Moral Bioenhancements Part Two

about in this one. And without further ado, here begins episode the second. So the whole concept of moral bio enhancement has lots and lots and lots of problems, some of which we kind of touched on either through our

tone or content so far. Yeah, and well, and I want to give a shout out real quick to a really great review of the literature on moral bio enhancements that I was reading by Jonas Specker and colleagues called The Ethical Desirability of Moral bio Enhancement a review of reason and and a lot of a lot of the things that I'm saying are are things that that that that Specker in our colleagues, um pulled, pulled together from just tons and tons and tons of of amazing thinkers

on the subject. So just wanted to put that out there. Go read that paper if you'd like, a very very theramic breakdown, but big problems. Yeah, who who decides what's moral? That's a big one. Yeah, who who's the moral authority? I don't feel like I'm qualified. Well, I mean, I'll stop up. So I understand that as a concern, But I also think that this is the same problem we

already face in our moral decision today. So you've got to make moral decisions in your life, and you're either trying to think through ethical reasoning yourself and consider consequences and trying to make moral decisions on your own, or maybe in a lot of cases, you're sort of offloading

some of that thinking. Two people you would consider a moral authority share like like a like a religion that you abscribe to, a subscribe a word, let's say it is um or or or or or like like like the theory of objectivism, like like some kind of theory like that sure, or even just to a person. I mean, there are people who live among us that we often think of as kind of moral genius. Mr Rogers would

have been a moral authority. Yeah. You look at somebody and say, I think that person knows what's up when when it comes to how we should act, and I'll follow their lead because it sounds like they know they know what they're talking about. So we already do this. We either make moral decisions on our own or we defer to a moral authority. So so we're already faced with the problem of who decides what is and isn't moral. This would just be adding on another step to that.

Do you also have a device or therapy further guiding you toward that conclusion? Yeah? And and right now, even if you have an authority who is proclaiming what is and isn't moral, every individual has the freedom to agree or disagree with that and to act upon that in whatever way he or she sees fit. So in some cases there might be like consequences. Absolutely, there could be. There could be very severe consequences, and that would probably prevent the vast majority of people from acting out on

those thoughts, even if they held them right. Uh, some people might still act out on them and then suffer those consequences. That history is filled with those stories. Every story that involves the word martyr probably has some element of that in it, right. Uh. In some cases you might agree with the person who is labeled as martyr. In some cases you might not. But in either case it's someone who's who whose stance is very different from

that of the authority figure. The case with moral bio enhancements is you would have no choice but to agree with whatever the authority figure had determined as moral, because the bio enhancement is mandating, is making that decision for you? Right? Well, so that's a different question entirely than I would say, because there we're talking about whether we could or should force other people to undergo moral enhancement. Is that not

inherently immoral? I don't know that's a good question. I mean, so I was considering people who would willingly choose to undergo a moral enhancement. So imagine you could you could elect for a free surgery that would make you a better person. Would you do it? I think the problem is that the people who would elect for that are the ones that we least need to undergo the procedure. Well, we could all be better. I mean, I I think a lot of us, we're familiar with this, we wish

we were better people in a way. I know I wish I was a person. There are times when I think about how I could be a better guy than I am, and I'm like, oh, man, like I let my friends down, and I wish that I hadn't done that.

And I agree with that. And I think the people that when when you start talking about moral bio enhancements and you start envisioning the sort of problems that it's meant to correct, the people who are perhaps the most accountable foresaid problems seem to be the least likely to elect to undergo a procedure. They might say, I don't have a problem. I'm find how I am exactly you're

everyone else has the problem. I'm sitting pretty, and like, well, the reason you're sitting pretty is because of the oppression you're you're dealing out to everyone else. Well, I mean, see, that's the I would argue. I don't think, first of all, I don't think moral bio enhancements being mandated being a a compelled thing everyone has to have it. I don't think that's a great idea. However, I think that's the

only way it would work. Like I don't. I don't think moral bio enhancements are a good idea generally speaking, in that I think there are too many problems that over out that out way the benefits, uh And the benefits only exist if it works the way we want it to work, as opposed to some perversion of that vision. Well, I feel like we're getting there a little ahead of ourselves here then, because we we should talk more about

what these problems are sure. Uh well, I mean, one, we've kind of identified the idea that you have to have to follow a moral authorities vision of what is no isn'm moral And it may be that your own view of morality doesn't match up to that person's morality. It maybe the morality our sense of morality changes over time.

