Morality in a Pill?

J. Hughes

The tragedy in Colorado (“Batman” mass murder) makes many of us wonder how we could better identify and treat people who are heading into psychopathic rage. [from a sermon delivered at the Unitarian-Universalist Society: East, July 22, 2012 and Unitarian Fellowship of Storrs, September 16, 2012]

Although I am for gun control, it can’t be the sole answer to preventing senseless violence, which we know can be carried out with fertilizer, box cutters and automobiles. Our growing understanding of the brain and how it generates empathy, self-control, moral judgment and even spiritual transcendence suggests that we will increasingly be able to identify and treat not just psychopathy, but ordinary moral and spiritual weakness. Neuroscience will offer us all the possibility of becoming the better people that we want to be, as well as enabling scary new forms of surveillance and social control. Neuroscience is making concrete age-old religious questions about what it means to be a good person.

All religious traditions have models of the good personality, the virtues and vices. Buddhism has exhaustive lists of mental impurities and meditations useful for developing their corresponding virtues. Confucianism teaches core virtues of benevolence, honesty, conscientiousness, loyalty, knowledge and good manners. Aristotle had a system of a two dozen interlocking virtues that Catholicism adapted into seven vices and virtues: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.

These systems of virtues present a problem for a liberal religious tradition like ours since we first notice that they don’t all agree, and second, that sometimes the things that religions agreed were vices or virtues then aren’t considered so by our modern Enlightenment morality. The whole idea of virtue, vice and sin just seems really old-fashioned and intolerant.

So as soon as we consider the project of moral enhancement using neuroscience, even if conducted without any coercion, each of us on our own brains, we have to wonder then, whose version of morality will we all be enhancing? Last year the Norwegian mass killer Anders Brevik insisted – unsuccessfully – that his use of terror to wake Norway to the dangers of Muslim immigration was both sane and moral. On the other hand it is only recently that most Americans have agreed that homosexuality is not a sign of both immorality and mental illness. Understanding the neurological sources of our gut intuitions about morality and why we come to different conclusions, appears to be a pretty important step before we set out to make ourselves the best we can be.

Here the psychologist Jon Haidt has a caution for Unitarians, and for liberals in general. Haidt has studied moral intuitions, the instinctual responses we have to moral situations that light up specific parts of our brains and appear rooted in primate neurology. He suggests that there are five of these basic intuitions:

• Don’t hurt people
• Don’t cheat
• Defer to authority
• Favor your family and your tribe over the other guys
• Stay sacred and avoid spiritual pollution

Huh? How did deference to authority, nepotism, racism and nationalism end up on a list of moral intuitions? For many people when they confront a moral dilemma where they have to do a polluting act, or harm someone close to them, or stand up to authority, even if it save lives, a strong signal of fear and loathing is sent from their amygdala to their frontal cortex and they can’t even think about doing it.

That feeling of loathing that some people feel at the thought of incest and cannibalism as well as homosexuality, strange immigrants, and interracial marriage is interpreted as a moral intuition, and finds sanction in moral codes. But it turns out some of are less responsive to those signals in the first place, or we are educated to not allow our amygdalas to drive our moral thinking, and we generally end up liberals. Liberals only prioritize two of the moral intuitions, don’t hurt people and don’t cheat. Otherwise we think the moral thing to do is to leave other people alone to find their own happiness. Conservatives’ brains on the other hand tell them you can’t be good person if you go around questioning authority, putting abstract universals over your tribe, and profaning the sacred.

So let’s think for a second about the UU seven principles. We have caring for other people and the importance of fairness at the top, and then global fairness and caring about every living thing at the bottom. And then in the middle we have three different ways of saying leave other people alone. That’s pretty different from obey your parents, kill the harlot and apostate, and don’t eat with your mouth open or use the lords name in vain. Right off the top we have to acknowledge that a liberal approach to moral enhancement is going to be a lot more minimal compared to a conservative approach, and may in fact focus on suppressing moral intuitions that conservatives take very seriously, such as suppressing disgust at sexual and ethnic minorities or encouraging individualism instead of obedience.

