The Politics of Moral Enhancement: Tripping our Way to Social Democracy
As a teenage Buddhist socialist I wrote essays about how I planned to work on enlightenment while trying to change the world. The connection between moral enhancement and political change has been on my mind every since. Once I started writing about the ways we can implement moral enhancement in liberal democratic societies, however, I began thinking about the fact that all societies, including liberal ones, have moral parameters, and use forms of moral enhancement to encourage compliance. The line between the United States prescribing involuntary psychiatric treatment for mentally ill criminals, or the Soviets sending dissidents for psychiatric rehabilitation, or the Chinese sending the Uyghurs to concentration camps for patriotic indoctrination, those cases are different in terms of where you draw the line, not whether you do the thing.
Now we are five or six years into the recrudescence of fascism as a global political force, after seventy years of psychological and neurobiological research into who is vulnerable to violent extremism and right-wing authoritarianism. We have two decades of research on the efficacy of anti-bias trainings, mindfulness meditation, and prescription and illegal drugs for reducing racism and toxic masculinity. It is time to ask whether there are moral enhancement therapies for fascists, and how and to whom they should be offered. More generally, if liberal and egalitarian states accept that they must set broad moral parameters, and that how they regulate technologies with moral effects may have population-effects through the widespread, voluntary adoption of moral enhancement, what civic virtues should public policy be attempting to enhance?
Every Society Has Practiced Moral Enhancement
Every society (that survived) has shaped moral sentiments and behavior through persuasion, incentives and coercion. Fairy tales and myths impart moral lessons, backed up by parenting and community rewards and sanctions. Some of these moral codes sanction the use of proscribed substances — certain foods, alcohol, cannabis, caffeine, etc — which are believed to lead to moral deviance. Some societies use mind-altering substances — peyote, tobacco, alcohol, etc — to reinforce group solidarity and moral conformity. Likewise clothing or jewelry can connote the moral obligations of specific roles, e.g. a priest’s cassock, an hijab or a wedding ring. At the extreme societies have used technologies to impose involuntary and punitive moral enhancement, as with the chastity belt, the scarlet A, and castration.
In the 20th century authoritarian regimes began experimenting with psychiatric drugs and treatments to complement propaganda, rewards and punishments as tools to shape the ideal citizen. Today the Chinese social credit score system is the most sophisticated version of authoritarian moral enhancement, penalizing citizens for sins from jaywalking and frivolous pass times to political activism and corruption, while rewarding them for political loyalty, good deeds and achievements. Some argue that the ready acceptance of China’s social credit system can be explained by the 3000 year history of the Confucian state’s central role in promoting civic virtue, a role the Communist state happily adopted.
In stark contrast to Western liberalism, Confucianism — and Chinese political culture more broadly — hinges not on individual rights, but on the acceptance of social hierarchy and the belief that humans are perfectible. In Chinese thought, humans are not equally endowed; they vary in suzhi (素质), or quality…But individuals are malleable, and if suzhi partly is innate, it is also the product of one’s physical environment and upbringing. Just as the wrong environment can be corrupting, the right one can be transformative. Hence the importance of following the guidance of people deemed to possess higher suzhi — the people Confucius called “superior persons” (君子) and the Communists now call “leading cadres” (领导干部)…it is the moral responsibility of an enlightened and benevolent government…to reshape “originally defective persons into fully developed, competent and responsible citizens.” (Leibold, 2018)
China is not really that different from many other societies in its authoritarian communitarianism. Communist regimes and theocracies are on one end of a continuum, with liberal democracies at the other end. But liberal democracies still have moral orders that they enforce through state policy.
Liberal democracies also have to decide how to use state power to encourage or enforce morality, and on whom. Democracies teach children the importance of civic virtues (tolerance, sharing , voting), attempt to rehabilitate criminals, and send some of the mentally ill for involuntary psychiatric treatment. Being homosexual is no longer a treatable diagnosis, but treatment for compulsive sexual harassment or gender dysphoria are accepted diagnoses. There are pressures for moral conformity from employers and the community. These social pressures will encourage the voluntary use of moral enhancement therapies in the future.
A liberal social order will use more persuasion than coercion to encourage moral enhancement, but will still need to determine when to apply involuntary moral enhancement, and how aggressively to encourage voluntary adoption. Moral enhancement will likely be deemed obligatory for certain occupations, especially if there is evidence of moral failure. Moral enhancements could be deemed appropriate medical therapies for psychiatric diagnoses (“excessive xenophobia” or “political paranoia”) and be subsidized by insurance. When an employer requires, as a condition of further employment, that an employee undergo rehabilitation for alcoholism, antibias training for racism, or sensitivity training for sexual harassment it is still, technically, voluntary. While liberal democracies will have much broader tolerance of moral deviance, the voluntary adoption of moral enhancement could still eventually have a population-level impact on politics (Elliott, 2019).