Uh yeah. Well, the theories like like relativism say that that morality is is an inherently personal thing, that that that that you know, my morality cannot be your morality Joe, and that that neither of our morality is going to be nulls or Jonathan's um, I mean, and on on a society wide thing. That's that's definitely a question you've also got um, you've all so got uh moral pluralism, which which says that that some aspects of morality are

are going to counter themselves. That if you're acting completely morally in one way, it's a trolley problem essentially, Um that that you're you're never because of the way that the world works, You're you're never going to make a perfect decision. Right. There's not there's not a black and white binary world out there where everything is either moral

or not moral. There are issues where you are you might be faced with a complicated problem that has no good solution, but you still have to make a decision. And and that becomes problematic in a world where you say, well, we've got a procedure that's going to force people to act in a quote unquote moral way, because that means someone has to make that either someone has to make that uh decision ahead of time about what is the moral outcome of those decisions or whatever guiding factors push

you to one choice over another. And then, like you said, you've you've got the problem of of what if our

ideas about morality change over time, because they do continually. Uh, it's it's I'm sure, I'm positive that what was considered good and moral six years ago is not the exact same thing that we consider today, and that's that's that's a long term kind of concept of like if these if these changes, if if these treatments are irreversible, then who makes who makes the decision to start changing them

down the line as as needed? Well, I mean, yes, I think that's an interesting thing to consider, But I also think that sort of falls into the same thing I was talking about earlier, where this is already a

problem we're faced with just having moral brains. So we have moral faculties that are informed by our sort of natural predispositions with whatever genetic element there is, and then also by our education and socialization which happened at certain periods in time, and we get sort of moral rules implanted in us. You can see this in changes between generations where the older generation has been taught a certain thing about what's moral, and then you know their kids

might not agree with them about that. Uh So, in a way, I'd say this is also already a thing that we face. We're talking again just about adding coercion. Well, except that I would argue a person can also come to the conclusion like they can change their right, they can change their view, and so could a bio enhancement. I mean it depending upon the implementation. Yeah, and and depending upon the the desires of whomever whatever entity is

actually administering them. Right, So it gets more complicated. It's not like it's something that would be decided on an individual basis, or at least not the individual who's actually having the experience. It would be decided upon from an authoritative perspective. Right, So could you have the country of vote on everybody's brain should be forced to think for the bio enhancements are. Because once the bio enhancements are and then you have the question. It's almost like our

our discussion on e voting. How do you know that the the true desires of the person are being reflected in the outcome? Yeah? Well, well here's another problem. This is hypothetical. What would it actually be possible? We sort of talked about this earlier, But I think is it possible from a technological point of view to have something like this? And I think the answer could be both yes and no, as in, we know there's a brain basis for morality that you can tamper with it with

electrodes or drugs, things like that. But morality also appears to be this complex cross brain region phenomenon, meaning we can't yet foresee a way to control outcomes with precision, and the question is could we ever do that? Uh? For for example, with with saratonin, seratonin is just let's all chill out brain chemical. It also has a hand in how we sleep, our memory and coding and recall, our sexual behavior and performance, how we process pain, our appetite,

how we process visual information. It has a hand in all of these. And so, uh, just like tossing SSR eyes at the entire population wouldn't really be moral. It's a it's a new kid for more of it kind of option, right, Yeah, and it's really too bad that we aren't like the crusty doll in that Treehouse of Horrors. Oh here's the problem. Yeah. Um, but see that that brings up another thing that we'll talk about in a minute. What is the crusty dolls life like after he gets

switched to nice? It's not good, isn't. No. He lives a life of humble subservience. But anyway, so we'll get to that in a minute. But another practical problem I want to point out is Okay, so we've got this problem with precision in the brain. We don't know exactly where to put the micro electrodes to make you stop kicking small children. Um Man, I don't hope they never do. So we could study this to try to figure it out.

