Fabiano argues that virtue theory offers the best “safety framework” for mitigating the risks of moral enhancement (1). He advances five desiderata for an ideal safety framework and then explains how virtue theory satisfies each. Among these desiderata is the “preservation of identity” (1). Fabiano argues that moral enhancement can safely preserve personal identity when carried out within the framework of virtue theory. We suggest Fabiano's argument for this conclusion falls short, since contra Fabiano’s claim, enhancing virtues may not preserve—and (...) could even damage—personal identity. We draw on three sources of evidence: 1) virtue theory scholarship that argues for the importance of habituation for virtue formation, 2) Focquaert and Schermer’s (2015) distinction between active and passive enhancement and attendant endorsement of more active paths to virtue enhancement, and 3) empirical research suggesting that technologies which support moral enhancements may have damaging effects on personal identity. (shrink)

David Chalmers (2022) argues that reality as we encounter it in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) is just as real as the everyday physical world. We may not agree with Chalmers’s prop...

Patients with severe and enduring anorexia nervosa have a relatively low chance of attaining the symptom-free recovery that traditional eating disorder treatment programs endorse (Bianchi, S...

The BRAIN 2.0 Neuroethics Report reflects on the ways in which neuroscientific research may inform our understanding of concepts such as consciousness and empathy, and how advances in this understanding might in turn affect practices such as research on non-human animal primates. Generally, the Report calls for “the integration of neuroscience and neuroethics during the remaining years of the BRAIN initiative and beyond” (NIH 2019). In responding to the Report, the articles in this issue grapple with theoretical questions about what (...) the integration of neuroscience and neuroethics might look like, as well as how specific practices might be affected. In this commentary, we don’t grapple with these questions ourselves. Instead, we propose a framework for debates about them. Specifically, we introduce the idea of ‘morally-salient features,’ suggesting that the concept may be helpful in providing a framework for the kinds of questions addressed by the BRAIN 2.0 Neuroethics Report as well as those tackled by the authors of this issue. (shrink)

A review of Eric Schwitzgebel's book "A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures" (2020).