I like this question.

Bad can be better than good. Likewise good can be worse than bad. The "Four Lessons of Liao Fan" clarifies and distinguishes true good, false good, true bad, false bad. (Virtous or non-virtous could be a better word.)

If my son disobeys and needs spanking, then the act of spanking is bad. But this act is actually good for my son (to teach him a valuable lesson).

If I give alms to the poor, this act is supposedly good. But giving alms to professional beggars is actually bad.

Thank you for your response, Francisco! However, I'm not sure whether your examples can shed light on the problem that I meant to address with my question. Yes, certain actions can be considered as intrinsically bad (because harmful), but good insofar as they lead to good (i.e. beneficial) results, so that in those cases the good (for instance, not spanking your son) might be worse (i.e. having worse consequences) than the bad (i.e. spanking him). Your second example is already a different case, because we are no longer talking about bad actions that lead to good results (or good actions that lead to bad results), but rather about actions that in general terms are good (giving alms to the poor), but can be bad under certain circumstances (if the poor are being used to enrich others, or aren't really poor at all). In both cases, however, it seems that the context changes our assessment of the action (turning a seemingly bad one into a, all things considered, good one, and vice versa).

Now, in the situation that I had in mind, where everyone is good (i.e. always doing the morally right thing) due to some kind of moral enhancement that "programs" them to be incapable of doing anything else (anything that is considered "bad"), the matter is more complicated. Yes, sure, it is the context (the not being able to act differently) that raises doubts about the "goodness" of the state, but it is the special value that we assign to human freedom or choice (or more precisely the choice between good and evil) that leads to the puzzling conclusion that a world in which everyone always does the right thing might be "worse" (in what sense exactly?) than a world in which many people do really bad things (as in the world in which we happen to live).

Muno in which we lived, also allows choosing. In a world which is totally good choice of action and as you value what you do is really good with that you set parameters that everything that happens in a world so good.

"A Brave New World" - society which is hedonist ('good') but nonetheless morally repulsive.

Yes, perhaps, but the question is what exactly makes it morally repulsive. And this specific world, in which everyone is morally good (i.e. they always do the right thing because that is what they want to do, they never hurt or kill anyone etc), is not a hedonistic world.

Actually, it is hedonistic on Huxley's premises it means 'pleasure overriding goodness'. It all depends on how you define the good, the bad and the worse, as in a Spaghetti Western--("the good, the bad, and the ugly"). If you define the good as overlapping with the right, then you can argue both ways (this is what utilitarians do).

I'm sorry, Silviya, but I think we're arguing at cross purposes here. What I had in mind was not Huxley's scenario, but Burgess's, which, it seems to me, is not about pleasure.

Yes, but then you seem to have your answer already :)

Such an hedonistic behavior, considered as acting correctly according some social conventions or paradigm, can negatively affect and act in relation to another society. In addition, even if considering an "absolute good" in a society, such a behavior may have undesirable long-term sonsequences. For example population increase due to an improved health system, and the absence of wars and famine will lead to resource depletion due to population growth. Anti-conceptive methods will help to this new problem on such an example, but they might be considered inmoral. If being the only solution, or the less undesirable "bad" behavior among possibilities (diseases, war, famine) then it might become "accepted" and "good". Therefore moral, is somehow ruled by trade-offs and optimality, is a matter of "games theory" and stability of the selected strategies.

I think that what is at stake when we consider 'moral enhancement' of human beings is their 'free will'. It seems to me that when we program people to 'be good' whatever that might be, we take away the possibility of 'being good' of their own choice or free will. In my opinion, what makes human 'morality' possible is to be able to evaluate an action and choose to do what one considers to be the right action, of course, one could also opt for what one considers to be the wrong action. 'Moral enhancement' seems to eliminate free will by simply programming people to act in a certain way, for this reason, it could be seen as something bad for those who consider free will to be something good.

I hope that makes sense...

Thank you, Esther, this is the point exactly. The problem, however, is that there might not be all that much difference between the limited choice of the morally enhanced posthuman and the choice that we have now.

