Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 9, 2024

Empathy, Altruism, and Moral Bioenhancement

(Abstract)

Xu Xiangdong

Moral bioenhancement is an initiative aimed at enhancing human morality through biomedical interventions, and its main proponents believe that moral enhancement can be achieved by biologically enhancing people’s capacity for compassion or empathy. Although altruism and morality can both be viewed as having evolutionary origins, they serve fundamentally different functions in human life, which complicates the nature of human moral experience and causes moral content to shift with environmental conditions and the nature of social interactions. Such proposed initiatives  not only lack sufficient feasibility but could, if implemented on a large scale, fundamentally alter the very shape of human life, potentially depriving individuals of their grasp of life’s value and meaning.