(Neuro-)Enhancement

Abstract

In recent years, biomedical ethics has dealt with a new subject, namely the use of drugs and other medical devices in order to improve healthy people, e.g. in terms of cognition, sexual performance, or mood. Although many of these attempts of so-called 'enhancement' are not yet proven to be both safe and effective, increasingly more people seem to use them. Ethical concerns, however, do not stop at issues of risks and effectiveness: Even under the hypothetical assumption that in the future these devices turn out to work well and without substantial risk, many people frown at what they consider a blatant 'abuse' of medicine. A whole array of deeper ethical criticism has been forwarded, both on the individual and the societal level. At the same time, there are other voices that consider such improvements ethically permissible or even desirable. These ethical controversies are particularly fierce when the attempted improvement aims at mental functions. In the following, we want to provide a systematic overview of the ethical debates around such 'neuro-enhancements'. To get there, some introductory remarks about concepts, debates, and methods of (neuro-)enhancement are called for. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)