But scientific ethics make it difficult to conduct experiments like this because, okay, so imagine you're trying to get institutional approval to perform brain surgery or introduce psychoactive drug regimens on people in order to see what makes them spend less time leaving jerky YouTube comments. That just seems like you're going to run into experimental ethics problems. That's what

college students are for. Just elect to go and be a subject in one of those testing procedures and they get like twenty bucks at the end of it and

everything's fine. Or even even if you took a population of of of criminals, of people who had murdered people, you would still have really have a really hard time, rightfully so getting getting permission from from any kind of uh good board of humans too to carry out these kinds of experiments, because any time that you that you do something to someone against their will when they are when they technically do not have a disease like a

like a lack of moral virtue is not a disease. Yeah, this is another problem because then you're going to have a conflict between the ethics of the experiment and scientific rigor. Because ideally what you'd want is a randomized sample to do your experiments on. You'd have a big problem if okay, you say so too. In order to do this most ethically, we'd have to have people who volunteered to want to

be a part of this experiment. But that would introduce a self selection bias into the sample of people you're performing it on, which is going to change the outcome. Uh So, Yeah, there's all kinds of trouble in trying to do experiments on this and and bringing up the issue of you know, who do you who do you perform these experiments on? Uh, it's not just an academic question.

I mean history is filled with examples of some very ethically questionable, if not downright unethical, experimental projects that subjected people without their knowledge. Two pretty intense and extreme experiments you know, in the name of science, and justified in some way or another at the time. But from today's perspective, from our moral perspective today, we would say, yeah, that is all kinds of wrong. So it is a very

tricky subject. Another complication I went to want to introduce, what if moral cognition isn't as local as it once looked, or what if there is no such thing as moral cognition. I'm not going to go into the whole argument, but there. There's another paper in social neuroscience from called where in the Brain is Morality Everywhere and Maybe Nowhere? By Leanne Young and James Dungan. They answer the question in the title. You don't even have to read the rest of the paper.

Uh No, it's so uh. Essentially, they asked the questions of is there really a uniquely moral part of the brain or is this just a label we're applying to aspects of the emotional brain and the social brain and uh, And so they look for it and they say, yeah, there are some regions that have been implicated, like some of the stuff we talked about earlier, think of intermedial

prefrontal cortex and stuff like that. But it's also just a very complicated picture, and nobody's identified this moral brain substrate there's nothing there. Um, so we may be there may be some folly in our approach here. If we're looking for where is the moral brain? There might not be a moral brain. Morality might be more like an emergent behavioral phenomenon that we're describing that comes from some emotions and some social tendencies. And we don't know if

in fact that turns out to be the case. That makes it even more complicated to come up with a moral bio enhancement that would actually be effective, right, because then what you'd actually have to be modifying is you can't pinpoint morality in the brain. You'd have to be

modifying emotions brain. And now you're really like, if you weren't already getting people a little squeaky about the idea of of tweaking morality tweaking emotions, then you're thinking, wow, it sounds like, uh, you know, you're you're creating just a little dial on me that has a very narrow spectrum of the human experience experience and everything else is

off limits. Yeah, And this this actually I would say that this conundrum is something we might expect from what we've already seen with the overlap between moral behavior and like SSR eyes which do mess with emotions. Uh. So here's one more complication. I want to introduce technologically, the plastic and adaptive adult brain. This is the thing we've discovered is that the adult brain is more were adaptable than we thought, and which is wonderful. Yeah. So there

are examples of the adult brain adapting to problems. Forms of neural injury can, for example, be offset by ad hoc adaptations using the rest of the brain. One example is people with memory loss coming up with cognitive strategies

to offset memory deficit. Yeah. It's kind of like if you work in a really small office and everyone has a very specific job, and someone has to call out sick at the last minute, and then everyone else has to figure out, how can we continue to do our work plus carry the load of this person who is not there, even though they specialize in something that we do not ourselves typically handle. Right, And you might not be able to exactly cover that person's duties, but you

