Designer Moods: The Ethics of Neurochemical Enhancement

For more than fifteen years now— essentially since Peter D. Kramer’s Listening to Prozac helped a generation overcome much of the stigma associated with one of the most common health problems in the United States— antidepressant use has grown steadily. Even while the drug war placed many so-called recreational drugs off-limits to those inclined to …

What’s wrong with society wanting us to be happy and friendly? The concern that America was becoming a “Prozac nation” popping happy pills was premature, given the emerging evidence that suppression of clinical trial data had inflated the reported efficacy of SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) like Prozac. Nonetheless, our growing understanding of the neurobiology …

Most of us think that if pharmacological agents can boost the mood of the clinically depressed, this is a very good result. But what should we think about the prospect of using pharmacological agents to boost the moods of those who exhibit no signs of depression? In other words, should society permit “designer” or “cosmetic” …

Few moral issues attract as much attention from moral philosophers these days as the ethics of human enhancement—of using pharmacological agents, genetic engineering, or biomedical implants to improve our memory, intelligence, strength, endurance, agility, or personality. To analyze the morality of enhancements, we must consider new technologies, review scientific developments, make predictions about the future, …

The nonreligious segment of the population is not only increasing but is also increasingly visible in the public square. Still, self-described religious believers constitute the vast majority of the American population, and so more attention has been paid by social scientists and survey researchers to distinctions such as religious denomination (say, evangelicals vs. mainline) or …

In 2006, Ronald R. Griffiths and his team at Johns Hopkins University demonstrated in a double-blind experiment that the hallucinogen psilocybin, extracted from a kind of mushroom, could induce mystical experiences. They chose thirty-six participants who at least intermittently had participated in religious and spiritual activities. All but one were college graduates. Two-thirds reported two …

Next year will be the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Council for Secular Humanism and the launching of Free Inquiry magazine. At that time, secular humanism was the bête-noire of the Religious Right. We were accused of dominating American life—the courts, public education, the universities, foundations, and the media. Our accusers claimed that …

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a transnational organization committed to scientific rationalism and secular humanism. More specifically, the principles to which CFI is devoted are: the use of the scientific method wherever possible in testing truth claims, including the cultivation of critical thinking and reason a cosmic perspective derived primarily from the sciences—a nonreductive, …

The setback at California’s Supreme Court is only a bump in the road. When same-sex marriage becomes legal in Iowa, you know the train has left the station. So irresistible has the momentum become that I predict that within a year, two at most, same-sex marriage will be legal nationwide. That’s a change that seemed …

In 1938, I was bar mitzvahed and also learned about Kristellnacht (the “Night of Glass”) in Berlin—the prelude to the Final Solution. As the Holocaust went on, I had a personal extra-parochial interest in Hitler’s extermination of the Jews because I was growing up in Boston, then the most anti-Semitic city in the country. A …

It’s hard to know if we should characterize as good or bad news a recent Pew Forum survey suggesting that public opinion is fairly evenly split over the legitimacy of torture. Support for torture was disproportionately low among people who do not attend religious services (which may reflect their political affiliations rather than any particular …

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse. Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops …

Lots of important people in the sciences and philosophy say that free will—the human capacity to think and do either this or do that—is a myth, a delusion. Some go so far as to recommend revamping the legal system and our ideas of ethics or morality so that concepts of guilt, innocence, responsibility, and so …

In the first part of this essay (Free Inquiry June/July 2009), I argued that the three main ideologies involved in World War II—liberalism, communism, and fascism—were secular grand narratives modeled on the so-called great religions. I focused on the concept of a grand narrative and on liberalism and how its progressive conception of history as …

Three years ago, I wrote an essay for Free Inquiry titled “Thank You, Science” (February/March 2006). I thanked science for orthodontia that straightened my crooked teeth and for antibiotics, without which I would have died of pylenophritis at thirty-three. On behalf of womankind generally, I thanked science for reliable birth control. This scientific innovation has …

