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Tag Archives: applied ethics

Love Drugs

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by kclphilosophy in Essays, Ideas

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Tags

applied ethics, bioethics, ethics, free will, human enhancement

By Ashley Owen

There are so many interesting topics in the area of human enhancement that it’s hard to pick just one to write about. One issue that prompted a lot of discussion in a recent seminar was regarding ‘love drugs’, touched on briefly by Allen Buchanan in his book ‘Beyond Humanity?’ but covered in greater detail in articles by Julian Savulescu and many others.

The idea is that in the near future we will be able to use chemical/biological enhancements to affect our relationships, for example by enhancing the bond between two people, or reducing the possibility of one partner (or both) being unfaithful. Several studies (on oxytocin in particular) indicate that this is a genuine possibility. Many people in the seminar were uncomfortable with this type of enhancement, but couldn’t quite pin down precisely why. In this post, I hope to elucidate those worries, and examine whether or not they are well grounded.

One idea that arose was that these types of drugs pose a threat to free will (assuming we have it). I’m not convinced this worry is well-founded however. The types of intervention at issue are not so strong as to compel someone to unavoidably act or feel a certain way (like ‘love potions’ in films). Instead, they increase the likelihood of certain behaviours or emotions – behaviours or emotions that the person taking the drug wants to do or feel. Consequently, the possibility to not act that way still remains open. In this sense, such drugs wouldn’t be a shortcut to a perfect relationship, but just another tool people could use if they felt it appropriate, like marriage counselling or date nights. We’re generally comfortable with people taking measures to try and influence their future behaviour, including their behaviour in relationships, without thinking that it removes our free will, so we would need a reason to think that the biomedical nature of the enhancement makes these cases different.

Moreover, the relevant cases are ones where the person choosing to take the drug – assuming she is in a position to make a rational, informed choice – is doing so because she wants her life to turn out a certain way, and is taking the drug in order to help her achieve that goal. That appears to be a free choice. In contrast, generally in relationships, the way we feel and act doesn’t seem to be entirely the result of our own free choice, as it is in part determined by biological factors – most of which are outside our control and have evolved through natural selection. Evolution is only concerned with survival and reproduction, whereas we have a multitude of values and goals that may well override at least reproduction (and most of us in the affluent world don’t have to worry too much about survival). The availability of love drugs could be seen as giving us the opportunity to guide our lives in accordance with our values, rather than be subject to outdated adaptations that are not relevant to our values.

Perhaps what makes people more concerned about love drugs than other enhancements, such as drugs to improve cognition, is that they have a significant impact on someone other than the person taking the drug – namely that person’s partner. While this wouldn’t be a problem if both parties felt the same way and were both taking the pill, it’s not hard to imagine that some people might react badly to finding out that their partner was taking such a drug. They might feel that it reflected badly on them and how their partner felt towards them, or that it rendered their relationship inauthentic somehow.

I think authenticity is more of a concern, although perhaps not insurmountable. If being authentic is understood as being somehow ‘true to ourselves’, it’s not clear that two people choosing to take a chemical to enhance their relationship would necessarily be rendering that relationship inauthentic. It would probably depend on the exact nature of the enhancement being used. For example, taking oxytocin in couples therapy to promote trust and communication in order to increase the chance of the therapy being successful seems to align with the authentic desire of the couple to overcome the problems in their relationship. On the other hand, if the only way someone could stand to be in a relationship with their partner was by taking a drug, that would be problematic. Although that person could be said to genuinely want to love their partner, it might not be so easy to describe the resulting love they feel having taken the drug as authentic. Certainly their partner would probably not feel it was. Having said that, the literature suggests that despite being referred to as ‘love drugs’, such pills would not create love out of nowhere, but instead enhance love that already exists – which could diffuse at least some of the worries about authenticity, as presumably the drugs wouldn’t work in cases such as this one.

