Reflection: Where You Draw Your Lines

Prompts to consider

• Make an honest inventory of the ways you currently improve or modify your cognitive and emotional functioning: caffeine, medication, therapy, social media management tools, glasses, any wearables or software. Where do you intuitively feel that you are straightforwardly treating a problem or improving a limitation, and where does it start to feel like you are changing something that should be left alone? What principle underlies that intuition?
• Sandel says the drive to improvement corrupts the virtue of accepting what is given, the appreciation for the unchosen elements of life that produces humility and solidarity with those who have less. Do you find this argument compelling? Is there something in your own life that you value precisely because it was not chosen or designed, a limitation you've worked with, a talent you didn't earn, a circumstance you didn't arrange? What would be lost if you optimized it away?
• The moral improvement question: if a safe, effective drug could reliably make you more patient, more empathetic, and better at long-term thinking, would you take it? What would stop you, if anything? And is your answer different if the drug were required, say, as a condition of holding public office or raising children? What does your answer reveal about your theory of moral responsibility and authentic character?