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Cognitive Enhancement: Methods, Ethics, Regulatory Challenges

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Abstract

Cognitive enhancement takes many and diverse forms. Various methods of cognitive enhancement have implications for the near future. At the same time, these technologies raise a range of ethical issues. For example, they interact with notions of authenticity, the good life, and the role of medicine in our lives. Present and anticipated methods for cognitive enhancement also create challenges for public policy and regulation.

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Notes

  1. Advances in social organization have also enabled individual minds—through interactions with other people’s minds—to become vastly more effective. Improvements in social organization that are not directly mediated by technology lie outside the scope of this review.

  2. A possible example is suggested in (Cochran et al. 2006), where it is predicted that heterozygoticity for Tay-Sachs’ disease should increase IQ by about 5 points.

  3. “In my view, the fear of hyper-agency is misplaced; society as a whole seems always to return to the reasonable use of new knowledge. … Just as most people don't drink all the liquor in their liquor cabinet…our society will absorb new memory drugs according to each individual’s underlying philosophy and sense of self” (Gazzaniga 2005).

  4. But see also “What is and is not wrong with enhancement”, a critique by Frances Kamm (2006).

  5. There is no link between higher intelligence and more happiness (Sigelman 1981; Hartog and Oosterbeek 1998; Gow et al. 2005). However, see also “Is being intelligent good? Addressing questions of value in behavioural genetics” by Newson (2000) for some more subtle ways intelligence might bring happiness.

  6. For an argument that it should, see James Hughes’ Citizen Cyborg Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Hughes 2004).

  7. It can certainly be argued as a negative right (cf. Boire 2001; Sandberg 2003).

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We are grateful to Rebecca Roache for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Bostrom, N., Sandberg, A. Cognitive Enhancement: Methods, Ethics, Regulatory Challenges. Sci Eng Ethics 15, 311–341 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9142-5

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