can sort of do it. Uh. And another one would be since lost, people who have lost one sense like site can sometimes compensate with adapted cognition based on different senses. Uh. Daredevil, Right, I was just going to say the same thing that I decided I've been too geeky for this episode soiled back. But here's the question I thought about. What if we apply this to moral bio enhancement. So you go in and you do the equivalent, the positive equivalent of applying

a brain lesion that introduces modified sociopathy. You put in some kind of modification that makes people very nice to each other. Other parts of your brain are still going to want to be selfish. So what if your brain adapts to the change and finds a way to circumvent it and revert to baseline jerky nous. Yeah, life finds a way and this yeah, jerk faces find a way. Yes, in this case were it's not that even the person in question is making a conscious effort to be selfish.

It's the brain itself is adapting to these changes and saying this is not the way things are supposed to work. So other parts of the brains start behaving in a slightly different way in order to kind of get us close to that previous condition before moral bio enhancement as you possibly can get. One of the other arguments that I saw was, um, should we should we really be just concentrating on treating actual mental disorders before we go like whole hog on something that isn't a disorder, like

like moral disorders. Right. And then my response to this is that the problem with that line of questioning is it starts to argue for a zero some kind of perspective on the subject, saying that if you focus on one, you cannot by necessity focus on another. And my argument would be that you could certainly have these areas of

research all working, perhaps even in parallel, cooperatively with one another. Uh. And but it is it is a good question if you could say, like, well, we have some very real problems that we do not understand how to tackle in a way that is beyond just treating some symptoms. Why are we worried about something for people who have quote unquote healthy brains. Uh? Shouldn't we focus on the people who are really struggling with these diseases injuries, disorders and

worry about that. First, Jonathan, I think I agree with your first criticism. I mean, I am wary of this type of question in general. That's just like, well what about uh, you know, what about is m of like there's another problem though, Uh so to remove the first problem, problems can exist at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So I think that this is a good question if you can point to factors that make it clear that we really are going to need to choose between one

or the other. But if you can't point to factors that make it clear that it's one or the other, then I don't think this question, uh necessarily matters. Well, how on another one then sure? Okay, in a world where some people are artificially moral, would would the regular people take advantage of them? Yes? I think so absolutely. If you know that every time you come by your neighbor's house and say, hey, can I borrow twenty bucks,

they're going to say yes. There are gonna be a lot of people banging on that neighbor's door until that neighbor doesn't have any twenty dollar bills left, which which brings us back to uh, something that we that we covered earlier in the show. Where where could regular people be allowed to exist in a world where anyone has this this altruistic treatment. So we wouldn't just be getting rid of murderers, we'd be getting rid of people who just you know, want to have basic uh, non harmful,

pleasure driven lives. Right. Yeah, let's let's say we've got let's say we've got someone middle class hedonism. Yeah, hedonism. We don't even need the hedonism part. But sure, let's say let's just say, let's take it. Uh, let's make a hypothetical person. And this person leads uh, you know, typical life. They've got work, they've got some outside interests. More or less, they keep to themselves. They don't really socialize with their neighbors. They don't know their neighbors names

or anything. They're not mean to their neighbors, they aren't thoughtless towards them, but they don't go out their way to know them either. Sure, but they really love uh spawn camping in in an online shooter game. Sure, it's just it's just how it's how they release their tension. Right, it's a legitimate strategy, I'll remind you. But it's yes, so they will take advantage of something that is not

explicitly against the rules. So therefore they're not really doing anything wrong, although their pleasure is coming at the expense of other people's enjoyment. Or even even if you want to take that away, let's just say that they happen to notice that a name or is having a hard time for whatever reason, but they don't feel any need to help. They're not making it worse, they're not judging

the neighbor. They're just not helping. You could argue, well, this approach would mean that people would feel better about going out and helping others. It's not even that they are taking advantage of other people. It's that they are not ignoring them. They're not They're not discounting someone else's misfortune or doing something like in like in this spawn camping example, that that's that's earnestly harmless, like the grand scheme of the right. It is irritating as all get out.

