People's Attitudes towards Moral Bioenhancement

The paper represents an empirical study of public attitudes towards moral bioenhancement. Moral behavior is essential to human society nowadays. The issue of moral enhancement is important since moral behavior and humanity are, along with rationality, a precious and essential value that constitutes us as human beings. Cognitive and scientific progress allows people to increase their capabilities and use them for both good and bad. Scientific advances offer a possible solution for some forms of the immoral behavior, misbehavior and crimes:moral enhancement of human beings through biomedical and biotechnological means, provided they are safe and effective. Bioenhancement implies biomedical interventions that are used to improve human form or functioning beyond what is necessary to restore or sustain health. Moral enhancement can be defined as an increase in the moral value of the actions, motives or the character of a moral agent. It implies the improvement of moral dispositions.Vigorous debate over the moral propriety of moral enhancement exists, but the views of the public have been largely absent from the discussion. In this paper we have examined people's attitudes towards moral bioenhancement. It is important to know public attitudes and the level of the familiarity with this topic. We have carried out a survey in order to obtain quantitative data on public attitudes towards moral bioenhancement. To gain insight into the reasons the public may have for endorsing or eschewing pharmacological moral enhancement, we used empirical tools to explore public attitudes towards these issues. We have examined whether factors like the level of education and familiarity with the topic have impact on public attitudes. Factors that could have impact on people's attitudes towards bioenhancement are inequality, identity change, unnaturalness, restricted freedom, the need for the enhancement, feasibility, efficacy, safety, and the means, some of which we have isolatedin the questionnaire. We were interested in the reasons why people approve or disapprove this form of enhancement. Further, we want to highlight the importance of querying and understanding the public on this issue. Morality at societal level is highly contextual. It is important to examine whether there is a gap between the learned opinion of philosophers and scientists, and the opinion of the general public, because that would suggest that something must change in order for bioenhancement to be useful and effective. One more worry about this issue is whether we engage in a form of social engineering that runs counter to public opinion or not. We have questioned if the familiarity with the topics is one of the reasons why people accept or reject bioenhancement. If this is the case, scientists and educators should focus on the education of people, especially young