Fundamental rights and ‘moral’ technologies: the legal status of moral claims to ‘moral enhancement’ by means of cognitive enhancement in the European legal system.

Recent advances in different technological and scientific fields pose new and old dilemmas on the most adequate way of interaction between science and law. In particular, moral enhancement of healthy individuals by means of cognitive enhancers has been at the center of ethical and legal discussions at the institutional level in Europe. Many advocates of the ‘project of moral bio-enhancement’ very often restrict their arguments to the ethical aspects without trying to really prove if they are consistent with the legal framework in which the debate takes place, that is, according to what is known as biolaw approach to bioethical issues. At the European institutional level, however, questions raised by emerging sciences and technologies have been recently approached from the viewpoint of fundamental rights. As implementation of science and technology into society can have unpredictable effects and results, the legal approach (biolaw) to the rapid technological and scientific developments is useful to highlight: first, if providing a fundamental right to moral enhancement by means of cognitive enhancement would be consistent with the current well-established European legal framework of fundamental rights, especially the right to health, to self-determination, to non-discrimination, and to equality, and second, how institutions can best act to protect individuals from unjustified economic speculations and risks for their overall physical and psychological well-being and simultaneously to promote safe use of new cognitive enhancers on the part of healthy individuals who desire to morally enhance themselves. The institutional approach to moral bio-enhancement should indeed take into account essential values and features of the modern European constitutional approach, that is, ethical pluralism and ‘equality’ in relation to (fundamental) rights. In a nutshell, the paper deals with ethical-legal questions concerning both equal management of scientific advances at our disposal and selection of goals we want to achieve with the available technological devices. What the paper suggests is that fundamental rights should mark the line between lawful and unlawful uses of science, especially as regards moral enhancement of healthy individuals by means of cognitive enhancement