Attraction and attachment are affected by a multitude of factors, many involuntary. For example, an increase in adrenaline, such as from being in a frightening situation, makes it more likely that you will feel attracted to someone. We don’t tend to consider such involuntary biological changes to render relationships inauthentic, but perhaps that’s just because we’re not consciously aware of them, which is part of what makes love so mysterious. By making the option available to voluntarily induce certain feelings, perhaps we risk losing what makes them so valuable to us.

In our drive to understand love, we may well be stripping away some of the mystery. However, if we can use that understanding to improve our relationships – which are so important for happiness, longevity, health etc – then perhaps that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And if ‘love drugs’ can help us to enhance relationships that we value, perhaps that’s not necessarily a bad thing either – but I think that the circumstances and motivation under which they were taken would have to be quite specific in order to overcome the concern about authenticity.

References

Allen Buchanan. 2011. Beyond Humanity? Oxford University Press.

Savulescu J , Sandberg A. 2008. Neuroenhancement of love and marriage: The chemicals between us. Neuroethics 1 ( 1 ): 31 – 44.

Living Longer, Staying Human

17 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by kclphilosophy in Essays, Ideas

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Tags

ageing, applied ethics, ethics, human enhancement

By Ben Davies

Nicholas Agar has come up with an interesting objection to the idea of radical life extension (RLE), a prospective set of technologies that aim to significantly extend our lifespans by preventing us from ageing, thereby making us “negligibly senescent” (NS). Agar recommends a ‘species-relativism’ about value that he thinks speaks against RLE. Essentially, things that have value for one species may lack value for another species. I can acknowledge that a dog is very happy, perhaps happier than I am, but still be glad that I am not a dog because certain things that I currently value are only valuable to humans. Crucially, this argument is supposed to apply if we improve rather diminish our capacities. A hyper-intelligent alien might find the great works of human literature to be trite and unimaginative, but it would be a genuine loss for me to come to such a conclusion about something that I currently value by enhancing my own intellect, even if I would have objectively more valuable experiences in such a state. Agar suggests that RLE will make us ‘posthuman’, and that species-relativism shows that this is a bad thing.

Clearly, the argument only works if Agar can demonstrate that RLE makes us posthuman, and so if we adhere to Agar’s definition of what it is to be in, and thus to leave, the human species. He starts by defining species as a “group of populations whose members are capable of interbreeding successfully and are reproductively isolated from other groups”. To leave a species, then, one must face “reproductive barriers” between oneself and members of the species. Although we are very similar to gorillas, we cannot reproduce with them, and so we are separate species.

The effects of RLE that constitute reproductive isolation are fourfold. First, Agar believes that long lives will make us extremely risk averse. We will have much more to lose through death (since we would have much more life ahead of us). So we will eschew many activities that humans enjoy, namely activities that would lead to sudden death (e.g. a car crash; drowning; being struck by lightning) rather than gradual death (accumulated damage that will be reparable by RLE techniques e.g. smoking; eating fatty food). Our interests will thus realign towards gradually damaging activities, and away from potential sudden damage. We should note that the activities that will be too risky for NS persons are things that we do without a thought today, such as going for a drive or swimming in the sea; NS persons will thus retreat from the world.

Second, Agar thinks that NS persons will be much more prone to illness; their unchanging genetic makeup will mean that their immune systems cannot adapt to viral, bacterial and fungal evolution, as accompanied by genetic reconfiguration in sexual reproduction. As such, NS persons will avoid contact with others, for fear that they will be exposed to an illness that their bodies cannot fight off. Third, people with indefinite life spans are less likely to want to engage romantically with people who will grow old and die. Finally, for various motivational and biological reasons, Agar suspects that NS persons will be unwilling, and possibly incapable, of having children. These aren’t the only costs of RLE, but they are the four that seem to form Agar’s argument for NS persons being posthuman.

To see why Agar thinks these problems divorce NS persons from humanity, consider a further aspect of his species-theory, that “reproductive isolation can be a partly psychological matter”. He notes that while humans and Neanderthals might have had significant chromosomal differences that made them unable to reproduce, there were probably also substantial psychological barriers that made them mutually unattractive. Agar suggests that we can distinguish between psychological aversions that are cultural, such as racism, and a “hardwired” aversion to “things that appear human but aren’t really”, an indicator of a suboptimal or even useless reproductive partner.

