Lukeprog does an overview of starting points on moral enhancement: useful for us because obviously we aren't perfect utilitarians and yet would self modify in that direction. This article could go some way towards doing it.

Could be a very profitable line of inquiry for utilitarians - willingness to give is a very important limiting factor in donations.

The links in the overview are interesting, but they're concerned mostly with the philosophical issues of moral enhancements. Have any of you used techniques to become more empathetic?

I listened to the interview with Julian Savulescu, in which he argues that it is imperative that moral education become part of school curriculums and that we use biological means to counter cognitive biases and to expand our sphere of moral concern. That we could modify ourselves to make acting morally easier is an attractive, even inspiring, proposition. Morally enhanced humans could care more about people in other countries, animals, the distant future, and so on. But there are all sorts of reasons that compulsory moral enhancement would fail.

• Concerns about civil liberties. Liberal societies don't like the government interfering with their lives.
• Disagreement about what to enhance. Religious parents might want to increase their children's respect for God, libertarians might want to make themselves more distrustful of the government, etc.
• Lack of awareness of the problems. Most people think that their morals don't need any enhancing. The very biases that contribute to needless suffering create a catch-22 by making people think that there really is a morally relevant distinction between acts and omissions, or between helping people in their own countries or those on the other side of the world (or in the future).
• Uneasiness about enhancement in general.

I wonder what it would take for people to agree that governments must require biological moral enhancement of their citizens, just as they require vaccinations for children. Even if something big happened (e.g., fifty million people died from a genetically engineered smallpox virus), would people realize that moral enhancement is a good thing?

Some comments on the Guardian article:

I quite like being immoral thank you very much.

THIS IS A WORLD THAT NEEDS ALL THE HELP IT CAN GET

Oh dear. There are countless SF books warning against this sort of thing. Perhaps someone should read some?

Look the links between pharmacopia and nazis are well known, in fact a lot of today's mainstream pharmacopia companies have very intresting links back to the Aryan ones.

I hate reading comments on newspaper websites about anything I'm remotely interested in. *Shudders*

I'm pretty much agreed that the idea of moral enhancement on a societal level is a non-starter. I doubt many things would convince people to do useful moral education or biological interventions or whatever. I mean, in some senses people do try to modify their kid's morals, but not usually in particularly interesting directions, e.g. fundamentalist Christians homeschooling their kids.

It's sad that there aren't too many practical techniques for this sort of thing. The most obvious thing I try to do is have being a highly altruistic person as a core part of my identity - and then making sure I don't just start defining everything I do as highly altruistic. And do start taking actions that make me feel altruistic.