Harris Wiseman on moral bioenhancement and religion
Can technology make us more moral?
“I wanted to know if there was a moral molecule … After ten years of experiments, I found it … It’s called oxytocin” declared neuroeconomist Paul Zak in a widely-watched TED talk. Does biology really determine morality? Can we enhance our morality through biotechnologies? And if so, how would such technologies relate to traditional sources of moral formation like religious belief and practice?
Dr Harris Wiseman examines the philosophy, biology, psychology and theology of moral bioenhancement in his book The Myth of the Moral Brain: the Limits of Moral Enhancement, and kindly agreed to be interviewed in January 2019.
This interview covers the relationship between moral enhancement technology and religion, churches’ use of emerging technologies, and whether public theology would be usefully directed towards moral enhancement technology.
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Q Could you briefly introduce your aims and research on moral enhancement?
When I first came to engage with moral bioenhancement discourse, I have to say that I found the enthusiasm in the discourse to be very fantastical indeed. It seemed like moral bioenhancement had the potential to touch on some very important issues, and so my hope was to bring the discourse back to planet earth. I wanted to give moral enhancement a bottom-up foundation.
That is, when we think about moral bioenhancement we should start by taking account of concrete facts on the ground, rather than starting with abstract speculations. A lot of the proposals for moral bioenhancement that had been suggested were quite cockamamy. When confronted with any of the real-world logistical issues that it would take to put them into practice they quickly fell to pieces (see my 2018 chapter The Sins of Moral Enhancement Discourse for a detailed account of these problems). Such proposals have no real grounding in actual reality, and seemed to be little more than flights of fantasy.
This is really problematic because there are real evils in the world right now that need to be tackled in concrete and meaningful ways. That’s not going to be easy. Armchair speculation about neuro-enhancement to make people more compassionate is cheap, and potentially quite offensive when stacked against the hard-won efforts put in by the real people, making real sacrifices, in the real world right now. Indeed, presenting unrealistic fantasies as solutions for real evil and suffering (which is exactly what many enthusiasts in the discourse had done) demeans the hard efforts of people tackling these issues now, often at great cost to themselves.
Above all, I wanted to correct the false belief that moral living is something that can be understood primarily in biological terms. One has to be careful here, this point is easily misunderstood. We are biological beings, of course. Our moral activity is inevitably mediated by that biology. But, we are also beings with psychology, we are social beings, we are beings with a history and culture, and so much more.
It is every bit as crude — and false, in fact — to believe that humans can be reduced to psychological motivations, or to say ‘we are just the product of our environment’, as it is to say that morality can be understood primarily in biological terms. Importantly, it is just as wrong to think of these factors as if they are wholly discrete layers on a cake. Our biology impacts our psychology, our psychology impacts our biology, and so on with all the various dimensions of our lives and the relationships we have. There is a dynamic set of mutually influencing interactions going on, and to just isolate biology as if that were ‘the main thing’, and all our hopes could be put in manipulating this biology demonstrates a very poor understanding of the kind of creatures human beings actually are.
There may be some ways in which biology can be leveraged in this regard (I propose a number in The Myth of the Moral Brain, for example in treating addiction and alcoholism), but these will always be limited prospects. Moral bioenhancement can never be any kind of salvatory hope, because the relationship between morality and biology is nowhere near as tight as such salvatory hopes would need them to be.
Q Do you think of The Myth of the Moral Brain as a theological contribution to moral enhancement or more a recognition that it’s simply impossible to ignore religion in attempts to enhance morality?
I was surprised to see the extent to which religion had been ignored in the discourse. In that sense, it is not at all that religion is impossible to ignore — to the contrary, it is all too easy to ignore religion, and very tempting to do so, because religion adds such an immense amount of complexity to the discourse. Grappling with that complexity requires a concerted effort, and it’s hard to know where to begin. There are a lot of religious persons on earth (5.8 out of the nearly 8 billion). These religious persons are extremely differentiated with respect to what they believe, where their moral boundaries lie, and how willing they are to embrace technologies that would potentially alter parts of their identities considered by some to be sacrosanct. Moreover, this landscape is constantly changing, and differs from national region to region.
