Enhancement and desert

Abstract:: It is sometimes claimed that those who succeed with the aid of enhancement technologies deserve the rewards associated with their success less, other things being equal, than those who succeed without the aid of such technologies. This claim captures some widely held intuitions, has been implicitly endorsed by participants in social–psychological research and helps to undergird some otherwise puzzling philosophical objections to the use of enhancement technologies. I consider whether it can be provided with a rational basis. I examine three arguments that might be offered in its favour and argue that each either shows only that enhancements undermine desert in special circumstances or succeeds only under assumptions that deprive the appeal to desert of much of its dialectic interest.

Files:: Thomas Douglas 2018 Enhancement and Desert.pdf

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Language:: English
Keywords:: desert

effort

FFR

achievement

praiseworthiness

enhancement

moral worth

fairness
Pubs id:: 1188431
Local pid:: pubs:1188431
Deposit date:: 2021-09-15
ARK identifier:: ark:/29072/ora_4e9ac7a93ab7459baac503de045963be

Copyright holder:: Thomas Douglas.
Rights statement:: © The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

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Journal article