Abstract
A number of articles concerning the idea of ‘love drugs’ have recently appeared in the bioethical literature. While, as yet, the idea is little more than science fiction, such drugs have been positioned as ‘neurotechnologies’ that will offer us the opportunity to enhance our marriages. Following a classically liberal approach, the strategy has been, first, to argue that there is no reason individuals should be prevented from using such drugs if they wish to use them, and, second, to adduce reasons why individuals might be morally motivated to do so. This work has been followed by a paper that considered whether such drugs will ‘medicalise’ love and, if so, whether any (bio)ethical implications follow from their potential to do so. In response, this article argues that traditional forms of bioethical analysis are ill placed to fully grasp the moral dimension of medicalisation. Using the concepts of biomedicalisation, theraputicisation and moralisation I attempt to show that bioethical scholarship can be considered part of these social processes, and, properly understood, they imply that our social, cultural and political norms, such as those that inform our conception of love and intimacy, are subject to change. As a result a more biopolitical approach is to be recommended.
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Notes
While the imagined biochemical neurotechnology, the ‘love drugs’, can be considered the science fiction presented in these papers, there is, as any science fiction aficionado will realise, always an accompanying ‘social fiction’. In this instance the operative social fiction is that the use of these drugs will occur in the world as it is today or, rather, as it is today in Western neo-liberal democracies. The socio-cultural fiction receives rather less attention than the scientific fictions both with regard to the case at hand and the enhancement discourses of (applied) bioethics more generally.
This article is due to be published in the Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics and, in a first for this prestigious journal, it will be accompanied by number of commentaries and responses.
Indeed, we might go further and suggest that the dominant bioethical methodology, that of applied philosophical ethics, is studiously unreflexive with regard to the sociological, anthropological and historical phenomena. As with medicalisation, phenomena that fall within the ambit of these disciplines are dismissed as contingent, as being neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad.
For the most part, my critique is levelled at ‘applied’ or ‘practical’ ethics rather than ‘bioethics’. The latter is a multi- and inter-disciplinary field, which admits of a variety of scholarly activities and perspectives. Some of these endeavours involve ethical analysis (for example, feminist ethics) and still others are more descriptive or empirical (for example, sociology, anthropology and history) while, nevertheless, maintaining some form of critical (cryptonormative or ‘ethico-political’) intent. These forms of enquiry are not subject to the criticisms levelled at applied ethics or, at least, not to the same degree. However, none have yet addressed the topic of ‘love drugs’. Furthermore, they do not tend to place the discourse of applied ethics alongside the objects of their concern as I have sought to do in this essay.
Addressed to those conducting neuroscientific research into oxytocin it presents an attempt to set an agenda for future research. It explicitly argues that researchers ought to further examine the neurochemistry of love in order that love drugs can be developed.
One could suggest that the authors of these papers are indeed suggesting that we, the human race, is in some sense ill, diseased or otherwise deficient. More specifically, one might construe them as suggesting that we are, as a consequences of our evolutionary development, morally deficient or flawed, at least insofar as we are unable to live up to the moral commitments generated by monogamy, an ideal of sexual intimacy that is both an evolutionary norm and culturally mandated normative practice. However, considering such suggestions to be a ‘diagnosis’ clearly goes beyond the realm of medicine and health and takes us into the realm of biomedicine and biohealth.
One might give further momentum to this point and hyphenate the word real-ized so as to suggest that intimacy is rendered real by the social forms of mutual recognition that attend such relationships. Such recognition renders us real to ourselves as well as each other, and thereby facilitates a form of authenticity that is otherwise unachievable.
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Emmerich, N. Limitations in the bioethical analysis of medicalisation: The case of love drugs. Soc Theory Health 14, 109–128 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2015.20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2015.20