I say it's a legitimate strategy, that's merely a quote from a from a video series. I don't actually spawn camp well, so I want to introduce a modification on this. A lot of I think a lot of actually very destructive behavior in the world, and I'm sure y'all would probably agree, is not even explicitly emminal behavior, not like

violent behavior. For example, there are systemically destructive phenomena in the world in which many people participate, but nobody personally breaks a law, or does anything violent to anybody else. One example I think might be some practices on Wall

Street that you could point to. That's okay. So you have thousands of people who collectively participate in a system that you could probably predict is going to lead to a bubble that's gonna burst, that's going to massively devalue national, probably global economy, lead to millions of people being out of work. You know, So there's a system that is pretty much guaranteed to cause misery. People are participating in the system without breaking any laws, and uh and so

and and so what do you do about this? I mean, this, in one way is regular behavior. It's not necessary deviant. They're not you know, beating people up in the street, not breaking any laws. What would you think about this kind of thing if you've just you're just part of

a system that has perverse outcomes. Well, and this goes back to those arguments the philosophers were making at the top of the show, right, the idea that we focus so much on short term as opposed to long term, that they would argue, using moral bio enhancements, you would start to think more in long term, and that you could still have that system in place. You could completely have an investment system in place, but that the behaviors of everyone involved would be more about trying to invest

and go for a long term return on that investment. Sure. Sure to take it back to the to the online shooter example. Uh, if you know, you could, you could potentially argue that that someone who has been spawn camped just one too many times develop some kind of some kind of heart problem and eventually that that type of repetitive emotional stress leads to a heart tech. H that's a fair I'm not sure if fair is the right

word for it. But thank you, but so many bullets and overwatch, I'm just ready for someone to someone to to feel my pain. No, but but but that but that that that same kind of drop in the ocean sort of sort of behavior that you that you can make an argue argument for in many different types of situations. I think could could certainly be applied. That that, yes, that that it is that we need a mandatory universal

moral upgrade. On the flip side of that, though, is there any evidence to suggest that selfish behavior can sometimes be of benefit to a species? Hey, I mean, let's let's go back to the let's go back to the Wall Street analogy. Now, I think it's quite easy to see how, if you know, you look at like what has happened in various depressions and in financial markets throughout history, it's obvious how certain behaviors in in financial markets and in on Wall Street can lead to pain and suffering

around the world. Sure, every single every single major bubble burst, you would argue, like you just look at the the outcome of that, right, the bubble burst, and you and you think, wow, how could we have let this happen? But then again you'll also get plenty of defenders who say, look, yeah, you know, sometimes things go wrong, but this is what drives our economy. We've got investment and even maybe sort of like risky investment, it generates tons of wealth, it

creates jobs. Uh. And if there is something to what people like that are saying, and this isn't the only case where it would apply, you could say that, Okay, sometimes people might engage in risky, selfish behavior that could cause harm to others, and you might look at it as morally dubious, but it also has lots of positive out comes that we depend on, uh, Yeah, which which brings me to, uh to another question. Could could we

nice our society to death? Um and and allow me to to bring in a an animal, an animal tail about this one? Okay, not a fable, no, because this is literal, actual biology that's going on out there in the world. Um. Okay, So some spiders actually live in colonies. I'm sorry to break it to you, um, but most

spiders don't because they're cannibals. Um. But you know. But but spider cities of up to like ten thousand spiders lived together in some parts of the world, hanging out, not eating each other, taking care of each other's eggs, making repairs to the to the entire web, and sharing their food. But um, but but in this specific but in the specific type of spider um every generation that they go through, about one of the colonies just die out,

just go completely extinct. Um and And so these these researchers from the University of British Columbia looked into it recently, and they discovered that once the colonies reach a certain size, they essentially share themselves to starvation because the overall web isn't catching enough food to support the entire colony. And

they overshare and they all die. Huh yeah, yeah. So so there we have an argument saying if we get all, if everyone's on the same page, we eventually just enthusiast collapse. Yeah we we everyone ultimately goes extinct because we weren't cold and callous enough to let parts of us go extinct. Well here's another thing, Uh, think about who are some of the greatest political leaders in history? Just think of some in your head here. You don't have to say