First of all, the morally enhanced would presumably also evaluate an action and then choose to do what they consider to be the right action. It's just that they would never choose the wrong action. In other words, their evaluation abilities would be so acute that they would always reach the right conclusion. Would we say about someone who has been cognitively (!) enhanced to such an extent that their (theoretical) reasoning abilities are absolutely infallible that they had lost their free will because they were now unable to make mistakes? Is the ability to make mistakes the hallmark of our freedom?

Secondly, it could be argued that we don't really have any choice in these matters anyway. If there's a possibility to do evil and we decide against it because we have realised that it is evil (or simply the wrong thing to do), could we then really have 'opted for what we consider the wrong action'? Are we not (reasonably) good persons precisely because this was not really an option for us?

I get your point, and perhaps it all comes down to how we understand morality, and how we understand freedom.

To respond to the first objection: Where does one get the 'criteria for moral evaluation' that is to serve as the formula to produce correct moral evaluations? I am not sure that I agree that moral evaluations are about right or wrong answers. I think morality involves a lot more than the ability to reason correctly according to moral codes. I think it involves our emotions, our culture, our affectivity, the strength of our passions, our capacity for empathy...

I also think that freedom necessarily involves being able to choose, that is, to have more than one alternative. I think that as soon as the person is effectively incapable of choosing alternative B instead of alternative A, freedom is effectively non-existent. Like I said at the beginning, it depends on what your concept of freedom is. If freedom is about having options, but not about effectively being able to choose among those options, then your argument works.

With regard to your second objection: If, as you say, we are determined anyway to choose the good, and evil came into the world because of the fact that some people are cognitively messed up and make false moral evaluations. Then yes, the solution to evil in human society is to 'morally enhance' everyone so that we all make the right moral decisions, and we will all be shiny happy people. I ask however, is that all that there is to morality? What moral codes are you going to use? What about existential options in which there is no clear right or wrong, in which moral codes conflict. When you have to choose between a better job opportunity and being close to someone you love? Can you make a formula to evaluate what is right or wrong in these types of situations? Don't these types of scenarios involve more than a theoretical evaluation? Who is to determine what the right answer might be? I guess what I am trying to say is that I think that 'enhancing morality' actually just replaces the human experience of morality with a set of theoretical codes to make everyone behave in a certain way. On top of that, whoever it is who is going to program those codes is going to have an awful lot of control over the masses.

I actually completely agree with you here. Yes, there's a lot more to morality than simply deciding what is right and what is wrong. And in many cases it is far from obvious what the right thing to do is; quite likely there is no correct answer to the question, and that ontological uncertainty makes the whole moral enhancement project so problematic. But I have to play the devil's advocate here: even if that is all true, then we may still ask why in those cases where we are pretty sure that an action is wrong or even evil (say, torturing a small child to death) and we had the means to make it impossible for people to perform such an act (never mind how likely or unlikely that is), we should still not do it. Why shouldn't we? Because people should have the freedom to torture small children to death? Because freedom of the will is a higher good than the absence of such actions?

I have been giving your question a lot of thought, and I haven't really formed an opinion on it yet. Of course it seems that it would be awesome if we could somehow make it impossible for people to perform those acts that seem to be obviously wrong. At the same time, the typical question of, does the end justify the means comes into play here. Is it right to manipulate people to obtain a certain desired result?

The other objection that comes to mind is this: It seems that we humans make ethical evaluations, by way of practical reasoning that takes into account many different principles, circumstances and elements, which then are in a sense 'applied' to be able to evaluate a certain particular action. If we were to 'fix' or 'set' certain evaluations, as you have suggested. Would this not imply that the 'flexibility' required to perform other evaluations be lost? Is it logically (I say logically because we are talking about a hypothetical situation anyway) possible to 'program the evaluation for one certain type of actions' without affecting the rational 'flexibility' to perform other types of evaluation? I hope you get the question since I am struggling to put down in words what I mean...

