Our Brave New Pharmacological World

Abstract

It’s not difficult to say what’s objectionable about soma in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: the majority of the blissed-out, mindless denizens of this socially and biologically engineered dystopia are oblivious not only to their own manipulation but also to the fact that their lives have become empty and hollow; they no longer care or strive for anything greater than the ecstasy of their next drug-induced vacation. Francis Fukuyama argues in Our Posthuman Future that Huxley’s vision of the future was extremely prescient and that advances in biotechnology and neuropharmacology now threaten to alter human nature and thus undermine the very basis of human dignity.1 One such threat stems from developments he sees in neuropharmacology and the growing omnipresence in our lives of psychotropic drugs such as Prozac and Ritalin. The first section of this paper discusses advances in neuroscience and pharmacology that extend the aim of medicine beyond the treatment of disease and the mitigation of pain and suffering to include “cosmetic neurology,” that is, the enhancement of cognitive functioning in normal, healthy human beings. The second section challenges Fukuyama’s assertion that we can only escape a “posthuman” future as nightmarish as Huxley’s Brave New World if we anchor human dignity and values in an empirically defensible conception of human nature. Given the theoretical difficulty of identifying a normatively relevant conception of human nature, I propose that Alasdair Macintyre’s analysis of virtue, internal goods and practices in After Virtue offers the necessary conceptual apparatus and appropriate context of human activity–not human nature–that allows us to evaluate the ethical significance of neurochemical enhancements. In the third and final section, I draw upon the myth of Theuth from Plato’s Phaedrus to argue that the use of performance-enhancement drugs within the arena of Macintyre’s practices threatens the integrity of these special domains