who they are. I bet whoever you've got in mind had to do some really immoral stuff in order to achieve goals that ultimately they we now look back on and say, I'm glad that happened. I mean, whoever it is, a lot of people might might pick Abraham Lincoln, but it's not like Abraham Lincoln just governed with like a squeaky clean you know what I mean? Or whoever you want to pick, leaders tend to have to do some

crappy stuff. So even the really good ones, and mostly I mean even if it's yeah, even if it's not a conscious effort to do something crappy, maybe that they have to do something crappy in order to avoid an even more crappy consequence exactly. So would we be hamstringing ourselves and sort of preventing greatness and preventing change if we say, well, everybody's always got to be a super goody two shoes all the time. What if sometimes we need people who tread into immoral waters in order to

ultimately take us to a better place. And then there's the the question that's asked in a clockwork are in, which is, if you remove a person's ability to make an immoral choice, are they no longer a person? If? If matter? Yeah, I mean Clark Karns just kind of tricky to write. Like the American version that was published was published without the twenty first chapter, So chapters one through twenty you have Alex's sociopathic character who does unspeakably

awful things. He is not a redeemable character at all through the vast majority of the novel, which is why I think American editors demanded the twenty first chapter be left off. Spoiler alert, he gets redeemed in the twenty first chapter, So for twenty chapters he's a terrible person, even after he's undergone the Little Eco treatment which gives him this aversion therapy. Where he feels physically ill every time he wants to uh perform an act of violence.

He still wants to do the ultra violence. He just can't enjoy it. Yeah, he can't. He can't think about it because it makes him sick. But he still has the desire to do it. He has not changed as a person. He only changes in that twenty first chapter as a result of maturing of growing up. So some people have argued that Burgess's approach to that form morality was a little shortsighted, like two little naive and optimistic saying that you'll just grow out of being a sociobath

and then you'll be fine. Um and uh. And people say that the way that the book ends on chapter twenty, where he is quote unquote cured of the Lotto Eco treatment, it no longer affects him, so he can go back to the person he was at the beginning of the novel. Uh. That that raises a very tough question for the audience. Is it better to remove the ability to make these terrible decisions and have a quote unquote peaceful society or is it better to allow people to retain their humanity?

But the consequence is you've got this unease and unrest and chaos us in society and burgesses. An answer eventually was, if you wait around long enough, people grow up and then they stop being total jerk faces. Well, you know, some people do grow up. Some people grow out of certain types of behaviors. I think. I think just rampaging around murdering people all the time doesn't sound like something

people usually grow out of. I'm not sure, to be fair, most people who do that behavior don't necessarily get start a chance to continue all that long. Well, they also don't necessarily get started at age thirteen, and most of them tend to be if you look at the grand scheme of criminal psychology, it tends to be later in life. But at any the point in fiction versus reality. But

but no, but but but but it is. It is a really interesting moral question of whether or not our personal choices and morality are a part of what makes us human, and whether we would be removing and an integral part of the human experience by by implementing some kind of treatment like this, will we just has becomes some kind of fleshy robot If we were unable a robots at least in theory only able to act within

the parameters of its programming. Yeah, so would we just become robots because we would have the equivalent of programming. It would just be here's a list of things you are not allowed to do, and not not just from laws, you physically cannot do them because of these enhancements. So here's the thing. I don't know if we maybe we have, but I don't know if we've talked yet in this episode about what is the internal experience of this life.

We've talked about sort of the external behavioral outcomes, but what does it feel like to have one of these modifications performed to your brain? And since it's hypothetical, it's really exactly I'm just saying, trying to imagine it. Would it be a case where you really want to do something immoral and you feel the urge to do it, but something prevents you, right like you're you're cybernetic and

plan't get it out your cybernetic implant. Make sure that you can't, you know, go out, go outside and kick that kid that's been irritating you all day. It's not that you don't want to do it is that you physically are unable to do it or does it change your fundamental desire? Right? And that seems harder to imagine. In that case, would you still be you? And you could argue that if it was something that was done

from birth, then it is you. It's the but it's the only it's not that you you could have been right, Yeah, it's you as mandated. Well, and I and I think that that based on the neurobiological view of of of what we currently know about how we could implement this kind of treatment. Um, I think I think that's more likely actually that that latter thing, where where just are our very personalities would be different, um, more than having like a button in your brain that like prevents the

