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We Can Make Room for SSRIs

Kilgus (2009) write in the classic psychiatry textbook Essential Psychopathology and Its Treatment (3rd ed.), “ First, if needed, the psychiatrist prescribes medication to rectify biological abnormalities” (100). They go on to add that “Correctly medicated patients gain more from psychotherapy,” and that “When used properly, biological and psychosocial therapies do not impede but facilitate one another” (101). In this conceptualization of psychiatric medicine, treatment with drugs is meant to enable to patients to move on from managing instinctive emotional and behavioral abnormalities to resolving more complex and cognition-related problems. Perhaps a similar framework could be employed toward moral enhancement efforts in the future. Currently, there have been no large trials to study the effects of SSRIs in modulating things like aggression in individuals without psychopathology, but for the sake of argument let us assume that these kinds of compounds do attenuate behavioral and emotional states that would otherwise hinder moral enhancement in people regardless of the presence of absence of a mental illness. As in psychiatric treatment, the use of such compounds could serve as a tool toward moral enhancement efforts, but would not constitute the enhancement itself. Instead, SSRIs and SSRI-like compounds would facilitate moral enhancement efforts. How much of an aid this would be to moral enhancement has yet to be investigated, but we should not summarily brush aside SSRIs and related medications simply because they would not by themselves bring about enhancement. Rather, we should make genuine efforts to find tools, both medical and nonmedical, to facilitate moral enhancement in healthy and nonhealthy individuals.