If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-Love Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical Breakup

Abstract

“Love hurts”—as the saying goes—and a certain amount of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived. But other times, love can be downright dangerous. It may bind a spouse to her domestic abuser, draw an unscrupulous adult toward sexual involvement with a child, put someone under the insidious spell of a cult leader, and even inspire jealousy-fueled homicide. How might these perilous devotions be diminished? The ancients thought that treatments such as phlebotomy, exercise, or bloodletting could “cure” an individual of love. But modern neuroscience and emerging developments in psychopharmacology open up a range of possible interventions that might actually work. These developments raise profound moral questions about the potential uses—and misuses—of such anti-love biotechnology. In this article, we describe a number of prospective love-diminishing interventions, and offer a preliminary ethical framework for dealing with them responsibly should they arise.

Keywords:

• love drugs
• neuroenhancement
• anti-love biotechnology
• domestic abuse
• pharmacology
• ethics
• wellbeing

Notes

As shown in the video game adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (Rowling 2005). See the Harry Potter Wiki at http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Love_Potion_Antidote Thanks are due to Ewa Jozwik for editorial assistance on this article, as well as to three anonymous reviewers for the American Journal of Bioethics. Minor portions of the earliest draft of this article were adapted into an interview for The Atlantic conducted by Ross Andersen (accessible at this link: http://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/latest_news/2013/?a=28554) and some reader comments were instructive for later revisions as well. This work was supported by a Wellcome Trust Grant #08604/Z/08/Z and by the Oxford Martin School.

A pharmaceutical normally used to treat alcohol dependency.

Some of what follows is necessarily speculative. But as Decamp and Buchanan (2007) point out, this does not “make the discussion fruitless” (538). Instead, preemptive deliberation “may help shape the technological development” of nascent biochemical research in a beneficial way, whether from an ethical, pragmatic, or sociopolitical perspective. Moreover, it may be “more prudent to explore a range of possible issues, some of which may not arise, than to be overtaken by events owing to the failure to think ahead” (Decamp and Buchanan 2007, 538). We add that as an intellectual exercise, reflecting on plausible “future” outcomes can help to clarify and simplify the underlying moral equations involved, which might in turn more effectively ground our ethical judgments regarding analogous cases in the present day.

A reviewer for this article writes: “This is Bonnie's experience—how she conceptualizes what she feels. However, a psychiatrist or psychologist may say that what she feels is not actually love but an obsessive attachment to the abuser, or an emotional allegiance from the perspective of a criminologist, [or] a mental disorder.” This is undoubtedly true: One person's “love” may certainly be thought of as insanity by someone else—or a delusion, or none of the above. But who gets to lay claim to the meaning of the word? A psychiatrist (for example) may wish to define “true” love as being something intrinsically healthy, positive, and good for one's well-being; and on such a definition, we would have to conclude that Bonnie was mistaken about her own feelings, or was using the word “love” incorrectly. Yet other definitions abound. The philosopher Simon May (2011), for instance, conceives of “true” love as something that can sometimes be destructive, even to the point of death. Our own conception is discussed in Box 1. Yet whatever position one takes on the question of labeling, the moral analysis remains essentially the same. Are the feelings harmful? Why? In virtue of what? And how might they best be tempered or resolved? As we have argued elsewhere (Earp, Wudarczyk, Foddy and Savulescu, unpublished), treatments designed to diminish problematic forms of interpersonal attachment “should hinge on considerations of harm and well-being rather than on definitions of disease”—or, indeed, on definitions of love. See Box 1 for further discussion.

The term “Stockholm Syndrome” was first used by criminologist Nils Bejerot to describe the emotional allegiance felt by a number of hostages—bank employees—toward their captors in an armed hold up of a Swedish bank in 1973. Rather than rejoicing at their eventual freedom, some of the hostages resisted the aid of government officials and actually defended the criminals who had held them captive over a six-day period. See Alexander and Klein (2009) for more information.

See also Burkett and Young (2012) for a more recent neuroscientific account of love-as-addiction.

Baumeister, Wotman, and Stillwell (1993) reported that 93% of males and females have been previously rejected by an object of passionate love and that 95% rejected someone who had such feelings for them. Romantic rejection has several negative mental health consequences: it sometimes results in homicide and suicide (e.g., Meloy and Fisher 2005; Wilson and Daly 1992) and regularly leads to clinically diagnosable depression (Mearns 1991).

Erotomania “is a rare disorder in which an individual has a delusional belief that a person of higher social status falls in love and makes amorous advances towards him/her” (Kennedy et al. 2002, 1). The individual himself or herself may (or may not) feel “in love” with this high-status person in return.