kicking mechanism from traveling through your nervous system. Well, I mean, I guess here's one thing we could compare it to. Imagine you're somebody who takes an s s R I for depression or something like that. How does that change you do? Do you like feel depression coming on but

then something stops it? Or do you just is it just something that's no longer a feature of your brain in the same way, So so sort of like have you guys ever had like a really bad headache and then taken some headache medication and you can tell there's still a headache, but you're not feeling the pain anymore. Because that happens with me and migrains where I'm aware that there is something in my brain that is not right, that it is it would be causing me agony. But

the medication I am on prevents that pain sensation. But there's still like it almost feels like a presence, like

almost like it's a physical thing in my head. Um. I I have, if I may share this experience with y'all, taken ss R S for anxiety and depression and and for me, the way that it's worked is, um it's it's more like it's sort of like all get an idea, um and and an anxious or a depressive idea and uh and and without the medication, I I have sometimes had the experience of not being able to escape from the idea, kind of have that idea repeat and and get worse and kind of spiral in my head um fixating.

Yeah exactly, um And But but with that kind of medication, I've had the experience of of just being able to shut it off, just going like this is ridiculous, dude, stop it and and having and having that work, as opposed to other times when when I have that thought and in my brain is just like nope, blur, forget about being any sort of productive member of society. You are going to be paralyzed with self doubt and fear. This is just what you're doing for the rest of

your day. I'm familiar with it, and so yeah, so so I mean, I don't know, like I it's it's a very strange thought to to try to imagine that that kind of thing going over into into moral territory of like of like may in like I really want to cut that dude off in traffic. But I guess I can just calm down. I guess, I guess just everything that's going to be fine. It would be interesting to live in a world where road rage is just a term of something that used to happen, right, Like,

that's a weird thought, especially here in Atlanta. So so let me ask you guys a question. I think we can wrap up this discussion. It's gone on pretty long, and uh, we have another section that I think is completely superfluous, So I cut it. But I do have a question for both of you, so, and I'll be happy to answer it to your own personal response to the idea of moral bio enhancement, do you think, ultimately it sounds like something that we should absolutely pursue or

do you think the negatives outweigh any positives. What was your personal feeling, Joe, Well, I mean, I think it's very complicated for all the reasons we've talked about here and probably some other ones we haven't even thought of. I don't necessarily think that. Um. I think there's a tendency that a lot of us who have experienced dystopian science fiction have to want to say anything that sounds kind of creepy is something that is ultimately like no, no, no,

that you know, we we shouldn't even look there. And I don't feel like that. I don't feel like this is something we shouldn't even look into. But I'm I'm certainly not ready to commit to bio moral bio enhancement, especially not compulsory moral bio enhancement. UM. I don't know voluntary moral bio enhancement that I'm trying to think of what exactly would be the problem with that, and nothing's coming to mind it's hard to say without the actual ability to do it, right, because we can't we can't

observe the results. Yeah, I think I think that the only real risk is having those people being taken advantage of. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think that the compulsory is what would be flat flat out evil, just that that would be completely so copletely immoral. Um, I'm taking a stance right there. And uh, and I don't know, like I think actually, uh, allowing the possibility of voluntary moral bio enhancement might range

towards evil a little bit too. I feel pretty strongly, um it kind of surprisingly like like I'm kind of pro a lot of of other voluntary brain enhancements, Um, but but this one, I don't know. I just I have real squeaky feelings about. Okay, well, let me let me test you on that little if that's all right, Yeah, totally alright. So we we we have a serial killer who has been caught by police. And this is a guy who's murdered twenty seven people. Uh. He tells the

police that he will not stop. If he is set free, he will do it again. Now, this guy has the several options he can go to prison for the rest of his life, or he can elect to take some proven bio enhancement therapy and we'll just assuem optimal conditions. Here we've actually shown that it works in some way. There's not a danger of this somehow going wrong right and has So we could put him in prison the rest of his life, or we could give him this thing and release him and he could live out his

days and never harm anyone again. Do you still think that, like if in a in a in a perfect world where where the treatment was was not a lobotomy and uh not the kind of of aggressive drug therapy um that that has sometimes been practiced, then then yes, if if the treatment truly was changing just his desire to go kill a whole bunch of people, then then then of course that would be beautiful. But that's a big