That's a good point, Esther, thank you. But it's probably moot to debate the point on an abstract theoretical level. I guess one would have to look at what is actually being done or proposed, so how exactly someone is made "incapable of evil" and on what level they are then incapable (motivation, intention, deliberation, action, or other). I don't have an answer either. But thank you for giving the question so much thought.

I'm a little late to the party but it's an interesting question. Surely the free will to decide against evil, here, just props prop up our illusion of individual subjectivity? We all know that our actions are controlled by law (of one sort or another), that a pure act of free will is impossible. I think the question becomes one of why we want to perpetuate this illusion, the pleasure we get from it and how this reifies subjectivity. So too with violence: externally projected violence is on par with self-harm, it is a perverse pleasure which makes the perpetrator feel alive.

The violence in Clockwork Orange has always appeared farcical and melodramatic to me, an obscene form of pleasure. The real evil is neither this violence nor the protagonist's loss of free will but his final failure to respond to the opportunity for pleasure with his own desire. The desire for violence in the movie is all an extension of subjectivity, a part of life, unpleasant and inconscionable as it is; the loss of desire can only be thought of as soul-death, a living death.

I think there is another step to this narrative, a Lacanian step which takes us back to the beginning. Isn't the zombie produced at the end of Clockwork Orange revolting precisely because he has no desire to direct towards me? It is only through the desire of the other that I can sense my subjectivity. So this protagonist (whose desire was always unreal, something of a pantomime, to me anyway) leaves me hollowed out, somehow aware of my lack. I know that this desire is unreal yet I need it to reify my being!

I guess that, in short, the Lacanian truth of this circular narrative is: desire is mimetic, and thus farcical, (there is no true desire), yet the loss of desire is the big subjective death. But perhaps the idea of a global incapacity to evil would also mean an incapacity to desire, and I find this distressing precisely because my sense of self depends upon the desire of the other, whether it is nurturative or violent.

In this discussion everybody was right in saying there own point. There are something which ancient Indian insight can tell. I will tell you shortly. The only thing I tell now is that there is no good or bad things as you understand it to be.

Semantic bla bla

Good and Bad are relative terms, sometimes what we see as good may not be good for others and the same holds true for bad! So how can we expect absolute Good or absolute Bad?

To control something implies a double edge... the state had necessarily imposed like control upon itself in its actions and perhaps no longer existed as he saw or wished, once existed in the mind of the punished ...was hailed by the vaccuum created to his end..the state both living and deceased in his mind..chose the lesser death, himself, with an illusion that the necessary to all other continue. There is no escape from action based on numbers, a world of controlled individuals is not philosophically tenible...there is no need if it is considered both that violence threatens the state and the violent criminal can not dispense with the state for his own existence. To control something implies a double edge... the state had necessarily imposed like control upon itself in its actions and perhaps no longer existed as he saw or wished, once existed in the mind of the punished ...was hailed by the vaccuum created to his end..the state both living and deceased in his mind..chose the lesser death, himself, with an illusion that the necessary to all other continue. There is no escape from action based on numbers, a world of controlled individuals is not philosophically tenible...there is no need if it is considered both that violence threatens the state and the violent criminal can not dispense with the state for his own existence.

to add: I think the only existing threat to mankind are his acts of cruelity to himself..drives all of our poor philosophies, the squandering of nature, poor behavior that continues because it is not realized to awareness..state executions are a prime example and continue even in the most modern and developed parts of the world.

I say:

That which perceives itself to Be good is vulnerable to Doing evil. That which perceives itself to have Done evil, is vulnerable to Become good. That which perceives itself to have Done-evil-with-the-intention-that-self-critical-perception-and-self-critical-judgment-will-make-itself-become-good is equivalent to that which perceives itself to Be good and thus making one vulnerable to Doing evil. That which perceives itself to Be-good-and-seeing-this-goodness-as-making-oneself-vulnerable-to-doing-evil, remains humble and what's more... likely of Doing good.

