June 20, 2014
What's Love Got to do With Medicalization?
In the (so far) final installment in the long series of papers about the neuroscience of love with Julian and Brian we have arrived at Brian D Earp, Anders Sandberg, Julian Savulescu. The medicalization of love. Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics. 06/2014; DOI:10.1017/S0963180114000206
It is open peer commentary, so interested scholars might want to submit replies.
This paper responds to the perennial worry "But doesn't this diminish love?!" that always shows up when discussing the neuroscience and neuroenhancement of love. In what ways are medicalization bad? There are a few key worries:
- The Pathologization of Everything: turning everything into some illness.
- The Expansion of Medical Social Control: control over our lives is handed over to medical experts.
- The Narrow Focus on Individuals Rather than Social Context: looking at individuals rather than overarching social problems.
- Narrow Focus on the Biological (or Neurochemical) Rather than the Psychological: bio-reductionism looking at the mechanistic underpinnings of rather complex phenomena and states.
- The Threat to Authenticity and the Undermining of the “True Self": maybe we are getting separated from unmediated experience and how the world really is.
- Finally, maybe even understanding how love works undermines our experience?
Somewhat unsurprisingly, we do not think these worries are enough to refrain from the kind of love enhancement research we suggest would be good. Rather, each of these worries do represent a recognized problem, but the solution to the problem is rarely to avoid developing the science. These are social and cultural problems, and hence best met on the social and cultural level.
There is nothing inherent in science and medicine that automatically leads to the worried about outcomes; rather, assuming that the science inexorably leads there means abdicating responsibility for what happens in our culture of mind, leaving only technocratic choices about what research to do or not - hardly the conclusion most intellectuals actually believe in. Maybe they believe influencing technology is easier than influencing culture, but that is empirically rather doubtful and philosophically inconsistent: technology is a part of culture.
The final worry, that understanding is bad for wonder and true enjoyment, seems to be based on a misunderstanding or maybe an obscurantist view of reality. Maybe some people enjoy things more if they do not understand them, but we also know there are many people who find a fuller enjoyment when they also intellectually grasp what they are caught up in.