But that's a big if. That's such a hypothetical thing, and I and I don't personally envision us figuring out enough about the brain and enough about about ourselves to to do that certainly in our lifetimes. Maybe ever, is that too cynical? Well, the thing I like to think that we're capable of everything, except for the fact that human beings also change over time, so as we gain an understanding of how things are, we don't necessarily have

an understanding of how things will be. So that's that's another I mean, you would think that our scientific understanding would start to outpace other factors, because it's not like evolution happens super fast. But that is still a factor, Lauren. I I side with you mainly on this. I I mean,

I'm clockwork. Orange is one of my favorite novels of all time, and it's largely because I read the American addition that left off that twenty first chapter, which to me makes it the readers responsibility to answer the question, which is the greater evil? Right? Which are these these

things that come out are the greater evil? The the allowing people who have immoral thoughts and who act upon them to exist, or removing the ability for a person to make any choice other than the ones that have been mandated by an authority figure, even if that's even if that's a range of behaviors, is that better? And more often than not, I I side with the that you shouldn't mess with that, at least not too much.

I do think, to Joe your point, the idea of pursuing it in a way that is a treatment for pathological issues makes sense, and that it's treating a person who otherwise doesn't have that capability. It's it's literally a pathological issue, whether it's from an injury or an illness condition, whatever it may be. And and and it's a danger to yourself or others kind of situation. Yes, that kind of situation, I would say that makes sense. I think

anything beyond that is at best problematic. I've also seen some criticisms. I didn't go into it in the notes because it didn't have time to really read and digest all the information, but I've seen critics of the idea of moral bio enhancement say, just based upon the way we have scientific progress and technical progress alone would suggest that we would be able to address this in a very piecemeal kind of way, which could end up having

disastrous consequences. Where it's like the idea of having that superhuman intelligent machine and you say, hey, I want you to find a solution for world peace, and its solution is to kill everybody, because now there's no way you could have conflict. Uh. That kind of idea that if you were to address one part of morality without being able to affect all of it, you could have some

unintended catastrophic consequences. And I think the capacity for things to go wrong is so great that it outweighs the

capacity for it to be a benefit to society. Um. That being said, I would love to see some really progressive, effective means of having people kind of come to uh uh a moral enhancement that doesn't involve bio enhancement, whether it's the education or uh some form of outreach things like that, so that people have that experience and are able to expand that that small social group to a larger group of people, and also expand that short term

gain perspective for a long term one. Yeah. Another complication on top of all of this is that in the example we gave about, you know, somebody who's been already convicted of many violent crimes. Um, you'd also have the problem that people often don't just view prison as like preventatives. It's a punishment, right, and so that that would also be a complication. So imagine somebody has done a bunch of very harmful evil and now we're saying, well, what we could do with this person is give them a

treatment that would mean they never do anything like that. Again, a lot of people would not be satisfied with that. Say, know, what needs to happen is this person must suffer in response to what they did. It's not Yeah, this is where you start to you know what, how do you view the purpose of prisons? Is it meant to be a punishment? Is it meant to be a center for rehabilitation? And the concept of the penitentiary being being making someone

making someone become penitent, right, it's in the name exactly. Well, that was an amazing conversation about concepts that are pretty heavy. I appreciate that you guys took the time to have that conversation with me, because again, like I love this whole arena of thought. It's fascinating to me. Uh and it's one that I think about a lot. And I would argue that in a lot of ways forward thinking being in kind of an optimistic view of what the future might be. A lot of that optimism depends upon

the concept of compassion. And if you were to argue that compassion is having a less relevant place, maybe your solution to that issue would be Hey about moral bio enhancements but as we've discussed done here, we're not so convinced that would be the best approach, especially not compulsory moral bio enhancements. But I'm curious to hear what our listeners think. Yeah, you guys get in touch with us. Yeah, you can send us an email our addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can

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