We do not mean to imply that incest is inherently harmful: If two adults who are closely related to each other wish to have concensual sex, especially if they take measures to avoid pregnancy (given a higher chance for genetic defects in any resulting offspring), then it is not clear, on utilitarian grounds, ceteris paribus, that there would be anything wrong with their doing so. Indeed, even if they did not use birth control, being at a higher than average risk of producing offspring with a genetic disorder does not normally constitute (moral or legal) grounds for a prohibition on having sex. Older couples and couples with heritable disabilities, for example, are free to have unprotected sex, and suggestions that they should be barred from doing so would be met with considerable skepticism. However, many cases of incest involve sex between parents (or step-parents) and younger children, which would introduce a much greater risk for exploitation and harm. These are the cases we mean to bring to mind. See Kasemset (2009) for an interesting discussion on incest between consenting adults.

The use of memory-erasing drugs to purge a prior relationship from one's mind was dramatized in the 2004 Focus Features film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, and Kirsten Dunst. For a thorough and very interesting discussion of the “morality of memory” as dealt with in this film, see Chistopher Grau's 2006 essay in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64(1): 119–133. While the possibility of memory erasure is clearly pertinent to our discussion of anti-love biotechnology, a full analysis would take us too far afield of our focus on lust, attraction, and attachment—that is, the predisposing affective factors for potential (harmful) relationships, as well as the psychological “glue” holding together current (harmful) relationships. Accordingly, we mention memory erasure only in passing here. Of course, if one had already “cured” herself of her emotional attachment to—for example—an abusive partner (perhaps by using one of the interventions we explore in this essay), there would seem to be less of a need for deleting him from her mind as well. For these and other reasons, we will leave the science and ethics of memory-modification to other writers (e.g., De Jongh et al. 2008; Glannon 2006; Henry, Fishman, and Younger 2007; Liao and Sandberg 2008; Liao and Wasserman 2007; Parens 2010).

To set the foundation for our new arguments in the present article, we have adapted a handful of sentences in this brief introductory segment—as well as in our later discussion of oxytocin—from section 7 of Earp, Sandberg, and Savulescu (2012). The copyright for this material is retained by the authors.

If fairly arbitrary: There are a number of equally plausible “biological” theories of love we could draw on to give our analysis structure, with a great deal of overlap between them. Douglas Kenrick (2006), for example, has proposed that “love is a set of decision biases that evolved to serve genetic interests”; Phillip Shaver and Mario Mikulincer (2006), like Fisher, argue for three systems, but call them “attachment, caregiving, and sex”; David Buss (2006) considers love a universal adaptation that “evolved in the course of evolution to solve problems of reproduction”; and Leckman and colleagues (2006) exchew the term “love” altogether and refer instead to the “conscious subjective experience that arises from bonding and attachment, and that also exerts an influence on them” (as summarized by Weis 2006, 4).

Erotic fantasies, of course, are unlikely to be problematic per se; it is when they are intrusive, unwanted, and interfere with a person's higher order goals and needs for daily functioning that they may become a more serious issue.

In the Kreuger and Kaplan (2001) study, Patient 1 reported that his sadistic sexual obsession with prepubescent boys was wiped out both during and after the 10-month treatment with drugs (in conjuction with group therapy), while he retained otherwise normal sexual functioning and an interest in consensual sexual relationships with adult males. Likewise, Patient 2 reported a decrease in exhibitionism but a retention of “normal heterosexual interest and functioning” (414). So in at least some individual cases, drug treatment and therapy may be able to selectively “knock out” the problematic sexual thoughts and urges, leaving a “healthy” libido intact (assuming accuracy of self-reports in these instances). While this outcome is still not person-specific, it does potentially relate to discrete classes of persons (i.e., prepubescent boys), or classes of behaviors (i.e., public displays of genetalia).

The typical case involves siblings—who do indeed commonly fail to find each other sexually appealing—but has also been observed with unrelated children raised together in Israeli kibbutzim. The same phenomenon is seen in arranged marriages in which child daughters are reared together with their husbands-to-be, as well as in marriages of patrilateral parallel cousins. This negative sexual marking effect has also been observed in animal-rearing experiments, and may constitute an evolved unconscious strategy to reduce inbreeding (Markus, Rantala, and Marcinkowska 2011).

