a promising middle ground. Drawing on psychotherapy, education, and AI-assisted enhancement, trusting relationships between facilitator and agent plausibly maximize the success of such moral enhancement. Informed consent and therapeutic relationship literature provide concrete suggestions for facilitating trust dimensions most likely to benefit adjunctive psychedelic moral enhancement, resulting in a detailed practical proposal.
A common objection to cognitive or athletic enhancement is that using drugs or technologies to improve performance 'cheapens' the resulting achievement. This paper extends that objection to moral enhancement—using biotechnology to become a morally better person. The authors argue that if the cheapened-achievement objection holds for cognitive or athletic enhancement, it can also apply to some forms of moral enhancement, but not all. Highly speculative or determinative technologies might diminish the value of moral self-improvement. However, more practical forms—where drugs or technologies play an adjunctive or facilitative role, such as psychedelics in moral learning, 'Socratic AI,' or empathy enhancement via virtual reality—largely evade the objection, assuming those technologies work as intended. The most promising forms of moral enhancement thus avoid a leading critique of other enhancements.
As interest in psychedelics like psilocybin, ketamine, and MDMA revives and their legal status changes in many places, ethical guidelines are urgently needed for both medical and non-medical use. This paper argues that focusing only on medical applications neglects potentially valuable uses in other contexts and raises ethical issues including hype, exceptionalism, informed consent, therapeutic touch, data collection, and balancing access with safety. The authors call for renewed attention to the treatment-versus-enhancement distinction from bioethics and stress that guidelines should be flexible and context-sensitive. They recommend incorporating diverse stakeholder perspectives and cross-sector collaboration in future research and policy for psychedelic bioethics.
A protocol is described for a scoping review that will map ethical arguments for and against the voluntary use of psychedelics as moral bioenhancers. The review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology, searching multiple databases for published and unpublished sources that present explicit ethical arguments. Sources focused primarily on clinical treatment or unavailable in English will be excluded. Two independent raters will assess eligibility, with disagreements resolved by a third reviewer. Data will be charted and analyzed following PRISMA-ScR guidelines.