Enhancement for well-being is still ethically challenging

”If we were to ask the question: ”What is human life’s chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: ”It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.” (William James 1902) Enhancement is generally understood as being intended to improve well-being. The motivation to enhance is the desire to change a person for the better. However, even when increased well-being is the motivation, it is unclear how to morally evaluate any given intervention. Four examples illustrate why any enhancement intervention, including those motivated by the desire to increase well-being, still demands ethical reflection. Enhancement – vaguely defined and controversial Humans have always been fighting, with all the means at their disposal, against disease, pain, and unhappiness, fighting to increase their quality of life. There have been many facts, fictions, and controversies around the enhancement of brain functions in the last 15 years. Ever since the debate started new definitions of enhancement have been proffered, often diverging from each other and leading to debates on a wide field of ethical and social matters (Parens 1998, Farah et al. 2004, Greely et al. 2008, Schermer et al. 2009, Nagel 2010). Enhancement interventions come in many varieties: there are manifold methods, goals, motivations, desires, ideals, and values that can invoke heated discussions. Moral deliberation reaches from statements such as those put forward in the President's Council on Bioethics report Beyond Therapy (2003) with an anti-enhancement agenda mainly based on arguments around the concepts of naturalness and dignity, to arguments for the moral obligation to enhance (Harris 2010, Savulescu 2005). This wide variety in moral evaluations partly seems to be based on different understandings of the very term. Although “enhancement“ is a notoriously vague term, a general consensus of what is meant is often implicitly assumed. Motivation and goal: well-being Here, I will attempt to further a particular understanding of the concept that shall serve to improve mutual understanding of the different positions. Furthermore, I suggest distinguishing what enhancement is and how it is motivated from how its usage is ethically evaluated. Julian Savulescu and colleagues distinguish various ways of conceptualizing enhancement and propose a “welfarist definition of human enhancement: Any change in the biology or psychology of a person which increases the chances of