Aragona and Wang (2009, 1–2) provide a useful introduction to these cuddly creatures (internal citations removed): “Prairie voles are small rodents … distributed primarily in the grasslands of the central United States. [They] are among the minority of mammalian species (3–5%) that show a monogamous social organization. … This species was initially identified as monogamous by field studies which showed that male–female pairs travel together, share a nest with one or more litters of pups, and aggressively repel unrelated intruders from their territory. Further, male prairie voles show high levels of parental care, and it has been suggested that both parents are necessary for pup survival which selected for highly enduring pair bonds. Indeed, the pair bond is so stable that a surviving member of the pair will not accept a new mate even if the other member of the bond is lost.” While traditional laboratory animals such as rats and mice do not show pair-bonding behaviors, voles—who retain their monogamous characteristics even in captivity—have been described as an “excellent model system” for studying human-analogous attachment and processing of social information (Aragona and Wang 2004, abstract).

While oxytocin and (to a much lesser degree) vassopressin get most of the attention in studies on pair bonding and attachment—especially in humans—they do not act in isolation. As we stated earlier, oxytocin and vassopressin seem to support the recognition and processing of social cues, while dopamine is needed to associate those cues with positive feelings. As Liu and Wang (2003) have shown, the concurrent activation of oxytocin and D2-type dopamine receptors within the nucleus accumbens is required for pair-bond formation—at least in female prairie voles.

Another, more speculative, lead for an attachment-dissolving intervention may come from Capgras's delusion (Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux [1923] 1994). In this delusion, an individual reports believing that a close spouse, sibling, or friend has been replaced by an impostor who shares identical visual features. Patients suffering from this condition are able to recognize faces, but the automatic emotional arousal to familiar faces does not ensue (Ellis and Young 1990). One explanation for this phenomenon is that “neuro-anatomical pathways responsible for appropriate emotional reactions to familiar visual stimuli” have become damaged or degraded (Ellis et al. 1997, 1086). This account fits comfortably with the oxytocin–vassopressin–dopamine model of attachment, which requires the integration of social cues (including person-identification information) with a network of positive emotions. Future anti-love interventions might mirror the Capgras effect—ideally without inducing its delusive aspects—by interfering with this integration in a targeted way. Indeed, some drugs used to treat posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—such as propranolol—may work in a similar manner: They do not erase the traumatic memory, but they do seem to blunt the emotional aspects of the memory, by interrupting content-emotion integration processes occurring during consolidation (or re-consolidation) in the amygdala (Glannon 2006; Liao and Sandberg 2008).

Note that this is a narrow question; it addresses moral permissibility only. In other words, it leaves to the side a wide range of other, broader ethical concerns that the existence of anti-love biotechnology would inevitably bring about. Indeed, “there are a whole host of ethical issues surrounding accessibility and availability to these technologies, informed consent, … the concept of harm (and benefit),” and so on, as a reviewer of this article rightly observes. We do not disagree. However, much of this “host” of ethical issues applies to any new drug or technology, and we do not wish to recapitulate the entire debate on such matters in this initial article on the subject. Instead, we wish to “zoom in” on a single moral question that seems to us to be especially pertinent, and give it the detailed attention, in this article, that we believe in deserves.

An analogous case would be the “love for a cult leader” example, at least in this respect.

As Ovid advised long ago in his Remedia Amoris: “Tell yourself often what your wicked girl has done, and before your eyes place every hurt you've had. Impress your mind with whatever's wrong with her body, and keep your eyes fixed all the time on those faults.” See Ovid and May (2010).

Niklas Juth (2011) asks: “Can enhancement technologies promote individuals’ autonomy?” And answers: “Yes. In general plans require capacities in order for them to be put into effect and enhancement technologies can increase our capacities to do the things we need to do in order to effectuate our plans” (36).

Or dangerous enough, for oneself or others (i.e., children in the case of pedophilia).

Hard-line atheists might wish to insist that such a person is by definition irrational (or otherwise mentally incompetent), but this would be a very difficult argument to defend.

Of course, affording such a power would seem to cut both ways. What if a homosexual person, comfortable with her sexuality and perhaps committed to a homosexual relationship, happened to fall in love with a person of the opposite sex? Our arguments suggest, equally, that she should be entitled to reject this value-inconsistent “straight” love, and even attempt to alter it through biochemical means. And what about “intercaste” love? We have yet to finish that discussion. In this case, too, we think that the “harm” associated with the love in question is a function of problematic social norms, not the love itself. Thus, the goal should be to change these norms over time, rather than the feelings of love experienced by any individual person. Nevertheless, if an individual's love-based suffering in the here-and-now is severe enough—even if that suffering is due exclusively to unjust social pressures—there may be instances in which diminishing the love could be permissible, as long as it were requested, autonomously, by the individual him- or herself (see Earp in press). It should never, however, be forced upon someone else.