Morality Pill – How Medicine Can Make You Better
The Morality Pill is a hypothetical drug that can increase a person’s empathy and sense of empathy, making them highly moral.
Scientists have long wondered why some people act morally and others do not. Why would someone walk past a dying person and not even call 911, while others are willing to risk their lives to save strangers?
Why do people commit violent crimes and is it possible to find a medical way to make a person better. Medicinal preparations that can increase the level of empathy, mercy and compassion are conditionally called pills of morality or mercy.
However, for now, science is far from the actual development of such tablets, and society does not have a unified position on how correct it is to apply them.
Why haven’t morale pills been created yet?
Scientists have long known preparations that affect human behavior, but which of them might be related to the future creation of a possible morality pill .
The complexity of this question is related to the fact that it is very difficult to define what is a moral act. It is easier to illustrate this through the well-known moral dilemma, the so-called trolley problem.
The trolley problem
The trolley is moving along the rails to which 5 people are tied. You are on a bridge that is over the tracks. You have the option to stop the trolley by leaving something heavy on the track. There’s a fat guy next to you and your only option to stop the trolley is to push him off the bridge onto the tracks.
What would your actions be?
• Consequentialists – utilitarians, that is, to evaluate the morality of an act, the consequences of it are taken into account, not the intention of the perpetrator. In the case of the trolley, if you are a consequentialist, in order to avoid the death of 5 people, you can sacrifice one. A supporter of this theory is, for example, the British philosopher and sociologist Jeremy Bentham.
• Deontologists – suggest that evil acts should not be done under any circumstances. Even in the name of a noble cause, no killing should be done, and that means you have to leave the fat man on the bridge next to you alive, even though his death could save the lives of 5 people. Supporters of this theory are Immanuel Kant and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The influence of different substances on the solution of the trolley problem
• Serotonin – one of the main neurotransmitters. After taking the serotonin-enhancing drug citalopram, people were more likely to say that they would push the fat person under the trolley – more immoral than letting 5 other strangers die.
• Lorazepam – tranquilizer, having a calming and anti-anxiety effect. During the experiment, people taking the drug tended to think more rationally and more often answered that killing one to save five lives was the right choice.
• Oxytocin – if the content of this hormone in the blood increases, a person’s ability to feel compassion, trust and cooperation increases. But it also strengthens such feelings in people as envy, scorn and attachment to a certain social group.
Participants in the experiment, who took this drug, were told the nationality of the potential murder victims before answering the question about how they would solve the trolley problem.
It turned out that people under the influence of oxytocin were more willing to sacrifice the life of a person of another nationality and to leave alive a person of their own nationality.
