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Empirical Support for the Moral Salience of the Therapy-Enhancement Distinction in the Debate Over Cognitive, Affective and Social Enhancement

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Abstract

The ambiguity regarding whether a given intervention is perceived as enhancement or as therapy might contribute to the angst that the public expresses with respect to endorsement of enhancement. We set out to develop empirical data that explored this. We used Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit participants (N = 2776) from Canada and the United States. Each individual was randomly assigned to read one (and only one) vignette describing the use of a pill to enhance one of 12 cognitive, affective or social (CAS) domains. The vignettes described a situation in which an individual was using a pill to enhance the relevant domain under one of two possible enhancement conditions, one perceived as enhancing above the norm (EAN), what most people recognize as a clear case of enhancement, whereas the other perceived as enhancing towards the norm (ETN), with the individual using the enhancement having a modest, but subclinical deficit. Participants were asked how comfortable they were with the individual using the enhancement and about the impact the enhancement might have had in the individuals’ success in life. We found that irrespective of the domain to be enhanced, participants felt significantly more comfortable with ETN than with EAN, and they regarded the enhancement intervention as contributing to greater success in life with ETN rather than EAN. These data demonstrate that the therapy enhancement distinction is morally salient to the public, and that this distinction contributes to the angst that people feel when considering the propriety of CAS enhancement.

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Notes

  1. Here it is important to emphasise that we are fully aware that what is regarded as normal is ambiguous as it can refer to what is normal for the individual or for the species, or normal for a specific developmental stage but no other, as well as being easily affected by changing social values.

  2. Our working characterization of the 12 domains that were tested in this experiment are as follows (some domains overlap two categories): Cognitive: Attention, working memory, narrative memory and alertness; Affective: mood and open to experience; Social: sociability and cooperation; Cognitive and affective: Self control, perseverance and creativity; Social and Affective: empathy.

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Acknowledgments

Supported by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. We thank Jordan Mowat for his work as a second coder.

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  1. National Core for Neuroethics, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Laura Y. Cabrera, Nicholas S. Fitz & Peter B. Reiner

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  1. Laura Y. Cabrera
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Correspondence to Laura Y. Cabrera.

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Cabrera, L.Y., Fitz, N.S. & Reiner, P.B. Empirical Support for the Moral Salience of the Therapy-Enhancement Distinction in the Debate Over Cognitive, Affective and Social Enhancement. Neuroethics 8, 243–256 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-014-9223-2

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