Should Technology Make Us Good? The Price of Perfection in Moral Enhancement

Event date: 19 October 2026. Information verified through 20 October 2026.

Suppose the device worked perfectly. No side effects. No coercion, no cost, no government overreach to argue about. Would you let it make you good?

A paper published on 19 October 2026, “The Price of Perfection,” grants every one of those conditions on purpose — and still answers no (Religions, MDPI). Its author examines moral enhancement through classical Jewish sources and argues that free will is not one value to trade against others, but an existential condition of human life, so the price of a world free of sin and suffering would be “our very humanity” (Religions, MDPI).

Moral enhancement, in this debate, means biotechnical intervention only — drugs, genetic engineering, neural implants or brain stimulation — not education or habituation (Religions, MDPI). The paper notes that a first Neuralink implant in a human patient in 2024 helped shift such questions “from theoretical to practical” (Religions, MDPI).

The case for urgency

The strongest argument on the other side is not vanity. It is fear. In their 2008 work, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu argued that cognitive enhancement and scientific progress increase the chance that weapons of mass destruction reach small groups or individuals, while traditional moral education is probably insufficient to keep pace (Towards a systematic evaluation of moral bioenhancement, PMC). On their account, our moral psychology is maladapted to the modern world: we care far more about people near us and near in time than about distant strangers or future generations (Towards a systematic evaluation of moral bioenhancement, PMC).

A systematic review of 85 publications in the debate sorted the arguments into six clusters, covering need, consensus, feasibility, means, freedom and identity, and social effects (The ethical desirability of moral bioenhancement, PMC). That review also warned that many authors overestimate how feasible these interventions are, rendering much of the debate “too speculative” (The ethical desirability of moral bioenhancement, PMC). No moral pill exists.

Tilt, thinking, override

The new paper usefully separates three targets. You can aim at motivation, tilting someone towards empathy and away from aggression. You can aim at cognition, strengthening the reasoning that works out what is right. Or you can aim at behaviour directly, so the right act happens regardless of motivation or reasoning (Religions, MDPI).

Defenders of the first target call it a “moral tilt,” not a “moral override”: the intervention amplifies a good impulse and attenuates a bad one, leaving deliberation intact (Religions, MDPI). A Kantian reading can even find room for that version. Sarah Carter argues that Kant’s later writing on sympathy means Kantian ethics might allow emotional modulation in some cases, and that softening counter-moral emotions such as racial aversion or aggression could clear the way for moral reasoning rather than replace it (A Kantian ethics approach to moral bioenhancement, PMC).

Behaviour is where agreement collapses. Persson and Savulescu proposed a hypothetical “God Machine,” a supercomputer monitoring the population and intervening before an imprisonable act, and they acknowledged it would cost freedom of action while arguing that preventing such harm could outweigh that cost (Religions, MDPI). John Harris’s objection, quoted across this literature, is blunt: “Without the freedom to fall, good cannot be a choice; and freedom disappears and along with it virtue. There is no virtue in doing what you must” (A Kantian ethics approach to moral bioenhancement, PMC).

Where scholars actually disagree

Do not mistake this for a settled field. A 2022 evaluation describes the debate as marked by “extreme polarization and lack of consensus about any relevant aspect” of moral bioenhancement — what it is, whether we want it, and whether it should be allowed (Towards a systematic evaluation of moral bioenhancement, PMC). Its author proposes three tests instead: is a given proposal coherent and effective, does it avoid conflict with fundamental moral norms, and is it compatible with equality and justice (Towards a systematic evaluation of moral bioenhancement, PMC)?

Context cuts both ways, too. Reduced aggression might help at home or at work and harm on a battlefield — a point the new paper notes is accepted even by many defenders of motivational enhancement (Religions, MDPI). A trait is not good in the abstract. It is good somewhere, for someone, in a situation.

Analysis: the tilt-versus-override distinction does most of the real work in this debate. A nudge to a motive you still examine is a different moral object from a system that vetoes your act before you take it. Collapsing both into “moral enhancement” lets each side argue against the version it finds easiest to defeat.

The Jewish sources in the new paper push the argument one step further than the familiar autonomy objection. The paper reads the Talmudic image of God slaughtering the evil inclination in a future age as something reserved for God, not a human engineering brief, and closes on a hard line: examining and correcting your own actions is the human task, not deleting the capacity to get them wrong (Religions, MDPI).

If a machine guarantees the outcome, who performed the good act? The paper’s answer: nobody did. A world producing good outcomes, with nobody performing good acts, has lost the thing it set out to protect.

Sources

1. Religions (MDPI) — “The Price of Perfection: Moral Enhancement, Free Will, and the Limits of Technological Salvation” (19 October 2026): https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/17/10/1224
2. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics via PMC — Kudlek, “Towards a systematic evaluation of moral bioenhancement” (2022): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9388419/
3. Bioethics via PMC — Carter, “A Kantian ethics approach to moral bioenhancement” (2017): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5656885/
4. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine via PMC — Specker et al., “The ethical desirability of moral bioenhancement: a review of reasons” (2014): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4274726/