Psychopharmacological Enhancements: More Than a Mouthful?

Cosmetic psychopharmacological drugs have quickly started to become more and more popular all around the world. These are drugs that are called enhancements.  An enhancement is defined as an intervention designed to improve human form or functioning beyond what is necessary to sustain or restore good health. People may use these to give themselves an edge over other people in aspects of life, for example competitive sports.

Although they tend to be similar to interventions, they are not. Interventions restore and sustain health. Enhancements improve beyond good health, but they also can increase our standards for good health. This could actually be beneficial to our society, causing health standards to rise. If they rise, although at first it may mean most of society will not be in good health, eventually people will be healthier. This should prolong life, as long as the enhancements used do not have revenge effects later in life.

 As of now, our society has not completely leaped into the world of psychopharmacological enhancements, but it has started to dip its toes. There are steroids, cosmetic surgeries, hormones, drugs etc. These things are not necessarily required by the body but used to give people an upper hand in competitive situations. Whether it is for a sport, to appear more attractive to the opposite sex, or to enhance your personality to be more likeable, more and more people are turning towards such enhancements to do so.

One personality enhancement that has already posed ethical problems in the world is Prozac. It is supposed to treat depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bulimia nervosa, and panic disorder. Twenty-eight million Americans have used Prozac. The subjects who take it claim to have a radical personality change. The general qualities of a person before they were administered Prozac consist of: low self-esteem, shy, sensitive to other’s needs and deferential. After taking Prozac, patients report being confident, assertive, self-content, outgoing, and preoccupied with themselves. These are characteristics that are said to be desirable. The issue with this is that it gives them a false self. The person on Prozac is not the authentic person he or she was meant to be. When of the drug, the good personality traits are soon lost. So basically you have to take a pill the rest of your life just to be falsely happy, and to become something that you were not meant to be. Personally I would prefer to be truly depressed, than to be induced into happiness. Some people are meant to be the shy, submissive types, and others are meant to be outgoing and assertive. If everyone became outgoing and assertive, soon no one would be. Everyone would want to lead, but then who would be the followers? Who would listen while the others talked?

There is also pre-natal genetic engineering. This would be used to dispose of undesirable genes in an unborn child. Although this is a great idea, to rid the world of genetic diseases, it should not be used to change personality or physical appearance. In some ways, it would be like selective breeding, except the choice of mate would be irrelevant. That somewhat dehumanizes our people, and turns us more into an ideal, which is the exact opposite of human society. There is no ideal person, everyone is unique, and the idea of perfect varies from person to person. That is why there needs to be regulations.

The market for genetic engineering also needs to be regulated. If the government does not take charge of this issue, then the market will. Then the prices for this will become only affordable by the economically fortunate. This will create a separation of people. One class, being the more fortunate (both financially and genetically), and the other class would be, everyone else. Shenk, who is ultimately concerned about general equality, expresses this view. According to him, the government needs to take charge of this regulation, before it gets out of hand.

Hughes, who is in see’s no problem with self-modification in adults and genetic therapy, agrees with Shenk’s ideas for regulations. He also endorses the genetic modification of offspring, which could be used to eliminate undesired physical and personality traits.

One of the main objections to gene therapy is the Natural Law Theory, which basically says if something is natural, it is morally right. Supporters of the Natural Law Theory think that such enhancements are unnatural. They also believe that genetic engineering is like “playing god with nature”. Kass is one of the main advocates of this idea, using it against the reproductive cloning. Reproductive Cloning is essentially a more radical approach to Genetic Engineering. Instead of choosing and modifying different genes within the unborn child, a parent my soon be able to basically choose a desired “model” child, and make it their own.

Kass believes that human cloning is wrong and immoral. I could not agree with him more. Cloning could actually turn into a crime against humanity, by eliminating the genes that make us all so different. It jeopardizes our authenticity, welfare, and safety among other things. All it takes is one Hitler to try and create a super race, and with cloning, the possibilities are endless. If there was still DNA left from Hitler we could actually clone him!

The problem with society is that everyone wants to be perfect. Our vision is skewed to see one certain person as ideal, and another as undesirable. In reality, there is no perfect person. Beauty is, in fact, in the eye of the beholder. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Idioms aside, we were all meant to be different and beautiful in our own ways.

No one will ever mold himself or herself into what the whole world can agree on as the perfect person, it is just absolutely unthinkable, unless of course we were all clones of one certain individual. Even so, we would all have different personal experiences in our life, causing us to be different mentally, emotionally, and physically. No one would have the same parents, environment, or experiences at all. Our personalities, although they may have tendencies to be the same, would at least vary in some way or another. Some of those qualities may be undesirable. Some of society seems to underestimate the affect a child’s environment has on that child. A child is shaped and molded by its environment. Nurture has ultimately more affect on a child’s personality than genes and nature.

Although some enhancements are for the betterment of society, such as the one that are getting rid of genetic disorders, most of them are just immoral and wrong. Cloning, and genetically modifying a child’s personality and appearance to be more desirable is just wrong. Also, taking drugs to change your personality to be what is believed to be better is wrong. There is no universally desired trait in any human. It all depends on perceptions. The government needs to do something about such enhancements before anything gets out of hand. If there are not regulations placed upon such things, our society has the potential to become a drugged up, plastic race and I am almost positive nobody likes to see people who are drugged up, or plastic.