¹ Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, Philosophical Review 74:1 (1965), 3–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 5.

² Savulescu, Julian and Persson, Ingmar, ‘Moral Enhancement, Freedom and the God Machine’, The Monist 95:3 (2012), 399–421CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Douglas, Thomas, ‘Moral Enhancement’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 25:3 (2008), 228–45CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; DeGrazia, David, ‘Moral Improvement, Freedom, and What We (Should) Value in Moral Behaviour’, Journal of Medical Ethics 40:6 (2014), 361–368CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

³ Douglas, ‘Moral Enhancement’; DeGrazia, ‘Moral Improvement’.

⁴ ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1:3, (1972), 229–43Google Scholar.

⁵ ‘Real World Justice’, The Journal of Ethics 9:1/2 (2005), 29–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Pogge, in ‘Real World Justice’, argues that we are actively complicit in sustaining these conditions (we are, he says, ‘participants in the largest, though not the gravest, crime against humanity ever committed’) and that therefore we have a moral duty to stop causing the harm. Singer, in ‘Famine, Affluence’, famously argues that whether or not we are responsible for the conditions that make people suffer ‘absolute poverty’, we are responsible for trying to help as many as we can, up to the point at which to do more would entail sacrificing something of ‘moral significance’ to ourselves.

⁷ DeGrazia, in ‘Moral Improvement’, includes ‘other sentient beings’, as well as human beings, as deserving beneficiaries of human moral enhancement.

⁸ Cf. Lichtenberg, Judith, ‘Negative Duties, Positive Duties, and the “New Harms”’, Ethics 120:3 (2010), 557–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I realise that some, probably most, readers would not accept that these are all genuine moral problems. I accept that this is a matter of “reasonable disagreement”. But I do not think it plausible that someone might reasonably deny that any of the aforementioned is a genuine moral problem, still less that that there are any moral problems of this scope, scale, and weight. Nevertheless, I do not here engage in first-order advocacy for any particular putative moral problem. My focus, rather, is on what it would take for these to be widely recognised as moral problems and for the recognisers to act in accordance with that recognition.

⁹ Savulescu and Persson, ‘Moral Enhancement’, 401.

¹⁰ Douglas, ‘Moral Enhancement’, 229.

¹¹ DeGrazia, ‘Moral Improvement’, 363.

¹² The foregoing mirrors Latané and Darley's five-stage model of the process of transition from bystander to helper in their classic situationist social psychology of ‘the bystander effect’, The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He Help? (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1970)Google Scholar.

¹³ On this see Moody-Adams, Michele, ‘Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance’, Ethics 104:2 (1994), 291–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who convincingly argues that self-interest in terms of material benefit and personal conservatism motivates people to remain ignorant of the wrongness of wrongful institutionalised practices in their society. She argues that this ignorance is culpable because it is affected, but I think the ignorance is largely caused by social and cultural influences and that therefore it is often genuine and for this reason excusable to a significant degree (see Pleasants, Nigel, ‘Institutional Wrongdoing and Moral Perception’, Journal of Social Philosophy 39:1 [2008], 96–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

¹⁴ Harris, John, ‘Moral Enhancement and Freedom’, Bioethics 25:2 (2011), 102–111CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Bublitz, Christoph, ‘Moral Enhancement and Mental Freedom’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 33:1 (2016), 88–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Sparrow, Robert ‘Better Living Through Chemistry? A Reply to Savulescu and Persson on “Moral Enhancement”’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 31:1 (2014), 23–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 25; cf. Bublitz, ‘Moral Enhancement’, 103.

¹⁶ I return to this point in section 4 below.

¹⁷ It does matter to those that hold a virtue-ethical conception of the moral agent, which many participants in the enhancement debate do seem to hold. But I think that what matters morally has more to do with the beneficiaries of agents’ action than the moral character of the agent themselves. The latter is primarily a good for the agent, and I find virtue-ethical fixation on the agent's character somewhat narcissistic. This issue is further explored in section 4 below.

¹⁸ ‘Before  the  eighteenth  century  practically  no one, no matter  how compassionate  or  scrupulous, regarded slavery  as  an intolerable  evil’, Haskell, Thomas, ‘Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Antislavery’, The American Historical Review 92:4 (1987), 829–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 848.

¹⁹ David Brion Davis, ‘The Universal Attractions of Slavery’, The New York Review of Books, 17^th December 2009.

²⁰ Quoted in Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975)Google Scholar, 453.

²¹ Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 41–42.

²² Haskell, ‘Convention and Hegemonic Interest’, 858.