If one is to enhance people, one must know the very people that are to be enhanced. Yet, religiosity, one of the core founding stones of persons’ moral values and sense of the good, is completely severed from the discourse. These real world, ground-level realities, religious and cultural differences, and the diversity in moral intuitions (i.e., what actually makes for ‘the good’, and which version of ‘the good’ is to be enhanced), have to be accounted for in any presentation of moral enhancement that wants to be at all practicable or realistic. Religion is an unassailable part of the conceptual, moral, social and behavioural landscape of any country (before one even begins to think of cross-cultural engagement on these matters), and absolutely should not be ignored. Some extensive transnational sociological analysis of religious attitudes towards technology and enhancing morality is very much required.
Next, in terms of theology, I was not so much trying to devise a specific ‘theology of moral enhancement’ per se, as I was attempting to apply existing pastoral theology as a reflective device to gain insight into the processes involved in religious moral formation. Looking at the pastoral insights into how moral values are in reality taken up by persons and embodied in individuals and groups, one finds a picture that is rich, layered and integrative. There is no sense that moral formation is something purely intellectual, or purely about pleasant sentiments, or just about building good habits. Rather, becoming good is more about the formation of the whole person within an overarching salvatory conceptual structure, wherein moral learning is done through modelling, mentors, imitation and improvisation, it is enacted as much in groups as in private, and requires the reshaping of values and motivations — every part of the person is changed.
That is really what hammered home the superficiality of the moral enhancement enthusiasm I was reading. It is not until one gets a really sharp look at how integral, organic and holistic the processes involved in moral growth are that one really comes to grasp how shallow are the proposed moral bioenhancement interventions, and how exaggerated are the expectations of the technological enhancement of morality. How can slapping a magnetic stimulator to the side of one’s head, or taking a dose of propranolol, or any such thing of that order possibly compare to the organic and synergistic quality of how morality is actually taken up and enacted in real life?
Q The Church has used objects (from beads to icons to architecture) to aid behaviour change for years. Now there are more sophisticated and perhaps less transparent efforts: bible apps that reward reading, Alexa skills that encourage prayer etc. Are churches equipped to critically assess new technologies?
I’m not sure churches need any kind of special expertise to be able to critically assess the technology they use — a little common sense and practical wisdom should be sufficient.
I would suggest that the most powerful advances offered by technology are in terms of communication, inasmuch as religious communities and individuals, who were once disparate, can now share information, thoughts, ideas, hopes, fear, and organise events in ways never before seen. That is the real stuff technology is offering in terms of moral ‘enhancement’ — the ability to do good en masse is heavily dependent on one’s ability to communicate (and much the same is true of the ability to organise evil). So, communication technology offers the ability to easily connect with persons that were unreachable, to get important news information from danger zones, to bring to light human suffering; and it provides the opportunity to better organise groups for the creation of public goods (everything from community outreach, to sending aid and assistance when tidal waves strike).
It is these more simple and obvious opportunities facilitated by new technology that have the most potential for ‘enhancing’ the spread of good in our world. These are the more down-to-earth prospects I tend to prefer, as they keep the human element in focus instead of getting lost in hopes for magic bullets created by fantastical speculations. But, such things are not really what ‘moral bioenhancement’ enthusiasts have in mind, which seems to be more in line with fancy gadgets, apps, pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence, neurosurgery, and wearable tech to remind everyone to be nice and kind. I suggest that is looking in the wrong direction.
With respect to the sort of advance you mention, apps for bible reading and so forth, certainly they can be valuable, but they are hardly earth-shattering. In a way, such advances must be applied, because the younger generation is used to engaging with things through such media. If the church does not provide apps and such conveniences it is going to be completely unable to engage with a whole generation of persons growing into an increasingly secularised, and pervasively online world. Even so, as ‘enhancements’, these sorts of advances are helpful if used appropriately, as long as one understands that they don’t really change anything fundamental (and, personally, I still prefer my prayer beads).