More on Morality for the Nonreligious Below is just a smattering of the huge avalanche of mail that I have received regarding the need to develop personal morality for unbelievers, the most I have ever received or a particular subject (see “Personal Morality” by Paul Kurtz, FI, April/May 2009). I am organizing a research project …

Eric Maisel, PhD, is the author of more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction. His nonfiction titles include Coaching the Artist Within, Fearless Creating, The Van Gogh Blues, The Creativity Book, Performance Anxiety, Ten Zen Seconds, A Writer’s San Francisco, and A Writer’s Paris. A columnist for Art Calendar magazine, Maisel is a creativity …

‘Pro-life’ Terror Assassination The terrorist assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, on May 31 was not just a tragedy for the courageous physician who was one of the very few who provided rarely needed reproductive health-care procedures for many women. It was also a vicious attack on the rights of women to appropriate …

The atheist ad campaign on public-transit buses in Canada was launched to raise much-needed discussion. It may have accomplished that goal even before the first ad-bearing bus left its depot on February 15, 2009. The campaign’s slogan was: “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” After over $45,000 was raised by …

While strolling on the boardwalk during a vacation in Wildwood, New Jersey, my family was approached by a well-dressed man with a charming smile who was carrying a Bible. When he tried sharing his beliefs about the glory of God, I just shook my head and walked on. But my friendly wife, with our young …

Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists and the Undecided, by Ronald Aronson (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008, ISBN 1593761600) 288 pp. Cloth $25.00. In Declining World Order, Richard Falk claims that “only inclusivist religion, with a sense of the sacredness of every human being, can provide the political foundation in this global setting for …

Quantum Gods, by Victor J. Stenger (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59-02-713-3) 264 pp. Cloth $26.98. One of the enduring debates between atheists and theologians concerns the presence or absence of scientific evidence for the existence of a deity. While the vast majority of the scientific community would probably assert there is no reliable …

Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, by Wendy Kaminer (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2009, ISBN 978-080704430-8) 160 pp. Cloth $24.95. Beginning in 2003, Wendy Kaminer accuses, the venerable American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lost its way. Awash in financial support since 9/11 and led by charismatic executive director Anthony Romero, the ACLU voluntarily agreed …

Pessimism to Realistic Hope: A Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment Program for Depression and Self-Esteem, by Tony Picchioni (Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2008, ISBN 1-60563-894-3) 137 pp. Paper $24.95. For thirty years, Dr. Tony Picchioni has worked in the field of therapy, conflict resolution, and mediation. He is also chair of the Department of Human Development at Southern Methodist University …

Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling, by Robert Kunzman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009, ISBN-13/EAN: 978-0-8070-3291-6) 256 pp. Cloth $27.95. June/July’s Free Inquiry ran my review of Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (“Fundamentalist Stepford Wives”). Almost simultaneously, the same publisher brought out Write These Laws on …

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59420-213-1) 416 pp. Cloth $27.95 It’s a bit strange—if not audacious—that The Economist’s editor in chief, John Micklethwait, and its Washington bureau chief, Adrian Wooldridge, would choose to coauthor …

Helix, by Eric Brown (Nottingham, U.K.: Solaris Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-84416-472-1) 526 pp. Paper $7.99. Helix, by Eric Brown, is a sprawling science-fiction novel combining a solid adventure story, world-building on an epic scale, and sharp-elbowed satire of religion. Five hundred years into its journey away from a nearly uninhabitable near-future Earth, its passengers in …

The Other Preacher in Lynchburg: My Life Across Town from Jerry Falwell, by John Killinger (New York: St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books, 2009, ISBN: 0-312-53858-8) 208 pp., Cloth $24.95. John Killinger, Harvard and Princeton educated theologian and author of more than sixty books, served as minister of First Presbyterian Church in Jerry Falwell’s hometown from …

Observe what has happened, what we’ve been up to ever since, what we’d like to believe. Observe the long unconstellated sky, how it darkens at the edges, like old scrolls, parallax. Observe the papering of all our greater walls, the bronchial, the aortal, the cerebral and pyloric, our innocent faces painted gray to suit the …