Ethics

Scripture uses the Greek root of ethics for character formed by habit and company, and Restoration revelation makes every legitimate power answerable to that character. Mormon transhumanists therefore judge a technology by whether the character directing it grows as fast as the power it confers.

Ethics is the study of right conduct and good character. The English word comes from the Greek ēthos, "moral habit" or "custom," a strengthened form of ethos, "habit," and Aristotle drew his term for moral virtue from the same root because virtue, he argued, comes about through habit. The word appears once in the New Testament, in a line Paul borrows from a Greek comedy: "evil communications corrupt good manners" (1 Corinthians 15:33), where "manners" renders ēthē, the plural, meaning morals or characters. In much popular religion, ethics means obedience to a list of rules, and an act is right when a commandment permits it. Restoration scripture keeps the commandments and sets them inside a larger aim, the formation of a character that can be trusted with the powers of God.

Character Formed in Company

The New Testament treats moral character as something shaped over time by the people and practices around it.

It has long been recognized that Paul's warning quotes the Athenian playwright Menander. Less often noticed is the setting Paul gives the line. It follows his argument against those in Corinth who denied the resurrection, and the word rendered "communications," homiliai, means associations or company. In Paul's usage, character is formed by a community and by what that community believes about the future of the body. Jesus placed rules beneath dispositions in the same way when he summed up the law as love of God and neighbor and said, "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matthew 22:40). The verb pictures the commandments suspended from love, so that each particular rule is read by the love it serves.

The Ladder of Virtue

Second Peter describes the moral life as an ascent toward the divine nature, and Restoration teaching reads that ascent literally.

The epistle promises that believers "might be partakers of the divine nature," and then sets out a sequence: "add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge" (2 Peter 1:4-5), continuing through temperance, patience, godliness, and brotherly kindness to charity. The Greek aretē, "virtue," meant excellence of any kind, the quality that makes a thing good at what it is for. Latter-day Saint interpreters have read the list as a ladder in which each virtue becomes the means to the next, recalling the ladder Jacob saw reaching to heaven and Joseph Smith's teaching that Paul understood its "three principal rounds." Restoration doctrine gives the ladder a literal summit, since human beings may grow into the kind of being God is. Commandments supply the lower rungs, training habits until the virtues they describe belong to the person who keeps them. Ethics in this frame concerns what a person is becoming, and acts matter as the means of that becoming.

Power and the Principles of Righteousness

Restoration revelation makes power answerable to character, and technology now tests that principle at scale.

Writing from the jail at Liberty, Missouri, in March 1839, Joseph Smith taught that "the powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness" (D&C 121:36). The same letter names the only legitimate means of influence: "by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned" (D&C 121:41). Mormon transhumanists read the passage as a rule for every kind of power. They hold that science and technology are among the means God has ordained for human exaltation, and they accept a duty to use them with wisdom and to prepare for their risks. Some philosophers of enhancement make a parallel observation in secular terms: technology now lets people act across the globe and far into the future, while human moral psychology formed in small groups with short horizons. Developers of artificial intelligence meet the problem in its plainest form, since a system that grows more capable must also be given aims its makers can trust, and no one yet knows how to guarantee that.

Moral Enhancement and Agency

Proposals to improve morality by technical means must preserve the agency through which character is formed.

Some bioethicists argue that humanity needs moral enhancement, drugs or genetic changes that would strengthen empathy and restraint, because education works too slowly for the dangers ahead. The research is at an early stage, and no intervention has been shown to make people reliably better. Critics answer that a person who cannot choose wrong cannot meaningfully choose right either, and they borrow Milton's phrase for Adam, "free to fall." Restoration scripture sides with the critics on compulsion. The plan of salvation rejected a proposal to save everyone by removing choice, and the revelation on priesthood condemns "compulsion upon the souls of the children of men" (D&C 121:37). The same revelation expects "kindness, and pure knowledge" to "greatly enlarge the soul" (D&C 121:42), which leaves room for tools that inform and strengthen a person who chooses them. The danger lies in virtue imposed by states or employers, or in drugs that make people compliant and call the result goodness. The test for any technology is whether the character directing it grows as its power grows, by means a free person can accept or refuse, or whether power outruns character and virtue is installed by compulsion.