Therefore to answer your question "How can the good ever be worse than the bad?"

Answer: Doing good can convince us that all we do is good, which blinds us to the evil we all have potential of doing. Such a person is capable of justifying any action whatsoever under the guise of them Being good. Therefore a good person believing himself to be good can Do worse crimes than a person who is bad and believes himself to be bad.

The Good can be worse can the Bad when it is a façade.

''Sometimes at night the darkness and silence weighs on me.

Peace frightens me.

Perhaps I fear it most of all.

I feel it’s only a façade, hiding the face of hell.

I think of what’s in store for my children tomorrow;

the world will be wonderful, they say;

but from whose viewpoint?...'' Divine Comedy - The Certainty Of Chance

Walker Percy has toyed with this idea in The Thanatos Syndrome, Kurt Vonnegut in Welcome to the Monkey House, and Joss Whedon in Serenity. It is not surprising that all have written in a dystopic vein when they have done so. I think we have a very deep-seated intuition that such a modification would be very dangerous. Who exactly is defining good and bad in such an undertaking?

Posing this question indicates to me that Burgess had a notion about there being value and worth to human beings as free rational agents. Freedom to choose appears to be one of the components of what makes a life meaningful and valuable. We fear that if a friend or loved one is lobotomized or receives shock treatments we will lose something vital of what makes them unique and gives them real personality and identity. "Moral enhancement" would have to be defined by some individual or group of individuals who, seemingly, would consider themselves above the enhancement process. That is certainly worrisome. Whether they are included in it or not, most of us would be justified in having concerns about just what sort of a modification such an "enhancement" would make to our true selves. How do we know that it would leave intact that which gives life meaning and significance?

I agree with your assessment, Bill. But regarding your last question, it seems to me that we could know whether or not it "would leave intact that which gives life meaning and significance" if we knew what gives life meaning and significance. Do we?

If speaking in the secular arena and in secular categories then I would say that meaning seems to be tied to our nature as the "political animal." Meaning seems to be best understood within the framework of human relationships. If I receive my loved one back after they have been "enhanced" I will be testing to make sure they are still the same person they had been previously. The possibility exists that enhancement has removed something essential to personality. As regards significance: I do not have a secular answer to that question. If we are only a highly evolved organism and no more than that, having emerged out of a random process with no design or Designer behind our existence then I am not sure that I can defend objective claims of significance. I would have to settle for the relative sense of significance which we assign to one another.

If we are dealing in the realm of the spiritual and the metaphysical then there is more to work with when desiring to ground my claims of meaning and significance, but my supports for my claims will only be accepted by those who are open to such categories.

It seems to me that you touch on various different issues here.

1) Does moral enhancement destroy or compromise "meaning and significance"? It is not clear, though, why we should think that. What has the one got to do with the other? And is there something particularly worrying about moral enhancement, or is that some general point relating to all enhancement?

2) You suggest that enhancement might change the identity of a person. They might no longer be "the same person they had been previously". Why? All enhancement, or a particular kind? And even if it did, why would it matter? Don't we change all the time? What if we had some religious or moral epiphany and turned our lives around? We may then be said to have become a different person. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Doesn't it depend on the kind of identity change that a person undergoes?

3) But perhaps you don't mean that, but rather, as you say then, that "something essential to personality" has been removed through an enhancement procedure. That would certainly be more worrying, but again, why should that be the case? What defines having a personality or being a person? In what way would moral enhancement (or any other form of enhancement) compromise that? These are all very difficult questions.

I think that we believe the meaning and significance of a person's life is bound up with their unique identity, with their exclusive and singular pairing of 23 chromosomes from that particular oocyte and 23 chromosomes from that particular sperm. Further, I think that unlike repairing defects which may cripple, maim, or shorten lifespan, performing enhancements on regularly functioning human beings may be tantamount to mutilation. This is especially so when we are speaking of that which affects the emotional/ cognitive/psychological functioning of a human being. What is worrying about moral enhancement is that the moral dimension of life has to do with human freedom. If you eliminate the ability to make wrong choices or evil choices it would seem that you have eliminated true freedom. Thereby you have eliminated the significance of human choices. What exactly is morally praiseworthy about me doing what I genetically must do and which I have no ability to choose to leave undone? This removes all worth and importance from my so-called decisions.