Agar defines reproductive compatibility in slightly broader than biological terms, as being partly “about having offspring that can be acknowledged as children and successfully raised to adulthood”. If the four effects he describes are accurate, it does seem unlikely that a NS person would reproduce with someone who hadn’t undergone RLE. Agar seems to think that this makes NS persons part of a different species.

There are problems with this claim. Psychological barriers can contribute to biological species-difference, by creating divides that lead to reproductive bifurcation of a species, or can simply warn us against attempting to reproduce with sub-par partners, as in the human-Neanderthal divide. Yet it seems implausible that we could separate groups into distinct species based solely on psychological barriers, so long as there remains a capacity to reproduce. As Agar acknowledges, various cultural barriers to reproduction – such as racism – do not lead us to identify multiple species. NS persons’ hermetic tendencies, and their preference for people of their ‘own kind’, do not seem sufficient to establish a species distinction, even if that means there are two groups who do not reproductively interact with one another.

This issue becomes clearer if we consider Agar’s explanation of those who are currently reproductively isolated. One example he offers is those who exist in self-imposed isolation, such as members of monasteries. These individuals qualify as human because of “potential or counterfactual reproductive connections with other humans”. When explaining this monastery example, Agar focuses on what individuals could do. However, when looking at the NS, he focuses on what will happen. Making the account consistent, in either direction, undermines his argument that RLE will lead to posthumanity.
Consider first what Agar would have to say if he considered actual behaviour in both instances. Assume he is right that NS persons would have psychological reasons to avoid reproduction, and even contact, with those of a normal lifespan. It is equally true that a committed monk, or lifelong prisoner, will not have any reproductive activity with the majority of humans.

The more plausible option, which Agar takes, is to acknowledge that the monk is still capable of reproduction, were his circumstances to change. The monk’s circumstances may include his desires and preferences – he may consider it morally wrong for him to reproduce, and this would need to change in order to end his reproductive isolation. Yet the very same consideration applies to the NS person. As Agar defines her, she is very risk-averse, has no interest in reproducing at all, let alone with someone whom she will outlive by centuries. But she still seems capable of reproduction, in the broader social sense that Agar uses. She could decide that the emotional and mortal risks are worth it. Even if we accept Agar’s assertion that she almost certainly won’t, we need some reason to focus in this case on what the NS person will do, when we see that the most reasonable option in the monk case is to look at counterfactuals of what he could do.

Agar has a final argument up his sleeve. He claims that RLE “is more likely…to result in beings who represent some kind of new beginning” because NS persons’ “evolutionary futures are less likely to depend on any contributions that they might make or might have already made to the human species”. Perhaps Agar would note that the monk will die without passing on any genetic material, and so no ongoing group barrier is established. Conversely, NS persons continue over time; if their preferences remain stable, psychological reproductive barriers will divide humanity into two well-defined groups. At this point, Agar might suggest, we have separate species.

We can imagine reproductively isolated groups that are importantly different from the ones Agar considers. Consider a religious order much like Agar’s monastery, aside from a couple of details. The order is not gender-exclusive, and members are not celibate, but may only reproduce with one another. We thus have two groups: the order and the rest of humanity. The evolutionary prospects of members of the order do not depend at all on sexual reproduction with outsiders, and vice versa.

I think it is clear that members of the order are still humans. Yet their reproductive isolation differs in no significant way from that of NS persons. It is self-imposed, based on certain uncommon preferences, involves social isolation, and is potentially reversible. Absent a stronger argument to the contrary, I conclude that a negligibly senescent person, even if they were isolated in all the ways Agar predicts, would remain human. This conclusion does not deny the serious costs of Agar’s suggestions, but it does mean that even if NS persons enjoy very different pleasures from those we enjoy today, those would still be human pleasures. So Agar cannot apply his species-relativist argument to this form of enhancement.

