We must enhance the human; or else humanity will come to an end. Thus dramatically one could summarize the bioethicist Julian Savulescu’s TEDx-talk in Barcelona in July.

The talk lasts fifteen minutes; you can watch and listen to it yourself: The Need for Moral Enhancement.

The idea is that we urgently need medicine and technology to enhance our moral skills; otherwise we will not be able to handle the global threats that we ourselves created: climate change, nuclear weapons, terrorism, starvation, escalating violence.

Globalization, in short, created a world with dimensions to which our hunter-gatherer morality isn’t adapted. Only a moral pill can save us now.

Listening to the talk, I’m struck by how archaic it sounds, despite references to modern medicine and technology. Thus fire-and-brimstone preachers always made people feel the proximity of the end of the world. Thus fire-and-brimstone preachers always made people feel that the cause of the despicable state of the world is their own moral failure. Thus preachers always forced a new awakening:

  • “You’re on the wrong path; I can show you the way!”

The difference is the use of what could be termed the modern rhetoric of empirical justification, in which all claims must be supported by evidence… that is to say, by PowerPoint slides. The rhetoric seems to direct the use of evidence, however, for evidence pointing in undesired directions isn’t cited.

Neither does Savulescu explore alternative ways of thinking. Has globalization really produced a world so big that we cannot handle it? Couldn’t one just as well claim that globalization created a world so miserably tiny and manageable that one might grieve for the death of all that is great?

In the talk, the most archaic form of moralizing is provided with a modernized rhetorical façade, in order to persuade us that only conversion to a biomedically perfected morality can save us now. It is slightly paradoxical.

No wonder the audience looks dejected.

Pär Segerdahl

The temptation of rhetoric - the ethics blog