Michael I am sure you have had a friend who because of either alcohol or dug abuse was behaving in an erratic manner. At that time didn't you think he/she was not acting like their "usual self"? I have had friends who were put on different psychotropic drugs which have made them manic, deeply depressed, lethargic, and which have seemed to remove the usual "filters" which kept them from saying whatever was on their minds. Something within us cries out for change and restoration of "normal" when we see someone "under the influence" of a drug or a very persuasive outside force.

I think what you are driving at with some of your questions here is whether or not the change is voluntary and chosen. I agree that these are difficult questions, but I am not merely a rational brain, I am also a feeling and intuiting creature. Goleman and others have written of emotional intelligence. I find that in responding to you my mind goes primarily to the arts and to cinema. Mary Shelley's vision of the outcome of Dr. Frankenstein's work keeps looming in my head. My mind tends to draw analogies saying, "Here there be dragons." I guess a large measure of my discomfort has to do with the notion of social engineers and conditioners who decide what sorts of enhancements we need. That is a notion which is very concerning. Whom do we trust to make choices like this for us? Such people would hold a terrifying degree of power. Have you, by any chance, seen the movie The Island? Who will stand in the place of Sean Bean's character and make the rules about the individual and societal engineering that such enhancements would require? There is my greatest discomfort with this notion of enhancement.

Hi, Bill.

Good post! Do we have genuine freedom when certain actions have an imposed negative consequence attached to them? It seems like one could argue that genuine freedom would require the ability to act in a way that is free from all forms of coercion or regard for consequences of an action. I agree with your concerns mentioned above, I'm just curious about the elements related to the questions about freedom of choice subordinating the elimination of harm. Would be ok with the elimination of harm if it happened through random genetic mutation? Or would we then be having discussions about the dangers of altering natural processes to give human beings genuine freedom of choice?

Michael - Thank you so much for pointing me in the direction of Hans Jonas. The book has been a terrific read so far. I was thinking about this question and looked back a ways in what I'd read there, because it seemed as if Jonas had addressed this a bit. This is in the English so it may lose something from the German, but here it is:

"Regardless of the question of compulsion or consent, and regardless also of the question of undesirable side-effects, each time we thus bypass the human way of dealing with human problems, short-circuiting it by an impersonal mechanism, we have taken away something from the dignity of personal selfhood and advanced a further step on the road from responsible subjects to programmed behavior systems. Social functionalism, important as it is, is only one side of the question. Decisive is the question of what kind of individuals the society is composed of - to make its existence valuable as a whole. Somewhere along the line of increasing social manageability at the price of individual autonomy, the question of the worthwhileness of the human enterprise must pose itself. Answering it involves the image of man we entertain. We must think it anew in light of the things we can do to it now and could never do before."

A bit prior to that he says:

"Relief of mental patients from distressing and disabling symptoms seems unequivocally beneficial. But from the relief of the patient, a goal entirely in the tradition of the medical art, there is an easy passage to the relief of society from the inconvenience of difficult individual behavior among its members: that is, the passage from medical to social application; and this opens up an indefinite field with grave potentials."

I guess I chafe under the threat of what Jonas speaks of when he says "we have taken away something from the dignity of personal selfhood" when we do this sort of thing. As well, I fear what will happen when we move from medical to social applications of such technological capabilities.

