---
title: "Moral enhancement"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_enhancement"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:23:48.024842+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== The Freedom to Fall ===
John Harris criticised moral enhancement on the grounds of 'The Freedom to Fall'. His principal argument is that moral enhancement is wrong because it restricts one's freedom to do wrong, making it impossible to act immorally, thus undermining their autonomy. Harris referred to Book III of Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Milton reported God saying, 'Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.' Harris believed that one should hang on to their freedom to fall. Without it, one is unable to discern right from wrong, taking away both freedom and virtue. Harris asserted that there is no virtue involved in performing activities that one is instructed to.
There are two further criticisms of moral enhancement. First, the distinction between right and wrong is highly context-dependent. For example, in the case of self-defense, harming another person can potentially be morally justifiable, as it might be the best compromise of welfare. Harris suggested that it is unclear whether MBE would be nuanced enough to take such situations into account. Second, he pointed out that there is an element of value judgement when one makes a choice between 'right' and 'wrong', and he said that people are entitled to willingly make the wrong choices. This would not be possible with MBE, which compromises this 'freedom to fall.'
Harris advocates science, innovation and knowledge — particularly in the form of education — as possible solutions to the possibility of mass destruction. Again, he refers to Milton, in particular the power of freedom and sense of justice installed within subjective selves. Most importantly, the roles of freedom and autonomy entails that one cannot have the sufficiency to stand without the freedom to fall.

==== Replies ====
Harris's "Freedom to Fall" has been widely criticized by MBE proponents, who have argued that MBE is benign to freedom and can sometimes increase freedom. Freely chosen moral enhancement is no threat to freedom, as described by Vojin Rakić. By reducing biases that impair moral judgement, Thomas Douglas argues, MBE can remove constraints on the ability to be moral. This does not take away anyone's freedom to be immoral. Instead, it simply grants them more freedom to be moral. Similarly, Persson and Savulescu point out that increasing someone's motivation to act rightly for the right reasons makes them no less free than "the garden-variety virtuous person" who already has that motivation.
Several MBE proponents have pointed out that Harris's "Freedom to Fall" assumes the controversial view that if someone's actions are fully determined by previous causes, then that person cannot act freely. If anyone can be free to act one way when they will certainly act another way, then MBE can cause moral improvement without taking away any valuable freedom. Most philosophers believe that free will is compatible with determinism in this way. If they are right, then MBE can improve moral behavior without affecting anyone's freedom.

=== Sufficiency of non-biomedical methods ===
Terri Murray disputes the claim by Persson and Savulescu that political will and moral education are insufficient to ensure that people will behave responsibly, claiming that Persson and Savulescu unjustly reify moral dispositions in biology. Murray argues that political and social pressure are sufficient to improve behavior, explaining that although certain Islamic countries state that women should be forced to wear the burka and stay indoors because men cannot control their sexual urges, this is shown to be false by men in Western countries, both Muslim or otherwise, exercising their ability to control their sexual urges. She explained that this is due to the deterrent effect of both laws and social pressure:

"The truth is that there is a political will to treat women as equals in the West that is apparently absent from countries governed by Islamic law. What Savulescu and Persson do is to similarly treat the will not to be moral on a larger scale as though it were an inevitable and natural part of human biology rather than a political and cultural choice."

=== Ethical basis of moral enhancement ===
Since the nature of morality has historically caused wide disagreements, several authors have questioned whether it is possible to come up with a sufficiently widely accepted ethical basis for MBE, especially with respect to what qualities should be enhanced. Joao Fabiano argues that attempting to produce a full account of morality in order to enable moral enhancement would be "both impractical and arguably risky". Fabiano also suggests that "we seem to be far away from such an account" and notes that 'the inability for prior large-cooperation" plays a role in this.

==== Replies ====
Although there are a wide variety of disagreeing ethical systems, David DeGrazia argues, there are “points of overlapping consensus among competing, reasonable moral perspectives.” Traditional moral education generally teaches children to stay within that consensus. DeGrazia’s idea of this overlapping consensus includes disapproval of antisocial personality disorder, sadism, some kinds of moral cynicism, defective empathy, out-group prejudice, inability to face unpleasant realities, weak will, impulsivity, lack of nuance in moral understanding, and inability to compromise. Biomedically reducing these traits would, per DeGrazia’s reasoning, count as moral enhancement from these “reasonable moral perspectives.”