This month’s British Jour­nal of Psy­chi­a­try has an inter­est­ing essay on ‘moral phar­ma­col­ogy’. Mind Hacks picks up the story:

[Sean Spence] argues that while most atten­tion has been focused on ‘smart drugs’ and cog­ni­tive enhance­ment, med­ica­tion is already being sub­tly used to improve eth­i­cal behav­iour and we should pre­pare for a rev­o­lu­tion in ‘moral pharmacology’.

[…]

Recent con­sid­er­a­tions of the ethics of cog­ni­tive enhance­ment have specif­i­cally excluded con­sid­er­a­tion of social cog­ni­tions (such as empa­thy, revenge or decep­tion), on the grounds that they are less amenable to quan­tifi­ca­tion. Nev­er­the­less, it would be regret­table if this lim­i­ta­tion entirely pre­cluded con­sid­er­a­tion of what must be an impor­tant ques­tion for human­ity: can phar­ma­col­ogy help us enhance human moral­ity? Might drugs not only make us smarter but also assist us in becom­ing more ‘humane’?