Psychedelics as moral bioenhancers: Protocol for a scoping review of ethical arguments for and against
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Moral bioenhancement typically refers to the deliberate use of drugs or biotechnologies, potentially alongside other practices, to attempt to improve oneself morally. In addition to general concerns regarding moral self-bioenhancement, the possibility of using psychedelic substances for such purposes raises distinct ethical questions. As a first step in analysing these questions, we intend to perform a scoping review of the existing arguments for and against the use of psychedelics as moral bioenhancers. We will focus primarily on voluntary use by individuals, although voluntary use by couples or small groups will be considered. The present contribution is a protocol for this scoping review. Methods: Our scoping review will adhere to the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology, which involves five stages: (1) identifying the research question, (2) developing the search strategy, (3) setting inclusion criteria, (4) extracting data, and (5) presenting and analysing the results. We will include both published and unpublished sources if they explicitly present ethical arguments for or against the voluntary use of psychedelics as intentional moral bioenhancers in adults. We will search for relevant studies in Embase, MEDLINE, Web of Science, Google Scholar, The National Library of Medicine, the Cumulated Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Philosopher's Index, the Bioethics Literature Database, EthxWeb, PhilPapers, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Philosopher's Index, EBSCO, BASE, and WorldCat. Sources will be excluded if (a) the full text is inaccessible, (b) the main text is in a language other than English, or (c) the focus is not primarily on ethical arguments (for example, focusing primarily on the clinical use of psychedelics for treatment). Two raters will independently assess all articles for eligibility, with disagreements to be resolved with a third reviewer. Data from eligible articles will be charted using a standardised data extraction form. The data will be analysed following PRISMA-ScR guidelines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.157 | 0.168 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.017 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.067 | 0.017 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".