The main point is that one has to be already making efforts in the right direction. Such apps and aids provide helpful conveniences which make it easier to do what one was already trying to do. Rewarding reading the Bible with tokens, like one is playing a computer game; or sending round reminder e-mails: ‘have you said your prayers today?’ are not going to change anyone’s life. A pre-existing will is always required to move things forwards, combined, ideally, with good company and worthy social scaffolding. Even then, moral growth is still hard enough. Nudges, rewards and tricks may have short-term benefits in terms of encouraging certain behaviours. But, the fundamental problem is the same now as it always has been: it is the problem of the will, and motivating oneself to keep carrying on along this long, hard road of authentic moral growth. In the face of that, Alexa skills for praying are not going to cut it.
Q Would you like to see more accessible public theology on moral enhancement technology — what value might this bring to secular society?
For me, the biggest value that comes from theological reflection on moral enhancement is that it serves as a mirror in which we can look at ourselves and examine our intuitions about what makes us human, and how we should live our lives — what goodness really means to us, and how it relates to practising our faith. Public theology, to that end, would be valuable. It would really help to get people talking about what it is to be a good person, what gets in the way of being good, and about why we constantly seem to think that biology holds all the answers to our character. We should definitely be thinking about how fully embodied moral living is — it is not something just we think about, nor just something we feel, but it is in everything we do.
In terms of public theological engagement, moral enhancement comes back to the good old philosophical question (which is perhaps the only real philosophical question that matters), that is: what makes for a good and worthwhile life? In relation to that, moral enhancement issues encourage us to ask: how does technology fit into the moral life? Why be moral at all, what is the value of being moral? Who gets to decide what is and is not moral? If there were ways of making everybody good, why shouldn’t we apply them? All these things are great to talk about, and I would encourage this at all levels, from school all the way up. From my conversations with teachers who have raised these sorts of questions in class, such ideas seem to be intrinsically interesting and exciting. For me, if we’re talking about public engagement, this is the beating heart of moral enhancement discourse and why it is really worth talking about.
Though I began thinking about moral bioenhancement as something that needed to be brought to earth, ironically, its primary theological value is as a thought experiment, and as an exploratory tool. What moral bioenhancement absolutely is not, though, is something that needs immediate, urgent preparatory discussion. So, if you mean that public theology should engage with moral enhancement questions, as if to say: ‘we must get out ahead of this thing, and confront this problem before it gets to us’, then I am more sceptical about the need. The problem is that there is no really pressing ‘science and technology of moral enhancement’ to engage with. Everything is extremely speculative at present. Given how hard to get a handle on moral living is, that should be no surprise.
Just as moral bioenhancement is no great hope to get all excited about, likewise it is not any great threat to be terrified about either, and for the same reasons. Biology just is not ‘the main thing’ when it comes to moral formation. Biologically meddling with moral formation will remain, at best, a single dimension of larger bio-psycho-social (-spiritual) way of thinking about things. Taking this more modest outlook, where biology is understood to be a single, limited prong in a much larger picture, we see that an urgent public theology is not much needed to prepare us from some impending freight train of great change — there is no impending freight train as far as moral enhancement is concerned.
Indeed, there are plenty of much more pressing issues in the public space right now that need to be discussed. In that sense, public theology would be much more usefully directed towards issues of the environment, of news bots, of human trafficking, of the rise of tyranny in the world, the loss of privacy, and the incredibly fast-paced datafication consuming all human existence. When one considers how significant these all-too-real contemporary issues are, I’m afraid to say that the more fantastical moral enhancement discourse pales in comparison. If we are talking about preparatory engagement, the things that stand in need of urgent public theological discussion right now, I would say that moral enhancement does not even make it onto the map.
Many thanks, Harris.
Harris Wiseman is currently a Research Associate at the University of Birmingham’s Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religion; and Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Education, UCL. His book on moral enhancement was published by MIT Press and is called The Myth of the Moral Brain: the Limits of Moral Enhancement.
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