²³ Williams, Bernard, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

²⁴ See Pleasants, Nigel, ‘Moral Argument is Not Enough: The Persistence of Slavery and the Emergence of Abolition’, Philosophical Topics 38:1 (2010), 139–160CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ This is an important qualification – I do not, implausibly, maintain that contemporary society is now (even largely) free of racism, sexism, and homophobia. There is still much to be done to achieve justice on these fronts. Arguably the main remaining recalcitrant barrier to justice is “implicit bias”. This phenomenon is claimed to be very widespread and its effect is most dramatically seen in those whose explicit beliefs, values, and attitudes are resolutely opposed to racism, sexism, and homophobia. Countless psychological studies have shown that many, perhaps most, individuals unknowingly harbour, and sometimes act upon, implicit (unconscious) biases that contradict and subvert their explicit (conscious) beliefs, values, and attitudes. There is a burgeoning philosophical literature on implicit bias – see, for a recent overview, Levy, Neil, ‘Implicit Bias and Moral Responsibility: Probing the Data’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93:3 (2017), 3–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The phenomenon of implicit bias coheres very well with my claim that we modern citizens who denounce the evils of racism, sexism, and homophobia do not possess an enhanced moral psychology vis-à-vis our overtly racist, sexist, and homophobic predecessors.

²⁶ This judgement coheres with Haskell's, Davis', and Williams' broader claim that the moral capacities of modern, early, and pre-modern peoples are about the same as ours.

²⁷ See Harman, Gilbert, ‘Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1999), 315–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Doris, John, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Cohen, G. A., If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

²⁹ Cohen, If You're an Egalitarian, 157.

³⁰ Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979).

³¹ Cf. Wittgenstein, , Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968)Google Scholar: ‘an “inner process” stands in need of outward criteria’, §580.

³² Tim Crane, ‘An Interview with John Searle’ (2014): http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/an-interview-with-john-searle.

³³ It is interesting that whilst there is something prima facie peculiar, or questionable, about the comportment of rich egalitarians, the very idea of a meat-eating vegetarian is patently preposterous. In the former case one may wonder how the egalitarian reconciles their (relative) wealth with their egalitarian belief; in the latter it hardly even makes sense for someone that eats meat, even just occasionally, to say that they are, or think of themselves as, a vegetarian (witness such expressions as “I am nearly vegetarian”, or “I am vegetarian most of the time”).

³⁴ ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, 234.

³⁵ Darmstadter, Howard, ‘Peter Singer Says You Are a Bad Person’, Philosophy Now 89 (2012)Google Scholar: https://philosophynow.org/issues/89/Peter_Singer_Says_You_Are_a_Bad_Person.

³⁶ ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, 241.

³⁷ Cohen admits to fitting the description ‘rich egalitarian’ himself: ‘I am, like most professors, much richer than the average person in my society’, and he confesses to giving to egalitarian causes ‘only a fraction of the money that I earn (by which I don't mean that I give away something like, for example, three quarters of it; I mean a different, more fractional, sort of fraction)’, If You're an Egalitarian, 150.

³⁸ Cohen, If You're an Egalitarian, 155.

³⁹ I do not deny that there may be a rare few that fail to act only on account of a weak will.

⁴⁰ The purpose of this example is not to argue that car-driving is, in itself, morally wrong. I am interested here only in the fact that hardly anyone has even considered whether it might be, despite, as I will show, there being strong prima facie reasons at least to pose that question.

⁴¹ Husak, Douglas, ‘Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked?’, Social Theory and Practice 30:3 (2004), 351–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 354.

⁴² See for example, Moody-Adams, ‘Culture, Responsibility’.

⁴³ Husak, ‘Vehicles and Crashes’, 364.

⁴⁴ Pleasants, ‘Institutional Wrongdoing’.

⁴⁵ Notwithstanding Husak's maverick, but outlandish, critique, this is currently the situation regarding car-driving as such, as discussed above.

⁴⁶ As do Savulescu and Persson, in ‘Moral Enhancement’: ‘[a] willingness to sacrifice one's own interests is […] a feature of even undemanding moralities’, 407.

⁴⁷ See Goodin, Robert, ‘Duties of Charity, Duties of Justice’, Political Studies 65:2 (2017), 268–283CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an argument on how the moral duty to aid the world's poorest people should be institutionalised and thereby transformed from isolated acts of supererogatory charity to a strict (perfect) duty of justice for all liable citizens.

⁴⁸ Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson present arresting empirical evidence in their bestselling The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin, 2010)Google Scholar, that fundamental inequality, disrespect, exploitation, and injustice is bad for everyone, perpetrators as well as victims.

⁴⁹ Quoted in Savulescu and Persson, ‘Moral Enhancement’, 406.

⁵⁰ Savulescu and Persson, ‘Moral Enhancement’, 409, quoting Harris.