J. Savulescu and Ingmar Persson argue that artificial moral enhancement is now essential if humanity - Polidicks

This isn't about someone injecting their subjective sense of morality into your head. The OP explains that humans, on a smaller scale like your family or maybe a tight-knit community, have a well-honed "moral compass" that biologically makes us feel bad for hurting people. The first problem the OP mentions humans have is sharing that same empathy for family with other people outside of your primary social groups. For example; your fat mum hurts her ankle, and she has to take time off work to heal. Her boss wants none of that and fires her, upon hearing this you become upset! How could he be so heartless? Then the next day you're sipping a cup of coffee as you watch Fox news and casually read the Daily Mail; when you hear that some whale of a person is complaining about how he got fired because he's... It's too late, you stopped listening, you already decided halfway through the headline that being fat is his responsibility and if he didn't want something bad to happen to him, maybe he shouldn't be so fat. The farther away a person is from your primary social group, the less empathy you have with their concerns and the more critical you are of their faults. The second problem is that humans don't feel as bad when causation of harm can not be directly traced back to them. That means that when blame can be shifted, shared, or even hidden the person will be less likely to feel bad about their behaviour, which means they are more likely to engage in and repeat that behavior. The third problem is that humans put too much emphasis on harm and not lack of equality. Everyone agrees harm is bad already, but the lack of something important is equally bad even if it isn't obviously harmful. Kind of like how someone begging for change in the street makes you go, "the feels :(" but someone working at McDonald's way below the poverty line slips your mind while you order your McGangbang. It isn't that you don't care about them, or even that you don't understand their struggle, it's just that they are doing better than the worst, which means they just slip right through most people's minds. The only thing anyone is suggesting is that we take our already superb, individual, subjective moralities and enhance them. Their goal isn't to turn you into a zombie, it's to make you care more about people than you currently are mentally and emotionally able to. Moral bio enhancement would not make someone "less human"; in contrast, the best part of our humanity, one of the few things that makes people truly beautiful, despite all the evil we are capable of, would be enhanced.

Perhaps if there was some augmentation to make us feel the same about some anonymous Indian sewage worker as we do about our neighbour and to take responsibility for the actions of the group you are part of then it might work. Such a thing would have to be optional and such people would be easy pickings for unaugmented scammers and asshats. (give money to Africa! Yes I will give money. Lol jk this isn't going to Africa I'm buying a new car)

Humans are in the paradoxical state of all being different, yet all being the same. Once you start categorizing good traits and bad traits as if they are the latest version of microsoft, you will start doing the same to humans. I like our convenient (falsehood?) that all men are created equal. It helps stifle against shit like Nazis and Hedonists. Take that out of the picture and we will have moral atrocities on a wide scale. We can barely manage our subjective moralities as it is, 'enhancing' them will only cause more problems.

[QUOTE=ZeMole;46422308]Brave New world much? This is idiotic, diversity, for better or worse is what makes humanity great, including differing moral standards.[/QUOTE] Yeah. To paraphrase Gibson (god I do that entirely way too often), the world we live in is a hell of a world, but hey, it could be worse - or even worse, it could be perfect.

[QUOTE=Wizards Court;46419633]i think the issue should be less "moral enhancement" and more "remove psychopaths/sociopaths" from the human gene pool, i don't think most people would be against such thing. that is of course, assuming such a thing can be done properly.[/QUOTE] Psychopaths make up less than 1% of the population. Chances are you will never meet one in your entire life and if you did, you probably would not know. Believe it or not, but doing bad shit to other human beings does not automatically make a psychopath, and psychopaths are not necessarily criminal or immoral. They are amoral, this not the same as immoral. You can find subclinical psychopaths in all sorts of jobs you would not expect. For example brain surgery, where believe it or not having empathy and strong emotions would make them worse at their jobs. Having a focus on psychopathy is ridiculously pedantic and irrelevant to crime at large.

