title: Cognitive biases can affect moral intuitions about cognitive enhancement.
abstract: Research into cognitive biases that impair human judgment has mostly been applied to the area of economic decision-making. Ethical decision-making has been comparatively neglected. Since ethical decisions often involve very high individual as well as collective stakes, analyzing how cognitive biases affect them can be expected to yield important results. In this theoretical article, we consider the ethical debate about cognitive enhancement (CE) and suggest a number of cognitive biases that are likely to affect moral intuitions and judgments about CE: status quo bias, loss aversion, risk aversion, omission bias, scope insensitivity, nature bias, and optimistic bias. We find that there are more well-documented biases that are likely to cause irrational aversion to CE than biases in the opposite direction. This suggests that common attitudes about CE are predominantly negatively biased. Within this new perspective, we hope that subsequent research will be able to elaborate this hypothesis and develop effective de-biasing techniques that can help increase the rationality of the public CE debate and thus improve our ethical decision-making.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford Oxford, UK.
authors.forename: Lucius
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Caviola
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University of Bern Bern, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Adriano
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mannino
authors.affiliation: Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford Oxford, UK ; Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, University of Oxford Oxford, UK.
authors.forename: Julian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Savulescu
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford Oxford, UK ; Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, University of Oxford Oxford, UK ; Department Values, Technology and Innovation, Delft University of Technology Delft, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Nadira
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Faulmüller
keywords: attitudes; brain function augmentation; cognitive bias; cognitive enhancement; de-biasing; moral intuitions; rationality