Commentary: Modeling the social Dynamics of moral Enhancement while illustrating some basic divergencies in the Enhancement debate

Abstract

The article by Anders Sandberg and Joao Fabiano in this issue of Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics is a very important addition to the enhancement literature. It reports an important simulation study of the stability of prosociality in society and at the same time implicitly illustrates some of the enduring uncertainties and divisions in the philosophical enhancement debate that often lead to participants in that debate talking at cross purposes. These come to the surface when reading Sandberg and Fabiano’s article, because specifying the mathematical model requires that terms be defined and operationalized to a degree that is unusual in the philosophical literature. In this brief comment I will outline three such uncertainties or divisions that come to the surface in Sandberg and Fabiano’s article.