Self-Control Enhancement Technologies Within Kant’s Theory of Virtue

Self-control is fundamental for moral development. In light of widespread phenomena such as digital addictions (gaming and social-media addictions), the prospect of enhancing self-control is more pressing than ever. There are also emerging technologies with the potential to improve self-control, such as neurofeedback devices, self-control enhancement apps, and transcranial direct current stimulation. They engage agents actively or passively. Different modes of engagement matter a great deal because they affect our perception of the permissibility of these interventions. This prompts an important question: What, if anything, is wrong with enhancing self-control by technological means? And yet, self-control enhancement (SCE) has received surprisingly little focused attention. Given the significance of self-control in moral development and its potential neurotechnological malleability, we believe that SCE warrants more thorough investigation in its own right. In this paper, we question whether technological improvements of self-control would be prohibited, permissible, or necessary according to Kant’s theory of virtue. We adopt this normative framework for two main reasons. First, SCE technologies such as brain stimulation and neurofeedback devices pose distinctive ethical concerns in a Kantian framework, particularly insofar as they challenge Kantian virtue – understood as a kind of moral self-control. Using SCE tools promotes overreliance and automaticity, and so risks hindering self-control development and undermining autonomous moral agency. By situating SCE within Kant’s theory of virtue, however, we argue that such technologies can be permissible, and even necessary means to moral improvement. If so, then SCE would be even more easily acceptable in other ethical frameworks. Second, Kant’s work contains a distinctive conception of self-control, which has important implications for the enhancement debate. Self-control is usually understood as the ability to act in accordance with our better judgment in the face of conflicting motivation. Alfred Mele (1987: 54) describes it as “the ability to prevent such motivation from resulting in behavior that is contrary to one's decisive better judgment”, and Jeannette Kennett (2003: 119) as “the capacity to bring one's actions into line with one's judgements of value”. Self-control thus seems to come into play once we have made moral judgements: we merely need it to achieve goals we have judged valuable. Contemporary moral psychology has downplayed a significant form of self-control: resisting the temptation to lower our moral standards when setting ourselves goals. Kant’s conception of self-control explains self-control in goal-pursuing and goal-setting. A view including instrumental and guidance self-control has interesting implications for the permissibility of SCE. For instance, if we offload our instrumental self-control to an app that locks us from social media from time to time, its use may still be permissible for we may have guidance control. Furthermore, if self-control is necessary for making moral judgments and SCE is yet morally permissible, then we have a case of the permissible enhancement of a cognitive capacity. By cutting across conventional distinctions between cognitive or motivational capacities, our Kantian analysis of self-control improvement advances the moral enhancement debate: since self-control spans both, it represents a more integrative and promising form of moral enhancement.