Freedom Issues Caused By Biomedical Moral Enhancement Technology

In 2008,Persson and Savulescu proposed the idea of moral bioenhancement,that is to improve people's moral level rapidly and effectively by means of biomedical methods including medicine,surgery and psychological training,so as to deal with the two major security risks faced by human beings which are misuse of weapons of mass destruction and global climate and environmental problems.Many people have raised objections,the focus of this paper is the freedom issues caused by this technology: whether free will is an illusion,the necessity and importance of free will,whether free will and moral enhancement is compatible,whether moral enhancement will deprive the human liberty.On the basis of summarizing the existing discussions on whether moral enhancement deprive the free will and liberty of human beings,this paper points out that the difference of this discussion lies in the different understanding of freedom and morality between the two sides,and this paper will demonstrate that moral enhancement will deprive the free will and liberty of human beings from the standpoint of moral philosophers rather than moral scientists.At the beginning of this paper,the concept of moral enhancement is explained and defined,that is,to improve people's moral ability by means of biomedical science and technology.The so-called moral ability includes moral dispositions and moral behavior.Then,the first chapter explains the content of biomedical moral enhancement,including the reasons why the advocates put forward the idea: biomedical moral enhancement technology is the best way to deal with security risks;the moral dispositions to be enhanced by the technology is altruistic and sense of justice and fairness;the technology will adopt two ways of operation: medicine and operation;this claim puts forward the idea of "God Machine" and “Artificial Moral Advisor".In the second chapter,this paper points out that for advocates of moral bioenhancement there are three kinds of understandings of freedom: the sense of freedom,the negative freedom and the right to freedom.In the third chapter,under the background of expounding whether causality determinism and free will are compatible,it is pointed out that the moral behavior generated by biomedical moral enhancement technology is not free behavior,because the "first-order desire" of the moral behavior subject is controlled by others and does not have free will in the process of technological operation.In the fourth chapter,it is discussed that when the moral enhancement technology seeks social welfare and everyone's life safety from the utilitarian standpoint,it mistakenly regards the individual freedom(including self-determination and free will of the subject)with the presupposition of "personality" as a kind of personal interest,which leads to the conflict between the individual freedom and social welfare,individual life safety.Advocates of moral bioenhancement claims that we can sacrifice liberty for welfare and survival.In this regard,this chapter quotes the Recognition Theroy to point out that the social community lack of liberty of is lack of legitimacy defense,so the claim of moral bioenhancement is also lack of legitimacy defense.