Destined to be super human? Moral bio enhancement and its legal viability

The case of moral bioenhancement (MB) is one of the several contemporary ethical-legal discussions related to the notion of ‘moral’ technologies. This is is an unusual coupling of terms whose meaning can be traced back to Michel Foucault’s understanding of the process that makes social beings into certain types of subject. Over time, the proposal of ‘moral’ enhancement of human beings, namely healthy individuals, has been developed into a more detailed ‘project of moral bioenhancement’. Recently, an entire issue of The American Journal of Bioethics 2014 was dedicated to the ‘project’ of MB from different points of view. In general terms, the proposal fosters the use of knowledge of the biological foundation of human moral behaviour for interventions, mostly pharmacological, into the human mind in order to make individuals become morally better. Some suggest that moral bioenhancement might avoid the long and not easy shaping of morality through education, other authors even claim that there is a moral obligation to moral bioenhancement for diminishing global threats like wars and therefore to keep the conditions for a peaceful coexistence at the global level. In order to understand the ethical-legal implications of this project I will first of all define MB and put it in the context of a process started in the second half of the past century and termed ‘medicalization of society’. The questions that will guide through my line of reasoning are: Is identification of the target group of MB easy today? Is the traditional distinction between healthy individuals and patients so clear? What about unpatients? What legal protection do healthy individuals find in the current legal framework in EU in case of administration of drugs for enhancing purposes? What may be the implications of MB for the right to self-determination and construction of one’s personality? I will deal with the topic from a biolaw perspective trying to relate ethical questions with legal ones in order to test the consistency of the proposal of MB with the current European legal framework. And eventually, I will discuss what is going on behind the scenes of the project of MB, as it is undeniable that a particular moral stance about human nature and notions of embodiment, enhancement, and morality are at play in shaping the discourse of MB. Are we destined to be super human?