A pill may one day be able to boost our morality
Go vegan. Oppose Trump. Drink less. Exercise more. Have more houseplants.
It’s the season of self-delusion with Twitter users pledging resolutions they’ll make and, statistics tell us, promptly break. But what if we could be better people with drugs — more moral mortals by taking a pill?
Neuroethicists and other thinkers are increasingly absorbed by the idea of “moral enhancement” through pharmaceuticals, implanted brain electrodes or other biomedical means.
Leading proponents argue advances in cognitive neuroscience suggest morally desirable capacities may, at least in part, be neurologically based and therefore amenable to tinkering.
Some envision a day when we could use drugs that act directly on the brain to dial down aggression and other “anti-social” sentiments and dial up “pro-social” ones like compassion and trust.
Whether that’s a good thing or bad is another question.
Oxford University philosophers Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson have argued that humans now have “the means of wiping out life on Earth” and that moral bioenhancement (or “MB”) may be our only hope for averting wide-scale terrorism, climate change and all the other rot in the world. Writing in the journal Neuroethics, they say the capacity for sympathy, in particular, “appears to be biologically based,” and that women tend to be more sympathetic than men, suggesting “that MB could consist in making men in general more like women in general,” at least with regard to sympathy.
They and others argue that, because the moral character of many people is less than ideal, what’s not to love about this new medical approach?
Critics such as John Harris, author of How to be Good, say using chemicals to make humans “better” animals could undermine our “moral freedom.”
Artificially enhancing people to always “be good” would rob them of their free will to make — and learn from — mistakes, they argue.
Then there are the questions of what exactly does it mean to be moral, and who gets to decide?
For now, “the reality is that there is not much out there that allows us to do these sorts of things,” said Queen’s University bioethicist Udo Schuklenk.
“Look at the miserable failure that is modern psychiatry. We just don’t really understand how the brain works,” he added.
“But it’s also true they’re making progress in leaps and bounds, and I have personally no doubt that these kinds of drugs will eventually exist.” In fact, they may already. In their 2014 paper, “Are you Morally Modified?” Neil Levy and colleagues cite three widely prescribed drugs that may, unbeknownst to the people taking them, alter their moral decision making and behaviour: propranolol for high blood pressure; the antidepressants known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors); and drugs that affect the release or metabolism of oxytocin, the love and bonding hormone.
One 2013 study involving 40 healthy volunteers found propranolol made men and women more likely to judge harmful actions as morally unacceptable (though only in scenarios involving “up-closeand-personal” harms). The drug also appeared to increase aversion to harming others.
SSRIs, meanwhile, seem to make people more co-operative, less critical of others and more sensitive to other people’s pain.
Oxytocin appears to make people more trusting.
Three years ago, an Australian team reported that couples who took a hit of oxytocin through a nasal spray before starting couple’s therapy recalled memories with more emotion and detail and seemed more open to the other partner’s perspective. But it isn’t all pretty. A 2014 study by Princeton University researchers found that people given oxytocin were more likely to engage in “group-serving dishonesty.” Compared with volunteers receiving a placebo, they lied more and lied faster to benefit their groups.
“Five or 10 years ago the evidence seemed to suggest oxytocin was just this universally good thing — that if we just dosed everybody up with oxytocin they’d all be walking around like love puddles,” said James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Willington, Conn.
Still, we do have drugs such as those used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — a behaviour that would have been classified as some kind of moral failing in the past, Hughes said.
“We no longer consider ADHD a moral failing because we’ve medicalized that moral failing. And that is part of what moral enhancement is about — to recognize the natural diversity of brains, and that some of us are just born with a poor roll of the dice that doesn’t give us enough self-control, executive function or capacity for compassion or moral cognition.” The result of MB? “The world will be happier; we’ll probably all be happier,” Hughes said. The downside? “We could end up in a world where every kind of political or moral deviance is subject to some kind of mandatory treatment,” he said.
An extreme case would be psychopaths.
“They’re so far off out of the norm that maybe bringing them back to the norm would be generally understood to be advantageous,” Brian Earp, associate director of the Yale-Hastings program in ethics and health policy at Yale University, said in an interview.
More broadly speaking, the drugs could be used to augment the things people already pursue to try to better themselves, he said.
There’s not going to be a pill that makes us more moral, Earp said. “But you might take a pill that makes you more susceptible to, or find more compelling the sorts of moral lessons you’re already engaged in.”
Schuklenk, of Queen’s, questioned whether we should be investing in research and development of moral modulators at all.
“Your gut response would be, well this would be a pleasant place to be,” he said.
“But what if the country next to us did the exact opposite, and invested in drugs that made their compatriots more aggressive, more competitive?”
Most importantly, “how do we decide what constitutes a moral deficiency? Who should be allowed to make these decisions about what is good and what is bad?”
I HAVE NO DOUBT THAT THESE KINDS OF DRUGS WILL EVENTUALLY EXIST.