Moral bio-enhancement is inadequate

The idea of ‘moral bio-enhancement’ is misguided. Moral behaviour is an algorithmic structure, and it is improved by developing better systems of organisation, not by changing feelings.

The article (inter alia):

"Moral Enhancement, Freedom and the God Machine"; Savulescu, Persson; 2012 / 7400 words / article.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3431130/

proposes moral bio/psycho-enhancement as a good way to improve human behaviour. Its basic argument can be summarised as follows.

The description:

• Humans used to live in small close communities, where no technology enabled distant communication or effect.
• Moral psychology adapted to those conditions, so was only concerned with the nearby.
• Recently, technology has extended the range of communication and influence of everyone to planet-wide.
• But moral psychology has not commensurately advanced, remaining limited range.

The prescription:

• “The expansion of our powers of action as the result of technological progress must be balanced by a moral enhancement on our part.”
• “What is needed is an enhancement of the moral dispositions of […] citizens, an extension of their moral concern beyond a small circle of personal acquaintances”

But this is a weak conceptualisation of the problem, and consequently a weak proposal for a remedy.

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The way to increase moral structure is indeed by scaling it up across larger numbers of people (and other agents). But that is done with mechanisms and protocols, like the conventions and institutions of property, money, markets. Boosting empathetic instinct and such personal ‘moral enhancement’ cannot compete with that, and is inapt as a solution. This is fundamentally an informational, computational problem, not a dispositional problem.

The argument that we now live in much larger societies and our instincts no longer match makes the opposite point to the one it intends to. We are not in a situation of disorder, but in relatively advanced cooperative form. And it is the external artifice of social/regulatory machinery that has brought us here, and clearly not instinct.

Imagine that a moral enhancer pill is available, and there are now a million people with more empathy and wanting to help someone on the other side of the world. What should they do? Go there in person? Send money? Follow an effective altruism program? Lobby their government? Change what policy? … etc. Adjustment of dispositions does not address the issue.

What is the personal sentiment, the ‘disposition’, that would get food efficiently grown and distributed across national connections? There is not one. It is not a ‘disposition’ that does this, but a system of organisation. You do not solve the travelling salesperson problem, or distributed consensus problems by enhancing people's feelings. You solve them at base with algorithmic techniques, and realise those with social mechanisms/regulations/institutions and so forth.

The notion of moral bio-enhancement does not reach the question of what is right to do. It presents simple examples of choices that are plainly right or wrong, where the moral question is trivial, by already known limited methods. But the problem is not choosing between right and wrong as we know them, but knowing how to generate better plans of action, before they have even been presented as options.

And one can see that it cannot be understood as a problem of individual deficiency because, where does the cohesion come from? Enhancing individual moral judgment will only produce coherent structure if everyone's local choices align in some way, and not a simple way. It is not a matter of people feeling inclined to coordinate with others across the world, it is how to, how to organise, or get mechanisms that self-organise, that. That all seems to have been merely assumed, or rather missed, in the idea of ‘moral enhancement’, but it is the complexity of the coordination that is the very problem, not the inclination to or recognition of it.

One should not confuse morality with empathy, and neither is empathy a feeling. Empathy is better understood as a very general way to pull agents into aligned behaviour. It is a distributed local mechanism for inducing a global structure. One must see morality in this more abstract way: as the structure of coherent multi-agent systems. Empathy is merely one mechanism to implement this.

The moral enhancement proposition comes from an analysis that is insufficiently abstract. It tacitly assumes-in a solution we do not have, by imagining it is only an extension of the limited non-solution we already have. It is like seeing that walking is now inadequate for inter/cross-city freight, and suggesting we need to devise better kinds of walking. But cars and freight vehicles are not just better walking. It is a problem in (primarily) the domain of vehicles and transport engineering, not the domain of walking improvement. Likewise, moral improvement is about multi-agent interaction rendered in political practicalities, not psychological enhancement.