Towards Responsible Use of Cognition-Dulling Drugs
posted by Frank Pasquale
In a recent editorial in Nature entitled Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy, distinguished contributors have endorsed a “presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.” Against various Luddites who worry about the rat races such drug use could spark, the editorialists argue that cognitive enhancement is here to stay: “From assembly line workers to surgeons, many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it, yet they may also need protection from the pressure to enhance.” Instead of the regulation encouraged by Francis Fukuyama, they would have us rely on robust professional standards to guide “appropriate prescribing of cognitive enhancers.”
The most promising aspect of the editorial is the thin and unspecified concept of enhancement that it endorses. As Carl Elliott notes, relentless focus on well-defined tasks can offer a real competitive edge in today’s economy:
Employees who cannot rely on job security often feel as if they are constantly required to prove their value to their employers. Many of these same employees spend most of their time sitting in front of a computer screen performing repetitive tasks that require sustained attention and concentration.
Of course, many in this group may experience moments of imagination or reverie positively, as exemplary thought rather than distracting consolation. For those individuals, the next goal of an autonomy-enhancing bioethics should be the development and widespread use of cognition-dulling drugs, which serve to blot out all awareness except of the task at hand. Cures for resentment, envy, or union-organizing may also serve to enhance workplace efficiency.
Bioconservatives may fear that cognition-dulling drugs presage a Brave New World–particularly Aldous Huxley’s futuristic vision of certain fetuses being routinely exposed to alcohol in order to ease their acceptance of low-caste membership. They tend to forget Huxley’s counter-image of a progressively technologized paradise, in Island, which “answers the authoritarian monoculture of Brave New World point by point”:
Biotechnology is present, but as a kind of ecologically wise agricultural system. . . . The nuclear family has been abolished . . . but only to increase human attachment among all its inhabitants . . . The novel . . . ends, exactly as it began, with the island’s mynah birds repeating the mantra they have been trained to mimic over and over again: “Attention.”
Like the happy inhabitants of Huxley’s Island, both cognition-enhancers and cognition-dullers can work together peaceably in a mutualism that discourages conflict.
Fortunately, the Nature editorialists appear in principle open to cognition-dulling methods, endorsing a nuanced and contextualized response:
Appropriate policy should prohibit coercion except in specific circumstances for specific occupations, justified by substantial gains in safety. It should also discourage indirect coercion. Employers, schools or governments should not generally require the use of cognitive enhancements. If particular enhancements are shown to be sufficiently safe and effective, this position might be revisited for those interventions.
The key then is to carefully consider how best to develop a pharmacopeia that safely and effectively cures tendencies to insubordination, daydreaming, dissatisfaction, and other inefficient habits.
[For my real views on the subject, please see this and this. Ellen Gibson at Businessweek gets my prize for best reporting on the editorial, by raising these issues:
Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, raises [a] red flag. Creative insights often arise when the mind is allowed to wander, he says. If drugs that sharpen concentration become widespread in the workplace, they may nurture “a bunch of automatons that are very good at implementing things but have nothing to implement.”
As Martha Nussbaum has observed in another context, “I’m getting more and more worried that we’re going to have nations of docile engineers who won’t know how to examine the claims of a political leader”–or to cease concentrating on the problems in front of them to think about the bigger picture. We might also worry about a competitive academic environment driving the endorsement of attention-grabbing policies without adequate attention to the social consequences of such policies.]
January 4, 2009 at 10:22 am
Posted in: Bioethics
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Responses (2)
dobe gulia - January 4, 2009 at 10:49 pm
I am glad we agree on something: removal of unions enhances workplace efficiency.
TheMonochromaticKnight - January 5, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I think it’s difficult for us to judge the future of “cognitive enhancers” from our current point in time. We do not know what developments may occur in future generations of these substances. That being said, I am very wary of the current over prescription of psychopharmaceuticals in the US, which makes me even further worrisome of a society that would use such substances without discretion. Of course, we tend to forget that sugar and caffeine are legal “cognitive enhancers” that are used on a daily basis by the vast majority of the US population.
“Moksha”, the “cognitive enhancer” or rather enthoegen used in Huxley’s Island was a fictional psychopharmacological agent, but most likely a psychedelic used ceremonially during rituals. This is very different from how most people would conceptualize the use of a drug. The most salient notion is that a “cognitive enhancer” would be used on a daily basis to boost productivity. Aderall comes to mind- a legal amphetamine used for its “cognitive enhancing” properties by 25% of students surveyed in 119 highly competitive colleges in the US.
My understanding of the “moksha medicine” was that it was used for spiritual/religious purposes on an infrequent basis. Perhaps it could be likened to a form of spiritual upkeep. Maybe it was used even less often, reserved for important rites of passage. Regardless, I do not think it should be confused with the notions of “cognitive enhancers” or “dullers”. And if one is to make such a comparison, it needs to be qualified.
I sincerely agree with Dr. Chatterjee and Martha Nussbaum.
With respect,
TheMonochromaticKnight
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