The Kantian Promise and Peril of Moral Bioenhancement

Moral bioenhancement (MBE) aims to fix our moral agency itself in order to prevent us from engaging in negligent or harmful behavior. Although such (self)-paternalistic practice might very well produce good outcomes, it can be argued – inspired by Kant – that it is intrinsically disrespectful towards our future agency. Hence, we are faced with the following ethical dilemma: the failure to engage in MBE seems reckless and negligent, which can be considered a serious moral wrong; but engaging in MBE presupposes that we treat our faculties (our future agency) in a disrespectful self-paternalistic manner. In this article, we want to resolve the described dilemma by suggesting a novel way of understanding Kantian objections to MBE. We argue that a careful engagement with Kantian moral psychology does provide a space for MBE but that it also describes a potential danger of MBE that has, at best, been only superficially described. That is, we offer a different Kantian understanding of MBE as a means to bring our empirical and noumenal selves together as a coherent whole to achieve what Kant describes as ‘genuine accountability to others’.