As we are now acutely aware however, different communities have different moral codes, and what gets you “canceled,” potentially losing friends and employment, in one community can make you praiseworthy in another.
Liberal vs Conservative Brains and Virtues
Peter Singer observed in The Darwinian Left (Singer, 1999) that the liberal and egalitarian values of the Enlightenment have repeatedly run up against the constraints of our primate neurobiology. Enlightenment universalism struggles with our innate tendency to favor in-groups, while egalitarian values are in tension with our innate deference to authority and hierarchy. Singer concluded that the Left has to either adapt to these neurobiological constraints on human nature by trimming our utopian aspirations, or embrace the conscious modification of human nature towards a more cosmopolitan and egalitarian society.
The frustratingly inegalitarian aspects of human nature that Singer identified are stronger in some people than in others. Research on right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and the proto-fascist personality suggest that social environment explains some of the variation in political personality, but some of the variation is rooted in neurobiological differences. Like the personality traits that political values are tied to, twin studies have suggested that political views are about 40% inherited (Dawes et al, 2020).
Jon Haidt’s research on innate moral intuitions further illuminated the differences between liberal and conservative morality. Liberals give more weight to the importance of fairness and protecting people from harm, while conservatives give more weight to respect for authority, in-group preferences and the defense of sacred symbols (Haidt, 2012).
Importantly, while liberals do not recognize the three conservative moral intuitions, both liberals and conservatives recognize the importance of harm/beneficence and fairness. A liberal society that respects the moral autonomy of both liberals and conservatives should be able to promote beneficence and fairness. The big Culture War fights are over the relative weight to give to conservative moral principles over liberal, cosmopolitan individualism.
So one dimension of our politics is the struggle over Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, with conservatives concerned about protecting social hierarchies, particularism and group symbols (law and order, nationalism, racism, religiosity, heteronormativity) from the liberal Enlightenment view that everybody should let everybody do their own thing if it isn’t hurting anybody. The other axis is the economic, or harm/beneficence dimension; do you think think we need taxes and social welfare to address social unfairness and the suffering of the unfortunate, or should people just accept that the existing social hierarchy is the best of all possible worlds? The fight over the spread of liberal individualist cosmopolitanism defines the culture wars dimension, while the fight over equality, fairness and redistribution defines the economic dimension of politics.
In turn these two axes are also loosely tied to underlying neurological and personality traits which tilt us in one direction or the other (Johnston and Ollerenshaw, 2020). These two dimensions of moral-political variation have deep roots in primate evolution (Claessens et al., 2020), reflecting selection for capacities for conformity (social ideology) and cooperation (economic ideology). Variation in these neurobiologies and personality traits at the population level have been tied to the political orientation of their governments (Mondak and Canache, 2014).
But we are only tilted by biology, not determined. If politics were completely determined by neurobiological tendencies it would be difficult to explain rapid change in social values. Social pressures amplify, suppress and redirect the same moral sentiments. A liberal or authoritarian personality would end up with very different, possibly opposing, politics depending on whether they grow up in the U.S., Iran or China. Social context can even overwhelm innate self-interest, as when blue collar conservatives oppose economic redistribution that would materially benefit them. The rapid acceptance of sex/gender non-conformity in Western societies was not the result of the proliferation of liberal neurobiology, but rather the spread of a new morality which shaped neurobiological responses, redirecting disgust from sex/gender nonconformity to those who condemn it. While homophobes formerly would give voice to their feelings of discomfort, the new morality encouraged them to re-assess or suppress. To avoid biological reductionism we need to keep in mind the feedback loop from society to the expression of neurobiological tendencies.
What are the Social Democratic Virtues?
So liberal and egalitarian states, like all societies, do set and must set moral parameters through public policy, albeit broad ones. How they regulate technologies with moral effects can have population-level effects on politics, even if through the widespread, voluntary adoption of moral enhancement. Besides fairness and egalitarianism, what are the minimum set of civic virtues such a state should promote?
I propose four virtues below:
- Openmindedness, and insensitivity to conservative moral intuitions, is the principal correlate of the cultural dimension of politics.
- Compassion, a desire for fairness, and a willingness to sacrifice for others are the principal correlates of altruism and the economic dimension of politics.
- Intellectual virtues protect against dogmatism, authoritarianism and extremism, and shape our understanding of how the world works.