[QUOTE=dilzinyomouth;46423540]Psychopaths make up less than 1% of the population. Chances are you will never meet one in your entire life and if you did, you probably would not know. Believe it or not, but doing bad shit to other human beings does not automatically make a psychopath, and psychopaths are not necessarily criminal or immoral. They are amoral, this not the same as immoral. You can find subclinical psychopaths in all sorts of jobs you would not expect. For example brain surgery, where believe it or not having empathy and strong emotions would make them worse at their jobs. Having a focus on psychopathy is ridiculously pedantic and irrelevant to crime at large.[/QUOTE] Less than 1% of the population? I think the average person meets 1000s of people during their life, probably much more than that. Consider being in a queue for something silly, person sees you rolling your eyes or sighing and you start talking. Or a person on the bus, or a person you ask for directions from. Chances are you will meet one or more.

[QUOTE=dilzinyomouth;46423540]Psychopaths make up less than 1% of the population. Chances are you will never meet one in your entire life and if you did, you probably would not know.[/QUOTE] Most people meet hundreds of people every day, so chances are we have. [editline]1[/editline] ninja'd

[QUOTE=Used Car Salesman;46420642]Hmmm, maybe. Humans are notoriously terrible at taking external costs into account. But, you know, good fucking luck getting [I]anyone[/I] to let you implant YOUR subjective idea of morality into their head. There is no universal human morality that everyone agrees on. IMO there is no such thing as objective morality, period. Only ideology.[/QUOTE] I would argue that killing another human is objectively morally wrong, but depending on the context and the following consequences do we understand if there was no other outcome. However, the fact alone that a situation resulted in a human killing another human is inherently wrong.

[QUOTE=Boaraes;46423661]I would argue that killing another human is objectively morally wrong, but depending on the context and the following consequences do we understand if there was no other outcome. However, the fact alone that a situation resulted in a human killing another human is inherently wrong.[/QUOTE] I don't disagree but why is it wrong? A cow accidentally tramples a beetle. A lion kills a deer. A male gorilla kills another gorillas kids. A baby shark eats its sibling inside the womb for a better survival chance. A group of chimpanzees hunting and killing another group of chimpanzees despite that group posing no threat or competition. (chimp genocide) A human kills a human by stealing all their food. A human kills a human who murdered a loved one. A human kills a human because he is told to. A human kills a human because they felt like it. At what point does nature become wrong?

[QUOTE=DrTaxi;46423625]Most people meet hundreds of people every day, so chances are we have. [editline]1[/editline] ninja'd[/QUOTE] I think we have very different understandings of the word [I]meet[/I]. Walk past? Sure. Meet? Naw.

I agree with op. A disturbingly large majority of humans dont give a single fuck about our world, as long as they get what they want.

The solution is to reduce human population to about 70 million in total

[QUOTE=mdeceiver79;46423691]At what point does nature become wrong?[/QUOTE] When it allows us to start slowly killing our entire biosphere due to apathy.

[QUOTE=DrTaxi;46423625]Most people meet hundreds of people every day, so chances are we have. [editline]1[/editline] ninja'd[/QUOTE] wtf are you a maitre d' or something? you don't meet hundreds of people every day. You mare share space with hundreds of people but you are not meeting them.

[QUOTE=Wizards Court;46419633]i think the issue should be less "moral enhancement" and more "remove psychopaths/sociopaths" from the human gene pool, i don't think most people would be against such thing. that is of course, assuming such a thing can be done properly.[/QUOTE] Sociopathy and psychopathy isn't 100% genetic. Sorry. There is a huge amount of factors that go into it that are non-genetic. [editline]6th November 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=LVL FACTORY;46423921]The solution is to reduce human population to about 70 million in total[/QUOTE] Or, if we just kill all humans, there will be no psychopaths or sociopaths, because all humans will be dead.

ur triggering my autism sociopathy and psychopathy are the [B]exact same thing[/B]. Sociopathy is a colloquial word only occasionally used by psychologists when talking to journalists or addressing the public because they are worried laymen will confuse psychopathy with being psychotic or having a psychosis which is not the case, psychopathy by itself has perfectly intact rationality/reasoning.