This review of John Harris’s latest book features in the inaugural issue of CQ’s Clinical Neuroethics series. It would be safe to bet that Harris’s works, and the debates that they stimulate, will feature across many subsequent issues of Clinical Neuroethics. It is thus particularly timely to consider how his new tome, intriguingly entitled How to Be Good, presents his most recent arguments, and his engagement with critics of his works on enhancement. As the subtitle suggests, his specific focus in the 12 chapters of the work is on moral enhancement.

Before presenting an overview of the book, it is worth emphasizing how well the title catches the essence of Harris’s inquiry. It does so starkly in relation to the question of “how to be good”: as is noted even on the back cover of the work, this “is the pre-eminent question for ethics,” if “one that philosophers and ethicists seldom address head on.” But the subtitle is subtly constructed and also bears note: the book explores “the possibility of moral enhancement.” A hallmark of the “enhancement literature” generally is a focus on the possible: philosophers engage in technological horizon scanning, asking what new innovations we will derive from scientific advances, and how they might be put to use in the real world. Yet Harris is not merely interested in the scientific potential to develop (say) interventions that will breed into people a propensity to be less aggressive. At base is a more fundamental, conceptual question: is it possible, analytically, to conceive of such a thing as a moral enhancement, and if so, is the term being properly applied? Or do apparent moral enhancements, as they are advanced by scholars such as Tom Douglas, in reality represent means of undermining, rather than enhancing, people’s moral capacity?

As indicated, Harris’s inquiry spans over 12 chapters. Anyone familiar with his work will know before reading it that it is written in engaging, accessible, punchy, amusing, sometimes irreverent style. (One senses, for example, that Harris enjoys describing his definition of the cloud as “rather nebulous” [p. 152], and writing of Leon Kass that he is a “philosopher notorious for trying to do away with moral philosophy” [p. 28].) A defining feature of the book is that it draws in large part from, and builds on, previously published works, many of which have engaged directly with protagonists who sit at quite different fronts in debates on moral enhancement: there are questions of empirical prediction, biological determinism, political responsibility, sound processes of legal (including criminal) justice, and basic moral decisionmaking. And at the heart of it all, as I read it, are two core questions: how can someone (or something) be a moral actor, and how can that person experience and be guided by morality?

Following a concise outline of the project of the book, the introductory chapter sets the parameters of Harris’s agenda and explains how he will approach it. The landscape in which his work sits is not limited to moral philosophy. He writes: “Knowing how to be good, or perhaps more modestly and more accurately, knowing how to go about trying to be good, is of immense theoretical and practical importance. It is also perhaps the most important issue facing contemporary neuroscience, social policy, and criminal justice” (p. 1). For Harris, approaching the question of how to be good through engagement with debates on moral enhancement exposes truths about morality itself. In setting out his moral stall in chapter 1, he is clear on how morality should be understood: it matters, he argues, that our actions have effects. The differences that we make are important. And the role of ethics is to allow us to assess the moral quality of the impacts that we (might) have. Chapter 1 makes clear, furthermore, that morality applies as much in political action as it does in individual decisionmaking: we have to consider our responsibilities collectively as well as individually. For Harris, this includes examining the role and legitimacy of the state (on which more below). This foregrounds a further part of the project, which is to establish who (or what) “the people” consists in: who enjoys the privileged status of moral personhood?

Harris has long argued that there are moral imperatives to embrace different modes of enhancement. He is, however, opposed to many of the agendas of (purported) moral enhancement that have begun to proliferate. He summarizes his overall thesis as follows:

As such, we enter the following eleven chapters with a view of the breadth of Harris’s inquiry. And although each chapter can be read alone as a self-contained essay, the narrative thread that runs through the different chapters makes the book a useful basic reference point to anyone interested in questions of moral enhancement, as well as more “meta” questions of what it is to “do” moral theory.

Chapter 2 examines the central question: What does it mean to be good? Although Harris’s theories revolve around respect for persons, his units of concern in assessing actions are predicated on accounts of harm and benefit. Part of the project of chapter 2 is to establish that these concepts, if not universally agreed on in every detail, are generally recognized; we can discriminate between better and worse states. Furthermore, the same rationality that would have us avoid harm no less compellingly suggests that we should aspire to greater benefit. Moral good exists, on this account, in the things that allow persons best to flourish. And being good exists in an agent being able to recognize the difference between good and bad, and further to recognize that with that capacity “come opportunities and responsibilities, to act to enhance the good and diminish the bad” (p. 32). It is thus potentially possible to do good accidentally (pp. 35–6), but being good requires engagement in moral deliberation and the capacity to be bad: a person can only be good if she has chosen to do good.

