SSRIs and Moral Enhancement: Looking Deeper

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Notes

1. As for the rest of Hyman's comments, I shall not insult the reader by reiterating what was already made perfectly clear in the target article.

2. Other distinctions raised but not explored in that article were (a) realistic/fantastical (that is, whether the intervention in question refers to some futuristic fantasy far beyond present technology; or whether we are talking about possibly realisable interventions, e.g., rt-fMRI for treating psychopathy [Jotterand 2014, 1]); and (b) strong/weak (that is, whether we are looking at a more character-based account of moral functioning extended over time [involving moral identity, virtue formation, etc.], or at more isolated and individual moral acts/motives, etc.

3. It is certainly true that mental health and moral issues have more than a little overlap at points—psychotherapy is to do with everyday living, and the moral dimensions of everyday living can never be particularly far from the psychotherapeutic process, inadvertently or not (see Browning and Cooper 2004). But this does not change the manner in which we are simply taking something pre-existing, i.e. therapy, and just relabeling this already existing thing as something else, “moral enhancement.”