State neutrality and the ethics of human enhancement technologies

Robust technological enhancement of core cognitive capacities is now a realistic possibility. From the perspective of neutralism, the view that justifications for public policy should be neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good, only members of a subset of the ethical concerns serve as legitimate justifications for public policy regarding robust technological enhancement. This paper provides a framework for the legitimate use of ethical concerns in justifying public policy decisions regarding these enhancement technologies by evaluating the ethical concerns that arise in the context of testing such technologies on nonhuman animals. Traditional issues in bioethics, as well as novel concerns such as the possibility of moral status enhancement, are evaluated from the perspective of neutralism.