Gender, Race, and Moral Enhancement

Abstract

One of the central bioconservative objections to pursuing human enhancement technologies highlights the risk that the development and dissemination of such technologies will exacerbate existing inequalities, with a particular focus on general considerations of distributive justice. This line of objection, typically framed to target cognitive enhancement&s;s potential to exacerbate inequality, has also been extended to moral enhancement, which will be this chapter&s;s focus. What will be suggested here is a comparatively more optimistic picture of the relationship between moral enhancement and inequality. It will be shown that there are at least two very specific kinds of moral enhancement proposals—i.e. Socratic artificial intelligence (AI) and psychedelic moral enhancement—which offer promising resources for combatting existing patterns of marginalisation and injustice in the case of both gender and race, and with important relevance to both feminism and social equality and justice effort more broadly. By exploring these benefits, we&s;ll see that the question of whether moral enhancement would threaten to exacerbate existing inequalities is much more complex than some critics have appreciated, and consequently, that inequality-related risks identified by such critics should be suitably weighted against the kinds of benefits outlined herein.