MAY/JUNE 2017 | | 49QUANDAry Michael Cook
Our culture is fascinated by psychopaths. Go shopping on
Amazon and you will find books like The Wisdom of Psychopaths:
What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About
Success; or Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the
Psychopaths Among Us; or Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths
Go to Work; or The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the
Madness Industry.
Two bioethicists at The University of Rijeka in Croatia,
Elvio Baccarini and Luca Malatesti, recently argued in the
Journal of Medical Ethicsthat moral bioenhancement for
psychopaths ought to be obligatory.
What is psychopathy? The authors define it as “a person-
ality disorder that involves traits such as pathological lying,
manipulativeness, superficial charm, no or little concern for
the interests of others, a grandiose sense of self and, usually, a
long history of offences and encounters with justice”.
Not the sort of person, in other words, you would normally
want as a boss or a babysitter, but also not the sort of person who
can be easily identified, even though the pop psychology jour-
nals claim that about 1% of the population are psychopaths.
And what is moral bioenhancement? This is the use of
biotechnologies, drugs mostly, that improve personality traits
and behaviour to make us nicer and less aggressive. Ethicists
Ingmar Persson and Australia’s own Julian Savulescu were
among the first to discuss the ethics and feasibility of moral
bioenhancement. They argued that it will eventually be vital to
keep humanity from destroying society or the planet.
Baccarini and Malatesti have more modest ambitions – to
keep psychopaths from making our lives miserable. They argue
that psychopaths, in general, are rational. They may not have
compunction about harming others, but they do realise that
other psychopaths could harm them. Therefore, compelling
them to take drugs or neurological treatment is ethical, relying
on principles of public reason.
The ethicists do not discuss the practicalities of their proposal:
how can we distinguish between psychopaths and people who
are merely appalling human beings? How would success be
measured? What would happen if they refused?
Among bioethicists there is a quiet debate bubbling away
over the merits of moral bioenhancement. Rob Sparrow of
Monash University is one of its leading opponents. He points
out that the government would be required to define what is
an acceptable level of morality. Given that we cannot agree on
simpler things like daylight savings time, it seems unlikely that
a consensus will be forged easily.
Furthermore, people who have been morally bioenhanced
might be regarded as socially, personally and even politically
superior. This could threaten democracy as we know it.
Like many issues in bioethics journals, debating the merits
of whether governments should turn psychopaths into docile
hail-fellows-well-met is a tad theoretical.
But there are precedents. Some countries have mandated
chemical castration for convicted sex offenders. Whether this
works is still uncertain; a chemical solution may not fix a psycho-
logical problem.One government is already using moral bioenhancement
with great success – the Islamic State. According to reports in
the French media, the terrorists who killed 130 people at the
Bataclan nightclub in Paris in 2015 were high on Captagon, a
black-market amphetamine.
The killers were almost zombie-like. “I saw a man shoot,” said
one witness. “I saw a man who was peaceful, composed, with a
face that was almost serene, contemplative, advance towards
the bar. He sprayed the terrace [with bullets] as anyone else
would spray their lawn with a garden hose.”
This is probably not Baccarini and Malatesti’s idea of
successful moral bioenhancement, but it illustrates one of the
big hurdles that proposals like their’s face: who will benchmark
the moral standards? Some bioethicists have suggested that
governments could use moral bioenhancement to make people
accept climate change mitigation. The Islamic State is using it
to turn young men into psychopaths.
Until we reach a consensus on morality, proposals for moral
bioenhancement will go nowhere.
Michael Cook is editor ofBioEdge, an online bioethics newsletter.Turning Psychopaths into Nice Guys
If moral bioenhancement of psychopaths becomes obligatory, who will benchmark standards?
Some bioethicists have suggested
that governments could use moral
bioenhancement to make people
accept climate change mitigation.
The Islamic State is using it to turn
young men into psychopaths.jaroszp
ilewski/
Ad
obeSU
BS
CR@ (^) aust IBE
scie
nce
.com