But there will be some areas we can agree on.

The first is the importance of self-control, which is central to all the systems of virtues. The ability to control your own behavior is foundational for being good, at least until you are so spiritually pure that you no longer have any impulse to say or do mean, selfish and thoughtless things. We also know that we are all born with brain settings that make us more or less capable of self-control. Famously Walter Mischel demonstrated in the Stanford Marshmallow Experiments that a four year-old’s ability to not eat a marshmallow predicted their academic success and juvenile delinquency as teenagers. Twin studies show that the personality trait of conscientiousness is about 50% determined by your genes at birth – probably by gene variants that determine how your brain regulates the pleasure chemical dopamine – that this trait strongly predicts drug and alcohol use, sexual risk-taking, criminality and violence.

We also know that that our upbringing, our diet, and various drugs can impair or enhance our self-control. People raised in stable families learn more self-control, and people vary in self-control throughout the day depending on their brain’s supply of blood sugar. At the extreme we are developing therapies to help people impose self-control on themselves, from appetite suppression for obesity, i.e. gluttony, to vaccines to block the effects of nicotine, alcohol, opiates and cocaine in the addicted brain, to testosterone suppression for sex offenders. But we can also now use drugs to enhance ordinary self-control. Stimulant drugs are perhaps the most widespread application of this. Drugs like Adderall or Ritalin increase the amount of dopamine signaling in response to ordinary events, at least for folks who aren’t on the high end of the dopamine bell curve to begin with. They make whatever you are doing more interesting, giving you more ability to control your own behavior and perform your best. Although we aren’t supposed to think about it this way anymore they allow “bad kids” to become “good kids.”

If we are morally obliged not to drink and drive, because it impairs attention and self-control, why are we not also obliged to enhance our ability to use deadly machinery with neurochemicals like Adderall or Provigil?

Or another example, infidelity. We know that infidelity is a lot higher for folks with certain dopamine variants, and we also know that some mammals can be switched from promiscuous to faithful by tweaking the way their brain responds to sexual pleasure. We know that when men care for children their testosterone level drops, reducing the impulse to promiscuity. The bioethicist Julian Savulescu has proposed that a cocktail of oxytocin, the cuddle hormone, perhaps combined with drugs that make you pay more attention to your partner, could be used in couples therapy to increase love and trust, and reduce infidelity.

Now lets think about compassion and fairness. Conservatives recognize their moral value, they just don’t focus on them to the exclusion of their other intuitions. So therapies to enhance compassion and fairness will likely be pretty popular. Our capacity for compassion and empathy is rooted in neurological structures like mirror neurons, which cause us to actual feel the experiences of others, and in neurochemicals like oxytocin, which heighten our empathy and trust. One of the deficits of autism is an inability to understand other people’s feeling, and giving oxytocin to people with autism and Aspergers appears to heighten their empathic capacities. Dosing people with oxytocin in a lab makes them more cooperative, the drug ecstasy boosts oxytocin and thereby feelings of love and trust.

Similarly there is strong evidence that our desire for fairness, or more precisely our desire to punish cheaters, is both biologically innate and chemically enhanceable. Research has found the fairness impulse to be modulated by variations in serotonin receptors, and sensitive to the level of serotonin in the brain. Giving people antidepressants that boost their serotonin makes them less willing to harm others in zero-sum games, and more prone to egalitarian solutions. But our aversion to unfairness is a tricky instinct because it can as easily be turned to hostility to welfare queens and job-stealing immigrants as to the 1%. As with all the virtues, they don’t work by themselves. They have to be tempered and trained against the others, and under the guidance of prudence and wisdom. And the evidence is mounting that we are far less wise than we think we are. Judges hand down harsher sentences before lunch, when they are hungry, than first thing in the morning. People judge others more harshly when they smell bad smells or have sticky substances on their hands - that’s your amygdala again, telling you that a feeling of disgust is the same as a moral judgment.

