As humanity faces immense global challenges, such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the increasingly visible effects of global warming, a new school of thought has emerged. Its essence is that we should investigate possibilities for “moral enhancement”: that is, we should consider how to alter human nature so that it becomes more pro-social and benign. Proponents of this idea say that we need, as a species, to be more willing to embrace whatever measures are needed to rise to large-scale challenges, even when this might be against our narrowly conceived self-interest as individuals.

This debate gathered momentum around 2008, when it became a hot topic in the peer-reviewed bioethics journals. Then, in 2012, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu laid out the case in a small book titled Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement. Unfit for the Future seems to equivocate between a moderate position—that our responses to global challenges should include research into moral enhancement—and a more dramatic claim, such as suggested by the book’s subtitle, that we need moral enhancement. Either way, these claims have encountered much skepticism and resistance. At the same time, other thinkers have followed the lead of Persson and Savulescu, and, indeed, some have pressed for extreme versions of their idea.

The argument developed in Unfit for the Future involves considerations that have become more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Persson and Savulescu argue that human nature evolved in conditions very different from those in which we now live. Our emotional tendencies and core sense of morality became adapted for life in small, close-knit societies with relatively little ability to affect their larger environments. By contrast, human beings now live in societies of millions—or sometimes hundreds of millions—of people, with enormous power to damage the environment on a global scale. In brief, we’re shaping the world and the future, perhaps for the worse, even though the outcomes are not anyone’s conscious choice. For Persson and Savulescu, then, there’s a mismatch between human nature and what is needed for beneficent human action under modern conditions.

I don’t necessarily buy either the evolutionary argument or the proposed technological solution, but Persson and Savulescu may have a point that draconian policies and widespread personal sacrifices will be needed to address some of humanity’s challenges. Furthermore, they may be right that we’ll be reluctant to adopt such policies or make such sacrifices. As they emphasize, we’re unlikely, in Western liberal democracies, to countenance reductions to our generally high levels of privacy, personal freedom, and material consumption.

The global health crisis caused by COVID-19 can be viewed as a test of these claims. In an effort to restrict the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, many nations have responded with lockdowns of various levels of severity. This has caused what would normally be considered extreme restrictions on personal freedoms, as well as threats to many people’s livelihoods or at least to their accustomed level of consumption and comfort. If these measures were imposed by governments in most other situations, they would rightly be condemned as tyrannical. Note, however, that their rationale in this case is not paternalistic, moralistic, or authoritarian. These harsh measures are aimed at protecting populations from the physical harms caused by a highly infectious and potentially fatal disease. Accordingly, they conform to the harm principle famously advocated by John Stuart Mill.

Indeed, when lockdowns were first introduced in my country—Australia—in early 2020, they were strongly supported by the public. If anything, the public sentiment favoring aggressive government action ran ahead of the steps that were actually taken. That is, in the early days of COVID-19, federal and state governments were responding to, rather than leading, the push for actions such as lockdowns. The impact on households and families was somewhat ameliorated by public spending measures, and for many months there was a bipartisan political consensus accompanied by a high degree of community acceptance and compliance.

Australia has been one of the leading, and most successful, countries in using lockdowns to try to restrict the spread of infection, partly because its geographical isolation gave hope of largely suppressing the disease. Nonetheless, widespread acceptance of harsh measures was also evident in other parts of the world. This seems to be evidence against the Persson and Savulescu thesis that human beings, especially in the West, will not cooperate with draconian, yet perhaps necessary, solutions to global problems.

However, the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant, which is more transmissible and virulent than the original strain of the virus, has greatly worsened the COVID-19 situation. In many places, it has led to new or extended lockdowns well beyond the time frame that most political leaders spoke about in early 2020. As I write, political debate and public opinion are now far more divided. Here in Australia, we see bitter, and even violent, anti-government demonstrations on an almost daily basis. In many countries, including Australia, paranoid conspiracy theories have emerged; these relate to lockdowns and even to vaccines that protect against the virus.

While most people might be thankful for vaccines and accepting of many restrictions as necessary evils, an angry minority is now in open rebellion in many parts of the world. This suggests that the pessimistic Persson and Savulescu thesis may, in a sense, have merit. Perhaps there’s a limit to how far governments can implement solutions that require sacrifice from their citizens: that is to say, even when the problem being addressed involves clear-cut physical harms, social consensus for restrictions and personal sacrifices may eventually start to fracture.

If so, that’s not good news as political leaders attempt to craft adequate long-term responses to global challenges. Beyond the immediate problem of COVID-19, the issue of how much sacrifice Western populations are willing to accept is becoming crucial to the human future.