Should we biochemically enhance love?

Robbie Arrell (Monash University)

Various authors have raised the possibility of morally enhancing loving relationships via hormonal or genetic manipulation (Savulescu and Sandberg 2008). The most immediate objection to ‘love drugs’ suggests that even if they promote the kinds of contingent good effects our loving relationships conduce to when we are appropriately disposed towards our loved ones, they will not promote the appropriate disposition itself. Indeed, the mere fact your partner requires biochemical manipulation to promote their provision of loving care would already seem to imply they are not appropriately disposed to love you in the way most of us want to be loved. Thus, a love that requires biochemical intervention to be sustained would seem but a thin simulacrum of the rich good of love we typically desire (Nyholm 2015). But this is too quick. Few would want their partner’s love for them to be caused or sustained by a love drug, but if the lover’s tendency to bestow loving care robustly is there but impaired by some feature that may be biochemically manipulated into submission, then this objection loses much of its force. The fact is that even otherwise loving partners sometimes lie, and sometimes they cheat. If, as neuroscientific research suggests, the impulsion to lie or cheat is in part biologically determined and we could attenuate it via biochemical manipulation, should we? I think we should not. Loving someone renders you vulnerable to being hurt by them. Ordinarily, knowing with sufficient certainty that they are appropriately disposed to accord your interests their deliberative due in a way that restricts their choice-sets in relevant situations attenuates such vulnerability. In this paper, I argue that since biochemical intervention would impair your ability to know with sufficient certainty that your enhanced partner acts out of an appropriate disposition (e.g. to be honest and faithful to you) and not because they are biochemically enhanced (irrespective of what the fact of the matter is), a probabilistic reduction in your partner’s propensity to lie or cheat will not entail a corresponding reduction in your vulnerability to being lied to or cheated on. In fact, since folding love drugs into the causal mix will tend to preclude whatever attenuation of vulnerability conventional relationship therapy methods yield, on consequentialist grounds we ought to prefer relationship therapy to relationship therapy plus biochemical enhancement.

Reading to complete in advance: Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg, "Neuroenhancement of love and marriage: the chemicals between us," Neuroethics 1 (2008): 31-44.