These themes are elaborated in chapters 3–7. Chapter 3 looks to persons, playing on the much-referenced concept of human rights. Persons—that is, moral actors and the primary recipients of moral concern—for Harris, cannot be defined by reference to species membership. In fact, he argues, there are both normative and scientific reasons to question the moral validity of speciesism. Recognition of such should not make us fear a posthuman future, or resist enhancing ourselves for the better (though see below the discussion of chapter 12). However, in chapter 4, Harris grips the main point at which he thinks “enhancements” should be resisted: when apparent “moral enhancements” operate by denying an agent freedom. For Harris, “the space between knowing the good and doing the good is a region entirely inhabited by freedom” (p. 60). Apparent enhancements that close off immoral choices close off morality: “There is no virtue in doing what you must” (p. 60). Building on this position, chapters 4–7 engage directly with various of Harris’s critics, including Tom Douglas, Ingmar Persson, Julian Savulescu, and David DeGrazia. There is not space here to rehearse their arguments, but the overall engagement with these critics lends additional depth to the book and will no doubt spur further debate in the future. The reader is left with much to ponder on: among other things, fundamental conceptual points in ethics, and consequent rationales for practical decisionmaking and understanding.

Although they are relevant throughout, from chapter 8 the book steers more explicitly toward questions of law and policy. Chapter 8 is one of two chapters that draw explicitly from work Harris collaborated on with the Royal Society (the UK and Commonwealth’s independent academy of science). This chapter focuses on moral enhancement and law, and the idea of prosociality. Harris examines questions regarding evolution, and the relationship (or otherwise) between people’s evolutionarily inherited feelings about morality and rational moral judgment. In exploring questions about the moral benefits (or otherwise) of persons possessing biological impulses to act morally, that chapter examines critically the morality that some see implicit in prosociality:

In a sustained engagement with the work of Patricia Churchland, Harris continues his examination of the nature of morality through debate on moral enhancement. Given his earlier claims about freedom, his position is that it would be wrong to understand morality by reference to biologically prescribed emotions. Morality, for Harris, must be understood through “judgment not feelings” (p. 132).

Chapters 9 and 10 continue the politicolegal discussion, first in a debate on the question of using moral enhancements to achieve—at a more macro level—moral progress. Harris resumes a debate with Persson and Savulescu regarding agendas to limit the harms that people might commit with technologies. In essence, the disagreement turns on whether humanity generally requires to be morally enhanced so that it does not cause itself great and avoidable harm. In excerpts from their published arguments against him, Harris presents and responds to critiques of his positions—perhaps most interestingly, those regarding the idea of freedom to be good. Again, the theme of judgment and considered moral positions is central. In short, Harris argues that the idea of moral progress is undermined if it is achieved by eradicating the capacity to reflect morally, and choose to act (or not) on the basis of moral reflection.

Chapter 10, again drawing in part from Harris’s collaboration with the Royal Society, considers the possibility of mind reading. The central question is about how we, and the state, might do harm or benefit to persons given the capacity to read their minds. The chapter begins with the cautionary note that things that can be read necessarily can be misread. And following reflections on a long-standing human fascination with mind reading, the practical focus moves to “the cloud,” the term Harris uses to incorporate the Internet and digitized records. He uses the chapter to argue that “the cloud has replaced the eyes, or the face or indeed the brain as the most potent avenue of access to the human mind and perhaps also to synthetic minds” (p. 149). The particular problem that Harris identifies, however, is that this “window to the soul” is likely to lead to large-scale, manifest misreadings: he is wary of the permanence of information in the cloud, the near-complete lack of control in knowing who the audience will be, and the partiality of information and the loss of nuance (e.g., the failure to recognize when a statement is made ironically).

In chapter 11, the book moves from issue-led analysis in political morality to Harris’s account of political obligation. Harris is firmly of the view that morality requires collective activity in order best to achieve the good. In elucidating part of what he takes this to imply, he constructs ideas about collective and political responsibility, which he draws from Hobbesian theory. He uses the metaphor of the social contract, but on the basis—following his interpretation of Hobbes—“that it is not the contract that creates our obligations, it is our obligations that create the contract” (p. 158). In other words, Harris sees prior moral obligations (as discussed, e.g., in chapter 2) as being the source to consult when seeking to establish consequent political responsibilities: legitimate political duties are derivative of morality. Harris’s analysis applies with reference to sovereign states, whose responsibilities are to protect the “safety of the people,” given preexisting commitments rooted in the harms and benefits at the heart of moral judgment, combined with a concern to respect all persons as equal rights holders.

The final chapter seems to move back away from politics and law and revisits questions that go to the heart of moral personhood. Earlier in the book, examination of this concept had looked at enhancements and evolution to biological persons. Chapter 12, however, responds to the literatures regarding transhumanism and considers persons who are machines. The analysis itself (as consistency would demand) points to earlier-stated conditions of morality. However, Harris provokes thoughts about the nature of moral—and other sorts of—interests of machines persons, and also the capacity that fundamentally different sorts of persons might have to recognize and respond properly to the moral interests of one another. He closes on the hopeful note that persons as commonly recognized will live according to recognizably sound moral values, and that machine persons might do the same.

Overall, the book draws from a range of debates and in this sense provides a most useful reference point for scholars and students who are interested in central controversies regarding moral enhancement. It also affords stimulating insights into many of the specific arguments prompted by the moral implications of different scientific and technological developments. The book is informative and interesting. Its full-blooded engagement in debate, furthermore, makes it highly engaging. Many of us working in bioethics have had the pleasure of arguing fundamental points of morality and politics with John Harris; I had the great pleasure of doing so when I was his colleague in Manchester. Reading How to Be Good for me did not just provoke points of intellectual inquiry; it also reminded me of the enormous value of academic debate. The book will surely encourage much more of that.