References

N. Agar (2010) Humanity’s End. MIT.

N. Agar (2010) ‘Thoughts about our species’ future’ in Journal of Evolution and Technology 21(2).

The Timing Puzzle

30 Thursday May 2013

Posted by kclphilosophy in Essays, Ideas

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Tags

applied ethics, Death, harm

By Ben Davies

One of the uncertainties around death is how it could be bad for us. This problem relates to Epicurus’ observation that ‘when death is, we are not’; since death simply is the annihilation of the self, it doesn’t seem as though it could be bad for us in the ordinary way that stubbing my toe or losing my phone are bad for me. One facet of this is the timing puzzle: when is my death bad for me?

With ordinary bads, I can locate times at which they are bad for me. A typical example is the stubbed toe. It starts being bad when I stub it, or perhaps when I notice that I have stubbed it, and continues to be bad until the pain subsides. Being dead isn’t like that, because it has no experiential quality. It seems as though there are five possible answers to when death is bad for us (six, if you count ‘never’). These are that death is bad for us

(1)   before it happens, maybe beginning with our birth (priorism);

(2)   at the time it happens (concurrentism)

(3)   after it happens (subsequentism)

(4)   at all times (eternalism) and

(5)   at no time (atemporalism).

I want to make a brief, incomplete case for concurrentism. This option has been given rather short shrift (in the recent Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, Johansson devotes just eight lines to rejecting concurrentism), but I think dismissals may rest on a misunderstanding of the position.

Note that we are considering the badness of the event of my dying, not the fact that I am going to die, not my being dead, and not the process of dying. So for concurrentism to be correct, death has to be actually bad for me as it occurs; it is not enough that it is true, or made true, that ‘death is bad for me’ when my death occurs. Perhaps critics assume that this kind of mistake is being made by all concurrentists (not that there seem to be many of us). I don’t think it is.

Here’s my account. Death is bad because it involves a significant loss. Without getting into other issues around variable badness, I think it is the most significant loss any of us will ever face, because it involves losing everything: your capacities, your inclinations, your possessions, relationships and mundanities, i.e. the rest of your life. So I think the appropriate comparison isn’t really with an experiential bad like stubbing one’s toe, but with my other prosaic example, of losing my phone.

When is it bad for me that I have lost my phone? Well, obviously there is an experiential element to this fact. There is that moment when I go to call someone and have that infuriating realisation that my phone is gone. So clearly losing my phone is bad for meafter I lose my phone. But let’s tell a story about my missing phone. I lose it as precisely 530pm, as it falls from my pocket on my way home. I don’t go to use it until 6pm. Is it bad for me that I’ve lost my phone in that half hour between my losing it and my experiencing the loss as bad (let’s say ‘suffering the loss’)? I think so, because my phone is a useful (albeit not irreplaceable) capacity. It’s bad for me that I have lost the capacity to make calls, even if at any moment I don’t want or need to make a call. Now most of these moments, most of the half hour, is still a point after the event ‘Ben loses his phone’. But the first moment when it is bad for me that I have lost my phone, when I no longer have the capacity to easily make calls, is the time at which I lose my phone.

My death will not be much like losing my phone. There is no experience of loss, and there is no time after the event at which I will lack capacities even though I don’t realise it – I won’t exist. But if death is the loss of all my capacities, then here is a way in which it is like losing my phone: there is a point of loss. There is a point at which I both lose my final capacity, and the chance to ever have any capacities again. And that’s when death is bad for me. Losses are bad for you at all times when they involve a lost capacity. For most losses, that includes the time of the loss, and all times after at which you lack the relevant capacity. Since death lacks this latter element (since you no longer exist to lack the capacity) it is bad, and only bad, at the time it occurs.

P.S. There is a complication that I haven’t fully worked out, and which I am willing to admit may undermine the whole argument: at my last moment of existence, I haven’t yet lost all my capacities. So perhaps there is no ‘moment of loss’. This might be problematic

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