- Moral autonomy to resist immoral social pressures.
I will explore below how moral enhancement for a more liberal and egalitarian (social democratic) personality require all four of these virtues, each of which can be encouraged through education, and potentially, eventually nudged with biomedical enhancement.
Openmindedness, Cosmopolitanism and Social Conservatism
The personality trait of open-mindedness is about 50% inherited (Bartels et al, 2012), and is strongly correlated with liberal responses to the cultural dimension of politics (Sibley and Duckett, 2008; Fatke, 2017). Open-mindedness is also correlated with intelligence, creativity and academic achievement (Sadana, Gupta, Jain, Kumaran, and Rajeswaran, 2021). Individual open-mindedness is also a predictor of politics at the population level. Mondak and Canache (2014) used personality data for 600,000 Americans and found that the liberalism of a state was strongly correlated with its citizens’ level of open-mindedness (although again, the causation probably goes both ways). Garretsen et al. (2018) found that the level of open-mindedness in different regions of the UK predicted whether they voted for Brexit or not. Psychogeographers have mapped personality measures onto regions (Rentfrow, 2010, 2019), finding neuroticism highest in New England and openmindedness higher on the coasts. Urban areas are higher in openmindedness than rural areas. Geographic variation, and even international variation, in personality traits and moral neurobiology may be the result of migrants moving to areas that are a better fit, as well as personalities adapting to new social environments (Rentfrow, 2020). Openmindedness is also a correlate of willingness to migrate (Shuttleworth, Stevenson, Bjarnason and Finell, 2020).
Another way to understand openmindedness is as a reflection of the relationship between the innate responses of fear and disgust from the amygdala and the reflective deliberation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). In general the larger and “twitchier” one’s amygdala the more predisposed one is to conservative moral and political sentiments, such as believing that the social order is legitimate and desirable (Nam, Jost, Kaggen, Campbell-Meiklejohn, Van Bavel, 2017). Enlightenment liberalism is correlated with larger and more dominant prefrontal cortices (Mendez, 2017).
Living in a state of fear from real or imagined threats will obviously have a big impact on the balance of the amygdala and PFC. The higher the murder rate in a country for instance, the weaker the relationship between the personality trait of open-mindedness and political liberalism (Sibley, Osborne and Duckitt, 2012); actual threats make everyone’s amygdalas twitch. Just priming the amygdala with disgusting smells or ideas tilts someone in a conservative moral direction, as does suppressing the prefrontal cortex with alcohol or fatigue (Eidelman et al. 2012). Likewise suppressing visceral reactions of disgust with drugs like propranalol has been found to reduce xenophobia (Terbeck, Kahane, McTavish, Savulescu, Cowen and Hewstone, 2012).
Psychedelic use reduces the reactivity of the amygdala (Kraehenmann et al., 2014) and silences conditioned fear (Catlow et al, 2013). The evidence for a liberalizing influence from psychedelics has generated headlines like “Scientists find magic mushrooms could help fight fascism” (Ratner, 2018). For instance, lifetime psychedelic use, and experiencing intense “ego dissolution” while tripping, has been correlated with more liberal political views, openmindedness and feeling related to nature, and is negatively correlated with authoritarian political views, even after controlling for many other variables (Nour, Evans and Carhart-Harris, 2017).
Unfortunately open-mindedness and psychedelic use are also tied to belief in irrational and supernatural ideas (Samar, Walton and McDermut, 2013). There are many anecdotal accounts of people on the far right who credit psychedelic “red pilling” with opening them to conspiracy theories (Pace, 2020), such as the horned QAnon shaman and psychedelic enthusiast who invaded the US Capitol in January (Evans, 2021). Without cultivation of the intellectual virtues, such as epistemic skepticism, a commitment to intellectual consistency, and a capacity to reflect on one’s biases, open-mindedness can lead in irrational and illiberal directions.
Cognitive Enhancement and the Liberal Intellectual Virtues
Open-mindedness is correlated with, but distinct from, cognitive capacity. Open-mindedness and cognitive capacity complement each other in generating liberal ideology. For instance, a meta-analysis by Onraet et al. (2015) and a recent review by Zmigrod et al. (2020) showed that cognitive ability was negatively correlated with political conservatism, including nationalism, authoritarianism and social conservatism; conservatives tend to have weaker and slower information processing, including less capacity for working memory, planning, and cognitive flexibility. Liberals also tend to have more reflective, empiricist and analytical thinking styles, while conservatives tend to rely more on intuition (Deppe et al., 2015; Talhelm, Haidt, Oishi, Zhang, Miao and Chen, 2014; Pennycook, Cheyne, Koehler and Fugelsang, 2020).
