ACROSS THE POND: “Don’t Mess With Mother Nature”: Evaluating the Moral Opposition to Cognitive Enhancement

➣ By John Banja

Various surveys indicate that between four to more than 35% of American college students admit to using drugs like Adderall and Ritalin to improve their concentration, memory, and mental stamina. Jet-lagged sales managers who go straight from the airport to their sales meetings might take a drug like Provigil to rid themselves of their mental fog, while the Air Force makes Provigil available to pilots, especially ones flying long missions. A “transcranial magnetic stimulator,” which looks like a halo and is placed on one’s scalp to stimulate certain brain regions, has been used to help persons suffering from depression, Parkinson’s disease, and auditory hallucinations from schizophrenia. It is also known, however, to improve drawing, proofreading, and memory among “normals.”

Many individuals regard drugs like the selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors as cognitive enhancers because of their sometimes remarkable effect on improving mood and remediating undesirable personality traits like shyness or social awkwardness. Psychiatrist Peter Kramer tells numerous stories in his marvelous book Listening to Prozac about patients who, once they begin experiencing the benefits of these mood and personality brighteners, beg him to continue their prescriptions as they can’t stand the thought of returning to “being the person I once was.”

Now, there are at least three practical reasons or arguments that should give us pause about categorically endorsing these kinds of “cognitive enhancements”—so called because they ramp up one’s “normal” baseline quality of cognitive functioning as opposed to improving an injured or diseased brain’s impaired functioning. The first argument concerns harm – some of these drugs can cause agitation, headaches or sleeplessness. After prolonged use, they can flatten one’s affect such that some users have described themselves as “zombies” when coming off them. Some drugs can also be habit forming such that when users try to quit, they find they can no longer tolerate their previous, foggy-headed mental state or their depressingly uninteresting or withdrawn selves.

The second argument is fear of coercion. If an individual resists taking these drugs but fears being penalized because his or her performance will compare poorly to competitors who are using them, he or she might feel enormous pressure to take them. This is probably not dissimilar to the problem of steroid use in athletics.

A third argument is equal access. Even if these drugs prove relatively harmless and effective, will only certain individuals have access to them? Will we have a two-tiered society wherein one group’s members are cognitively robust, vital, and high-performing, while the other is depressingly average?

Yet a fourth kind of argument that opposes cognitive enhancement was strongly advanced during George W. Bush’s administration by some members of his President’s Council on Bioethics. Leon Kass, the chair of Bush’s first bioethics council from 2001-2005, believed that the three arguments above missed what is really at stake and said, “If there is a case to be made against these activities (i.e., cognitive enhancements)…we sense that it may have something to do with what is natural, or what is humanly dignified, or with the attitude that is properly respectful of what is naturally and dignifiedly human.”

Kass argues that these “artificial” cognitive enhancements disrespect the “special gift that is our own given nature;” that they are a form of cheating in giving us abilities that are undeserved given how they were acquired; that they show disdain for the importance of discipline, hard work, and even pain and suffering in achieving superior performance; and that they render us less humble in the presence of the Creator’s design of human functioning, which does not contemplate a “brain on steroids.”

Because I have no quarrel with the first three arguments above, I want to spend the remainder of this essay discussing what we are to make of this last one. It continues to be a prominent argument among “moral conservatives” and extends to virtually all kinds of biotechnology— involving not just cognitive enhancement but research on reproduction, stem cell research, and other neurotechnologies—that might tamper with “the special gift that is our own given nature.” How seriously, given the democratic, ethically pluralistic values that characterize America, should an “argument from nature and human dignity” be taken?

Assessing the Argument from Nature and Human Dignity

Despite this argument’s appeal and popularity, many individuals such as myself find it very flawed. First of all, “Nature”—understood as a world of unadulterated biological, physical, geological, meteorological, and cosmological phenomena—presents us with what exists, not with what should exist. For every item in the natural world at which we marvel and might want to recommend as a morally right and compelling example—animals caring for their young, say—there is another natural phenomenon that is horrifying and abhorrent—such as natural predators looking to feast off those animals and their offspring.

Proponents of the argument from nature know this, and so they focus on a particular manifestation of nature which, they believe, offers up compelling moral rules and prescriptions: human nature. Thus, philosophers like Kass make numerous appeals to certain characteristics and traits of human beings, especially those bearing on human dignity, that they believe embody undeniable and inviolable moral truths. For example, Kass fears that the use of cognitive enhancements will replace humility with arrogance and incline us towards what is “ignoble;” that cognitive enhancement would “undermine the highest and richest possibilities of human life”— indeed, would undermine “what it means to be a human being”—and that cognitive enhancement would dismiss the normal exercise of hard work, diligence, perseverance, and suffering in the pursuit of human excellence.

For many individuals, this kind of language has enormous intuitive appeal, and that’s the problem. Different cultures might have radically different conceptions of dignity and its accompanying connotations. The idea that there is some absolute, eternally true or correct representation of dignity that is not the product of some culture seems wildly wrong. Indeed, why even insist that dignity be the primary principle or value that morally grounds and restrains cognitive enhancement research and use? Why not choose human flourishing, creativity, or efficiency as our primary goal or human purpose?

Second, while appeals to human dignity might sound ennobling, “dignity” in and by itself often fails to give us explicit moral direction. For example, does the jet-lagged sales manager impugn human dignity when he takes a Provigil to be at his best (or even better) for his sales meeting? Does the college student who opts for some Adderall rather than multiple helpings of espresso during finals similarly violate dignity? Invoking “dignity” isn’t necessarily morally informative because different people, each of whom is morally respectable and decent, can disagree on what dignity demands in any given situation.

Third and somewhat related to the last point, some philosophers believe that dignity is a useless concept. What does “acting with dignity” add to the idea that we should respect one another, not harm one another, and treat one another fairly and with civility? How many of us walk into our offices thinking, “Today, I must respect everyone’s dignity.” ? Very few, one suspects, largely because “dignity” sounds too abstract and vague, while acting courteously and respecting others’ rights seems much more normatively concrete and helpful.

Last, and perhaps most obviously, objecting to cognitive enhancement on the grounds that someone or some group’s idea of dignity is insulted runs afoul of the traditional rights-based conception of our moral obligations and norms. I am obliged to respect your liberties and freedoms; I cannot harm you without compelling justification; and I should treat everyone I meet with a reasonable degree of fairness and justness (although I might be even more obligated towards special individuals, such as my family or professional clients). On the other hand, denying individuals the right to cognitive enhancement because it is “ignoble,” or would make them “less humble,” or that it would “undermine the highest and richest possibilities” of their lives sounds hopelessly dogmatic, vague and undemocratic.

We should be careful about cognitive enhancing interventions and technologies because they might turn out to be harmful, or encourage coercion, or produce unfairness. But we shouldn’t be wary of them because they threaten human dignity. Indeed, they might ultimately promote it or at least better clarify what we mean by it.

John D. Banja, Ph.D.
Emory University
U.S.A.
jbanja@emory.edu