The morality of brain enhancing drugs
Catching up on an old Wired, I came across this thought-provoking article on whether safe brain-enhancing drugs should be legal. The argument that something should or should not be legal can be based on many factors, but, as always, we’ll consider this from the moral perspective.
There seem to be two main moral arguments against the use of safe brain-enhancing drugs: 1) that there is something inherently wrong with using unnatural enhancements to treat the pathologies of normal life; and 2) that using brain-enhancing drugs is cheating because it creates unfair advantages for users.
To address the first argument, let’s consider a thought experiment. Imagine your alarm goes off at 7am after a late night of poker with the guys/gals. You consider calling in sick but remember that you’re saving your “sick” days for that long vacation you plan on taking in August. You arrive at work and head to your cubicle calculating the number of times you’ll have to walk to the copy machine per hour to make it look like you’re keeping busy, when your boss approaches you with a big assignment to be completed by the close of business. You sit down at your desk and try to come up with a plan, but your mind is off on its own and your eyes burn to stay open. You finally hit the point of no return and fall asleep on your keyboard when a colleague knocks on your cubicle and asks if you want a brain-enhancing drug that will allow you to stay awake all day, tune out distractions and concentrate on your assignment. Do you take it?
If you are one of the many people that instinctively say no, let me ask a follow up. Morally would it be ok to accept a cup of coffee? Qualitatively, there is no difference between caffeine-infused coffee and the described brain-enhancing drug. There may be quantitative differences, but qualitatively they are the same. Thus, if you would take the coffee or, at least, wouldn’t call someone who does immoral, you have to think that taking the brain-enhancing drug would not be immoral either.
The second common argument against brain-enhancing drugs is that they give some people an unfair advantage in the same way that steroids give some athletes and unfair advantage. That if two people are studying for a test and one has taken a brain-enhancing drug, that person has an advantage over the other. This critique can go one of two ways: either 1)the person who didn’t take the drug didn’t have equal access to it; or 2 )they chose not to take it.
In the first case, the one who took the drug does have an unfair advantage - but, that unfair advantage stems not from the drug but from the unequal access. In other words, if the drug was readily available and affordable to everyone, the critique would not hold. In the second case, the non-drug user has chosen not to take the drug. But then how is this any different from the case of two people, only one of whom chooses to drink coffee? The critique seems to stem from the idea that the use of such drugs is currently taboo and so the actor that chooses not to take the drug faces a choice that is not completely free (because of, say, social pressure or fears of drug safety). But, of course, the taboo exists only because the drugs are not currently legal or proven safe. If the taboo existed for some other reason, it would have to apply to coffee as well (since, remember, coffee and the brain-enhancing drug are qualitatively the same).
The point of this post was not to conclusively make the case for brain-enhancing drug use, but to show the the most common arguments against it do not stand up to a test for coherence. Commenters: I am completely open to other arguments, so if you have any post away.
-Marc
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- Unequal advantage and baseball steroids
- What morality “means”
- High time for a change?
- Wipes away wrinkles . . .
- God, science and morality walk into a bar . . .
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When you imagine that the use of brain enhancing drugs might be immoral, what conception of morality to you have in mind? Is it that this is immoral in the same sense of the term in which murder and torture are immoral? I mention this because it seems to me that there is serious question whether the terms ‘moral’ and ‘morality’ are always used to refer to the same thing. One thing that a public philosopher might profitably do is to call attention to this, and consider what alternative conceptions of morality seem to underlie various uses of these terms, and what we should think about the merits of and relations between these different conceptions.
[...] of our commenters on Friday raised an interesting question in response to Marc’s post about the morality of brain-enhancing drugs: When you imagine that [...]
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