So this Guy Kahane character, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, has been raising a few hackles with his musings on using drugs to induce “moral” behavior. The article has been cut and pasted all over the web (about eight hundred bloggers have opined at last count), and it certainly seems provocative enough on its face: cure racism with a pill? Pharmacise criminals into not just law-abiding, but moral citizens? What could possibly go wrong?
After all, as Kahane points out, we’ve already taken the first steps. He cites Prozac (which dulls aggression); he cites oxytocin (which ramps up cuddles and empathy). (I would add American Idol, which effectively shuts down the sex drive.) Why not just take it a few steps further, dose your team with drugs to enhance cooperation, hand out “Trust Tablets” with communion wafers so your parishioners aren’t quite so reluctant to send little Timmy off to summer camp with the Christian Brothers?
The question’s not entirely rhetorical, and Kahane admits that Morality Tablets aren’t the kind of thing people are likely to line up around the corner to buy:
“Becoming more trusting, nicer, less aggressive and less violent can make you more vulnerable to exploitation … On the other hand, it could improve your relationships or help your career…”
Although I’d suggest that depends on your choice of career. Lawyers, border guards — basically, any profession in which psychopaths flourish — are not going to put much of a premium on more trusting or nicer.
Anyway, given that those whose chemical improvement would be most societally beneficial are also those least likely to want the treatment, induced morality is unlikely to take off any time soon unless someone dumps a shitload of empathy enhancers into the water supply — an alternative that Kahane explicitly does not advocate (which led a fair number of bloggers to wonder who suggested that we should do that, and why aren’t they named in the article?). And while I can certainly see any number of governments deciding to “enhance” the national water supply to make their citizens more docile, that would presuppose a certain level scientific literacy in the upper echelons of said governments. I think here in Canada, we’re pretty safe on that score at least. (Besides, most Canadians have already proven themselves docile to the point of narcolepsy).
I think there’s more smoke than fire here. Beyond the unlikelihood of widespread adoption, most of the online reaction I’ve seen has been focused on the relatively uninteresting question of whether drug-induce altruism or empathy would constitute real moral behavior. Kahane pussies out on that score; “Not something science can answer”, he says, and I beg to differ. Moral behavior results from moral attitudes, and moral attitudes — like everything else the brain does — are functions of chemicals and electricity. If the chemistry is the same, then so is the end result; it makes no difference to the reaction whether the reagents came out of a gland or a pill. Methinks Kahane probably knows this, but is treading gently for fear of angry dualists in the audience.
(Anthony Burgess played this game at a much higher level in A Clockwork Orange, by the way, precisely because the behavior imposed upon his protagonist was not neurochemically identical to the baseline moral suite: an aversion to violence produced not by rewiring the basic circuitry, but by hammering a layer of negative reinforcement down on top of it. Now that was an interesting question — the morality of unmaking monsters, By Any Means Necessary — even though the lawnorder types in the novel dismissed it with the unassailable rejoinder “The point is that it works.”)
This might work too, if you could get anybody to take it. Let’s assume that you can. Let’s assume that, as one Will Sargent has suggested, we could surreptitiously dose some bankers with some kind of enhanced oxytocin derivative to increase their empathy. Good for everyone, no?
No. Because all these neurochemicals for social bonding did not evolve in response to abstract concepts like “society at large” or “the good of the many”. These things work tribally; they enhance group cohesion amongst those individuals who see each other and work together day in and day out. They are chemicals that imprint you like a Lorenz duckling, and they only work in proximity. So uplifting a bunch of bankers and businessmen would, I’d imagine, have the effect of increasing their empathy and their protective instincts — towards other bankers and businessmen. I don’t really see this as a step up.
On the other hand, it might at least be entertaining to see Conrad Black and Jim Flaherty in a cuddle pile.