The capacity to entertain and synthesize diverse points of view, to have sophisticated capacity to take the perspective of others, to recognize and reject logical inconsistency, these are all liberal civic virtues, tempering the illiberal tendencies of cosmopolitan and egalitarian values. Cognitive ability is also correlated with the ability to understand the viewpoints of others, to have a “theory of mind” (Navarro, Goring and Conway, 2021), which is necessary to have “cognitive empathy” for others. The capacity for cognitive empathy has also been found to be significantly heritable (Knafo and Uzefovsky, 2013), and is correlated with general intelligence (Warrier et al., 2018). Cognitive empathy, intellectually understanding others’ pain, is also correlated with sensitivity to the injustices inflicted on others, while “emotive empathy,” viscerally feeling others’ pain, is not (Decety and Yoder, 2016).
While those with greater cognitive capacity are still vulnerable to cognitive biases, such as filtering out information that doesn’t fit with preconceptions (Winegard, Clark, Hasty and Baumeister, 2018), the intelligent are more likely to look for trustworthy information (not “fake news”) and to seek intellectual consistency. This greater commitment to and capacity for “epistemic rationality” among those with more cognitive ability increases intellectual humility (Zmigrod, Zmigrod, Rentfrow and Robbins, 2019), and reduces their susceptibility to conspiracy theories (Ståhl and Prooijen, 2018) and to political extremism (Rinderman, Flores-Mendoza and Woodley of Menie, 2012). The political choices of those with more cognitive ability are also more consistent with their policy preferences (Ganzach, 2018).
Would the biomedical enhancement of cognitive ability, by itself, have a liberalizing effect? To answer that question we will need technologies that reliably increase memory or cognitive speed, complexity and flexibility. Until then education, nutrition, and sleep are the interventions that most reliably boost cognitive capacity.
Promoting Compassion, Sharing and Egalitarianism
Unlike cultural politics, economic ideology is only weakly and inconsistently related to open-mindedness or cognitive ability. Instead economic ideology is tied to personality traits of agreeableness, compassion, and empathy (Goren, Schoen, Reifler, Scotto & Chittick, 2016; Fatke, 2017; Johnston and Ollerenshaw, 2020), or in Schwartz’s (2012) model, to our orientation towards selfishness and “self-transcendence.” Economic ideology is also strongly tied to wealth and social status; the higher the social status, the less empathy for others, and the less support for redistribution.
The psychological traits that correlate with economic and cultural conservatism are in fact so different that they suppress one another (Costello and Lillienfeld, 2020). For instance, the libertarian orientation of conservative economics is at cross purposes with the authoritarian impulse of cultural conservatism. Likewise, social conservatism is positively related to the personality trait of agreeableness, but economic conservatives are less agreeable (Bakker, 2016). Social conservatives with leftwing economic views (“populists” in the model above) are the most narcissistic, while economic conservatives with liberal social views (“libertarians” in the model above) were highest in Machiavellianism (Bardeen and Michel, 2019). Controlling for these contradictory influences makes the relationship of ideology and personality stronger.
Psychedelics provide us the best evidence for biomedical enhancement of egalitarianism, prosocial attitudes, fairness and sharing. Psychedelic use has been repeatedly linked to a sense of greater connectedness to others (Carhart-Harris, Erritzoe, Haijen, Kaelen and Watts, 2018), and increased emotional empathy (Dolder, Schmid, Müller, Borgwardt, Liechti, 2016). Some are proposing the use of psychedelic therapy for the treatment of “maladaptive narcissism” defined as excessive feelings of self-centeredness, superiority and entitlement (van Mulukom, Patterson and van Elk, 2020).
Research on boosting dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin, on the other hand, have demonstrated the limits of biomedical enhancement of compassion, agreeableness or self-transcendence (Reese, Bryant and Ethridge, 2020). Dopamine plays an important role in mediating our feelings about fairness and inequality. Saez, Zhu, Set, Kayser and Hsu (2015) found that when subjects’ dopamine levels were boosted they chose more equal outcomes in economic games. But too much dopamine can increase antisocial and immoral behavior (Buckholtz et al., 2010). The administration of oxytocin, and oxytocin gene variants that increase its production, increases in-group trust and altruistic, prosocial behavior (Marsh, Marsh, Lee and Hurlemann, 2020), but also reduces tolerance of and cooperation with outsiders, and increases inter-group conflict.