Pat,

When you say,

"Would be ok with the elimination of harm if it happened through random genetic mutation? Or would we then be having discussions about the dangers of altering natural processes to give human beings genuine freedom of choice? "

I am not certain of what you mean. Michael is speaking of moral enhancement, which, by definition, would seem to mean an intentional human manipulation of the human. He has posed other types of changes above, such as a religious experience or that sort of thing, chosen by the individual. I do not think we can even speculate about interfering with chosen changes that an individual has selected as desirable for them unless we think that such a change poses a great danger to our friend or loved one (e.g. doing an "intervention" in the life of a friend who is an addict, or who has been brainwashed by some cult). When it comes to random genetic mutations we have a hard time becoming aware of them when they have occurred unless their outward effects are glaringly obvious. I do not think that we can control that sort of thing. I suppose that if we were speaking of something like the worldwide decrease of sperm in a seminal emission that we are hearing reported from around the globe, we might intervene in that situation (I don't know if it qualifies as a mutation) for the sake of preserving the human species.

I suppose I would not be opposed in principle to working to correct a deleterious change that took place in human beings due to mutation. I will need to think about that some more though.

Michael, two weeks ago you posed some questions above which I failed to answer well. Here is my offering in a more philosophical and less intuitional mode. I have not fully excised the intuitions as you'll see, but I've done my best to be more philosophical in this response:

1a) - We attach meaning and significance to actions being chosen out of a field of possible actions. Any enhancement that I can conceive would seem to necessarily require a reduction in the human ability to choose. Thus a loss of meaning and significance to the human capability of choice seems to be implied. I may be wrong about this, but I can’t at present see how I am wrong.

1b) - I suppose I do have a fear of all enhancement of humans because it is difficult for us to understand the long term effects of changes that we make in an organism. When you ask if it is moral enhancement especially which is worrying I must say “Yes.” primarily for the reasons mentioned in 1a.

2a) I believe that the reason that it matters if we change the identity of the person is a personal belief in the dignity and worth of the individual. We say “the fleas come with the dog”. Many famous individuals are notoriously eccentric or quirky. If, in the business of “enhancing” a human being, we eliminate the quirks and oddities, have we lost something vital about what made that person the unique individual we knew?

2b) Why would a change in the person matter? I believe because it is a loss of something about the whole, the package that comprised my friend Mary or my friend John, without concomitant growth and maturation. If John has a drinking problem that he battles with and then overcomes, then he has personal growth, as well as the “scars” earned in the process of such growth. But if we “enhance” John so that he no longer wants a drink, we may have not allowed him to grow and mature through choice, determination, failure, humility, cooperation with a process, and with people who might have helped him in his struggle. He has the desired change without the humility and accomplishment that a genuine struggle may impart. Desired change in humans presently implies (I am a counselor) hard work and what Nietzsche called “a long obedience in the same direction”. This is gone from our lives if people just go and get enhanced in order to overcome their troubles.

2c) I don’t believe I am as concerned with the type of identity change that the person undergoes as I am with how it was achieved. “Enhancement” as I conceptualize it would bypass the process by which change and maturation occurs. I believe there is something valuable about that process. As well, though I am a religious person, like yourself, I recognize the difference between programming or brainwashing and an non-coerced and personally chosen religious conversion.

3) I must confess that I cannot give a satisfying definition for what it means to “have a personality” or “being a person”. It is a holistic and experiential thing that we are dealing with and it implies a lot of assumptions on the part of the knower which Philosophy of Mind deals with more than the philosophical disciplines which I have tended to focus upon. Augustine said this of time: “What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” So also I would say, “What is a person? If you don’t ask me to define it then I know what it means. If you ask me to define it I am reduced to silence.” All my definitions are unsatisfying even though I use many disciplines to draft a definition. Does this ontological complexity mean I don’t know what a person is? Yes and no. Yes as to the entirety of what a person is, but no as to knowing something substantial about what it mean to be a person. Moral enhancement by definition means one must tinker with a very complex creature in some fashion, and I don’t think we know enough about the whole creature to do so safely.

And I can only wholeheartedly agree with everything you say, Bill, although I'm not, as you seem to think, a religious person - unless one can be religious without knowing that one is. As it happens, I just published a brief article on moral enhancement and free will in The Philosophers' Magazine, which you can find here if you're interested: http://www.academia.edu/1775221/The_Little_Alex_Problem

For a more comprehensive treatment of moral enhancement see my recent book "Better Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project" (Acumen 2013).