By the way, there’s now an app for that. The psychologist Dan Ariely has an app called Conscience which helps you work past biases in your thinking about moral decisions.

Now let’s think a bit about transcendence and the sacred. There is some evidence that liberals like us may have a harder time finding the sacred and transcendent in our lives because our prefrontal cortex is always nattering away. But we liberal religious do find those experiences, even if they aren’t tied to sacred books, flags, the relics of dead saints, or the mummy of Lenin. In fact variations in serotonin receptor genes have been linked to the liberal-leaning personality trait of “openness to experience,” which makes you more likely to have spiritual experiences, more likely to remember your dreams, more easily hypnotizable, and less likely to be a religious fundamentalist and political conservative.

So what are the experiences, places and objects we discover sacredness and transcendence, and how might those we technologically enhanced? Giving people access to more of those experiences may actually increase the openness to ambiguity for those who would otherwise have a closed, literalist approach to religious experience and morality. In fact a study published last year found that the psychedelic psilocybin had a long-lasting effect in changing people’s personalities towards greater openness to experience.

Some of us have found those experiences through meditation, and neuroscience is illuminating the parts of the brain that meditation effects and ways that we might directly create meditative experiences. Certain drugs, and more modern methods like focusing powerful magnets on specific parts of the brain, can turn off the sense that you are your body and create a sense of boundless oneness, or give you the sense that there is a powerful spiritual presence in the room. Transcranial magnetic stimulation has also been used to turn off the critical yammer of the cortex allowing a free flow of creative thought and expression that people didn’t know they had.

Another way that our brains are primed to experience transcendence is through rhythmic song and dance. When we use our mirror neurons to sync with others through song and dance we get a boost of reward in ancient parts of the brain. The principal risk associated with ecstasy use in all night dance clubs was in fact that the revelers enjoyed the hours of dancing and the feeling overwhelming connectedness so much that they didn’t notice becoming severely dehydrated. The idea that certain drugs enhance a collective ritual ecstatic state was of course pretty familiar to most shamanic tribal religions.

Now, I’m not suggesting a reductionist “pill for morality” or “pill for spirituality” approach here. Becoming a moral or spiritual person requires a moral education, is helped or harmed by morality of your society and life situation, and requires that you create a moral framework around your life and not just in your brain chemicals.

Announcing to a community that you and your partner are making the commitment of marriage is an enlisting of their moral suasion to back up your moral commitments, which works better if your community takes those commitments seriously. Wearing a ring, announcing your relationship status on Facebook, and taking down your eHarmony profile all reflect and reinforce your moral commitment. Changing the structure of your brain to suppress the impulse to infidelity might then be the next stage, complementary to these others but not a substitute.

The demands of most systems of virtues are heavy, which is why most religions put their saints on pedestals as moral exemplars that we can aspire towards, while acknowledging that for most of us the flesh is just too weak. It may be that soon we will have tools more powerful than meditation and hairshirts to tame our bee-stung monkey brains, suppress our vices, and carefully enhance our virtues. The road to moral enhancement will not solve the fundamental moral disagreements we have, although it will lay bare how they arise and the consequences they entail. And these tools will create a future in which we not only can identify and cure the psychopaths in our midst, but in which societies will actually be able to “fix” political dissidents, sexual deviants, and heresy in ways only hinted at by the crude efforts of Inquisition, Soviet psychiatry or the “ex-gay therapy” of today.

I think Unitarian Universalism is a fertile ground for the exploration of ways that these new tools can be used within a liberal model of virtue and the good life, and as a place to take a stand against the inevitable efforts to use these tools to close down the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. This has been a hope expressed by many of our Enlightenment forebears as they contemplated ways the future powers of science could improve our lives. So I leave you with this reflection by Benjamin Franklin writing to the Unitarian scientist Joseph Priestley in 1780:

“The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may, perhaps, deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce: all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured (not excepting even that of old age,) and our lives lengthened at pleasure, even beyond the antediluvian standard. Oh that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity.”