Boosting serotonin, or possessing genes that increase serotonin, increases sensitivity to others’ pain, but reduces willingness to “altruistically” punish cheaters (Siegel and Crockett, 2012; Gartner et al, 2018), which is a key motivator in support of redistribution (“eat the rich”). But disgust at unfairness and the desire to “altruistically” punish cheaters can just as easily be turned against “welfare cheats” or “undeserving immigrants” as against bosses and the rich. Our intellectual understanding of the world, about how things work, determines how our impulse for justice is targeted. So, again, a social democratic orientation to politics is not a matter of simply boosting one moral intuition, but rather the amplification of several moral impulses under the tutelage of intellectual reflection.
Freedom and the Promotion of Moral Autonomy
Some have argued that even voluntary moral enhancement is a threat to human freedom. I would argue the opposite, that we are freer the more we are able to choose and change our bodies and brains, even if we are changing our preferences (Varelius, 2019). The “situationists” in moral psychology point to the immoral behaviors that situations like prisons can call forth from even those most determined to resist. If they are right that we have no innate moral personality invariant across social situations, perhaps true moral freedom will only come when we have the tools to tie ourselves to the moral mast.
The liberal assumption is that if we could encourage more moral independence that people would resist immoral pressures and choose moral courses of action. Zmigrod et al. (2020) found that conservative political ideology is correlated with a lower tendency to take social risks “such as disagreeing with authority, starting a new career mid-life and speaking publicly about a controversial topic.
However aren’t psychopaths, narcissists and Machiavellians moral individualists, taking risks and resisting social pressures? Can we make ourselves more autonomous from social norms without also unleashing more sociopathic behavior? What if terrorist groups were able to reduce members’ qualms about violence by increasing their sociopathy and extremism? Autonomy is only one value among many. A future in which we all can choose our own morality, and in which some “enhanced” themselves to be able to ignore social norms, might be much worse off.
One of Savulescu and Persson’s arguments for obligatory mass moral enhancement is that the proliferation of technologies of mass destruction will give small groups or even extremist individuals increasing destructive capacity (Savulescu and Persson, 2012). Mass inoculation against supervillainy would not be necessary, however, if we could reliably identify and treat people with extreme, sociopathic personalities. That would still require a less laissez faire approach to moral psychology.
The risks of more choice in moral sentiments are not just from increased sociopathy. If a liberal regulatory regime allowed widespread adoption of moral enhancement then therapies to enhance conscientiousness would be strongly incentivized. More conscientious people tend to earn more and be healthier (Duckworth, Weir, Tsukayama and Kwok, 2012). But a more conscientious society might also tilt more towards the free market and cultural conformity. Economic ideology is strongly tied to the personality trait of conscientiousness; people who believe in and follow rules tilt towards conservative economics (Bakker, 2016).
It is too soon to tell whether moral enhancement would increase or decrease moral deviance and sociopathy, and how strong a case there will be for mandatory universal moral psychology screening and enhancement. It is possible, as Sandberg and Fabiano (2017) argued, that the incentives for becoming more prosocial will encourage a voluntary population-level shift in that a positive direction when moral enhancement is effective and widely available. Hopefully a social democratic approach of state encouragement of civic virtues, with subsidized, universal access to positive moral enhancement therapies, would encourage sufficient use to give society “herd immunity” to social pathologies (Gibson, 2021).
The Social Democratic Personality is an Ensemble of Virtues
Even when we have more precise and effective methods of moral enhancement we should probably still focus on encouraging liberal and egalitarian virtues through education, and by establishing a social order in which liberal and egalitarian values are hegemonic. But even when we have safe and effective moral enhancement therapies there won’t be one moral virtue to promote to produce better social democratic citizens. Rather the values of social democracy, supporting a peaceful, democratic path to a more liberal and egalitarian society, will require the cultivation of an interlocking set of civic virtues, including openmindedness, compassion, intelligence and autonomy. Each virtue needs to be tempered by and balanced against the others. Intellectual virtues, by themselves, are inert. Moral autonomy can encourage resistance to immoral pressures, but can also unleash sociopathy. Openmindedness reduces xenophobia and intolerance, but can also make people more open to extreme and irrational ideas. Prosocial attitudes can tip over into dogmatism and authoritarianism.
Future work on a social democratic approach to moral enhancement should explore some questions I didn’t address here:
- How should we test the safety and efficacy of moral enhancement methods?
- When should moral enhancements be offered to, or enforced on, the incarcerated or mentally ill?
- What kinds of moral enhancements should be subsidized, restricted by prescription, or allowed to be sold over the counter? If by prescription, for what diagnoses?
- How do social conditions shape our moral personality, or even our neuroanatomy and neurochemistry?