Sorry - probably that was poorly worded. I said, "As well, though I am a religious person, like yourself, I recognize the difference..." The "like yourself" was supposed to modify the ability to recognize the difference between brainwashing and freely chosen faith. I was already aware of what you had said about your own beliefs and regret that I was unable to come to that conference at Oxford that you spoke at in the Spring. My "though I am a religious person" was meant to be in contrast to yourself.

I just ordered Better Humans? It isn't cheap, but I anticipate an interesting read. Thank you for the link.

Sorry, Bill, I misunderstood. I hope you didn't order the hardback version. There's also a paperback copy which can be bought for 12 GBP via Amazon here in the UK. But many thanks for you interest.

Michael and Bill, I just read your discussion on Moral Enhancement. It is really interesting. I am working on "the ethics of human enhancement." I am a doctoral student in KUL, Belgium. The title of my doctoral project is " THE ETHICS OF HUMAN ENHANCEMENT: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION." One of the chapters of my dissertation will deal with the well-being approach of Julian Savulescu wherein I will analyze his stance on moral enhancement. I have read some of the works of Savulescu already on the topic under discussion and your discussion in this regard sounds very interesting.

Michael, I have read a couple of articles of yours and I have quoted you elaborately in my chapter on Michael J. Sandel's ethics of giftedness. I do agree with you on most of the points which you have written in the article,"Human Enhancement and the Giftedness of life." I will discuss with you once I begin writing on Savulescu, especially on his argument in favour of Moral Enhancement.

Bill, you seem to agree with John Harris partially regarding his stance on moral enhancement. Hope you have read Harris' literature on moral enhancement and his critique on Savulescu in this regard

The problem of good and bad, its reversal obviously arises from reflections concerning the cause of the common good; formulations of the common good can sway with setting. In my paper "Determining the Determined State :A Sizing of Size From Aside/the Amassing of Mass by a Mass (was just released) I present a shape of space (basically egg shaped) generated from a graphing method that produces more of a picture from discontinuous parts than a continuous mathematical plot....in essence is a prison that contains motion and has no ordinary moral content but is not impermeable to human action...is an ethic for the continued existence of motion from which else ensues. Is rendered strictly from the first person perspective in critique of existing physical theory.

If you are interested the link to it is:

http://academicjournals.org/journal/PPR/edition/September_2013

I have also included the RG link to it with this post.

Marvin, Unfortunately I have no idea what you are saying, so cannot really respond to it.

- Arnald, thank you for your comments on Bill's and my discussion. If you're working on the enhancement and the pursuit of perfection, you might be interested in a paper published recently by Johann Roduit et al in the Journal of Medical Ethics, which explores the issue with respect to both bioconservative and pro-enhancement positions. I forgot the title, but you can find the paper on academia.edu.

Michael: Thanks for your response. I just wish to add that my reflection on ethics begin (taken from my studies as biology graduate student and undergraduate knowledge in physics) that the light radiation has an absolute angular polarity (the energy bound to the transverse wave rotates to the right I think looking along the forwards direction of propagation) and second from writing in 14th century(Boethius) that the path of choices for those who chose a criminal existence narrows..he does not result to have equal natural f reedoms as the good. These facts indicate to me that the world has a polarity, is not general or neutral, thas had to do with ethics and morality and survival. We are borm with an idea of something from the first physical touch. I know these connections are hard to make and think to just provide a beginning point if there is interest.

Michael, thanks for your response. Yes, I downloaded the article of Johaan Roduit, namely, "Human enhancement and perfection," in JME. I am yet to read that. Thanks for suggesting. You may introduce me to literature connected to my theme or Human enhancement in general. I have placed orders for your books, (1) Better humans? Understanding the enhancement project and (2) Biotechnology and the integrity of life. Hope to come back to you after reading your views on Moral enhancement.