You take a few caps and place your head in a magnetic field distortion machine. A doctor enters and asks you what you want to desire, believe in and find morally righteous. You could leave your jealousy at the reception desk, or your fear of strangers, or that conviction — inherited, never chosen — that you are worthless. After a quick procedure, you walk out a new person. Call it ethomorphism: the deliberate reshaping of one’s own ethos.
Morality and desire modification therapy may sound far-fetched, but according to scientific developments we should be preparing for it — with optimism. The building blocks are already on the shelf. Drugs such as Prozac alter a patient’s mental state and have a measurable impact on moral behavior, as reported by The Guardian in its coverage of the emerging science of moral enhancement. Oxytocin, the chemical that, among other things, can induce labor and deepen the bond between mother and child, may cause a person to be more empathetic and altruistic, more giving and generous. Psilocybin, the active component of “magic mushrooms,” has been shown to lower aggressive behavior in people with antisocial personality disorder and to improve the ability of sociopaths to recognize emotion in others — interacting directly with the psychological underpinnings of moral behavior.
It gets more surgical than mushrooms. Researchers found that the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam changed how people answered the classic trolley problem: after taking it, subjects were more likely to approve of sacrificing one man to save five — a pharmaceutical nudge from one ethical school to another. MIT neuroscientists went further and skipped chemistry altogether: by disrupting the brain’s right temporo-parietal junction with a magnetic field applied to the scalp, they impaired subjects’ ability to read other people’s intentions, making them more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible. A study published in PNAS showed the mirror image — that selectively disrupting a brain region can paradoxically enhance our ability to incorporate unwelcome information into our beliefs. And in 2022, researchers at McGill University treated patients suffering from adjustment disorder after a romantic betrayal by reactivating the painful memory under propranolol, dimming the emotional charge of the event — editing, in effect, how much a memory is allowed to hurt. Symptoms dropped and stayed down; the patients still remembered the betrayal, they just no longer organized their lives around it. If heartbreak can be prescribed away, the desires and judgments built on top of it are hardly untouchable.
Before anyone objects that beliefs are sacred territory, notice that they are already being altered at industrial scale — just without a prescription. The scholar Shoshana Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism’s interventions as attacks on what she calls “the right to the future tense”: “The very idea that I can decide what I want my future to be and design the actions that get me from here to there, that’s the very material essence of the idea of free will.” Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute documented organized social media manipulation campaigns in seventy countries, warning that “computational propaganda — the use of algorithms, automation, and big data to shape public life — is becoming a pervasive and ubiquitous part of everyday life.” And a study by Diehl, Weeks and Gil de Zúñiga, surveying around a thousand Americans, found evidence that social media use leads directly to the persuasion and alteration of political beliefs. Scientists predict that future medical advances will allow far more sophisticated manipulations than these blunt instruments. The field is in its infancy, but “it’s very far from being science fiction,” says Dr. Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. Evidence suggests that our capacity for empathy, our tolerance of other racial groups, and even our political opinions can be altered by technology. The only question is who holds the dial — an algorithm optimizing for engagement, or you.
The next thing to notice is that some desires and beliefs are pathological for oneself and for others. According to the psychologist Judith Beck, there are negative core beliefs about the self — helplessness, unlovability, worthlessness — that cause long-lasting harm and can barely be tackled even with intensive cognitive behavioral therapy. Kengo Miyazono, a philosopher of mind at the University of Birmingham, argues that certain beliefs go beyond being merely irrational and should be classified as pathological: harmful malfunctions of the believing mind. And pathology is not only private. Oxfam’s research across countries in Africa, Latin America and the Pacific catalogued the harm caused by commonplace beliefs about women — that they must be submissive to men, that they are worth less if divorced, that harassment is normal and genital mutilation acceptable. These are not exotic convictions held by monsters; they are ordinary beliefs, transmitted like a dialect. In his book Extremism, J. M. Berger defines the extremist spectrum — religious fanaticism, tribalism, nationalism, conspiracy theories, racism — by a single feature: the belief that an in-group’s success or survival can never be separated from hostile action against an out-group. Even at the banal end of the scale, researchers from Bharath University note that food habits are mostly cultural, and that some belief systems steer us into unhealthy consumption of sugar, fat and salt. We do not choose these beliefs; they choose us, early, and then defend themselves. Oppressive, arbitrary and extreme beliefs represent dangers to the self and to others — which justifies treatments that could change them more effectively than behavior modification therapy ever has.
Here comes the reflexive objection: wouldn’t this destroy free will and identity? Further evidence suggests the advantages of such interventions would not trump either. Research in neuroethics has linked violent aggression, drug abuse, addiction and the likelihood of committing a crime to genetic variables and to specific brain chemicals such as dopamine — meaning the “authentic self” we are so anxious to protect is already a biochemical settlement we never negotiated. As Slate observed, evidence suggests that our ability to be empathetic, our tolerance of other racial groups and our sensitivity to fairness all have their roots in biology — the attempts of parents, educators, friends, philosophers and therapists to make people behave better are simply getting a boost from technology. Nobody accuses a good kindergarten of erasing free will. Kahane points at the upside: “Relating to the plight of people on the other side of the world or of future generations is not in our nature. This new body of drugs could make possible feelings of global affiliation and of abstract empathy for future generations.” The bioethicist Brian Earp dismisses the critique that becoming reliably moral threatens freedom, pointing out that Aristotle advocated practicing good behavior until it became natural virtue: “I see it as an expression of my free will, my desire and efforts to become a moral person. It only makes sense that I would try to automate some of those habits and tendencies so that I’m not constantly facing a moral crisis every time I walk down the street.” And the stakes are not academic. Parker Crutchfield, a medical ethicist at Western Michigan University, argued that “morality pills” — psychoactive substances boosting cooperation — may have been America’s best shot at getting through the coronavirus pandemic, a collective action problem that ordinary persuasion spectacularly failed to solve. Weighing pros, cons and the possible forms of exploitation, the outcome looks surprisingly positive for such interventions.
Of course, the dangers are real and should not be whispered. A technology that edits conviction is a tyrant’s dream; the history of psychiatry has its own gulags, and any ethomorphic medicine would need consent at its absolute center — the treatment must answer to the patient’s question, never to the state’s. But notice that the choice is not between modified and unmodified minds. That option expired. The choice is between modification by design — transparent, consented, clinically supervised — and modification by default, at the hands of advertisers, algorithms and demagogues who never asked.
There is a new horizon in medicine: as the complex system of consciousness gets deciphered by science, it becomes possible to reprogram our moral codes and convictions, unsettling what were once solid cornerstones of identity. Different modes of oppression — of women, of out-groups, of our own bodies — are sustained by beliefs that can reasonably be deemed pathological. Despite serious problems with belief-altering medication when it comes to autonomy, standardization of behavior and loss of identity, there are also powerful advantages that could allow individualism to be reconciled with global collective challenges: pandemics, climate, the plight of strangers we will never meet. Every previous technology of the self — education, religion, therapy, advertising — has answered the question “what do you want?” Only this one asks the deeper question.
There is a strong case for a desirable ethomorphic future, when humans are able to decide what they want to want. At that point, identity and morality will be fluidly determined by the previous moral state of a person — whatever that is.
by Bruno Decc
Picture Nick Victor
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SOURCES: The Guardian, “Manipulating morals: scientists target drugs that improve behaviour” (2011); P. Crutchfield, The Conversation (2020); L. Young et al., PNAS / MIT News (2010); T. Sharot et al., PNAS (2012); A. Brunet et al., Journal of Affective Disorders (2022); S. Zuboff, The Intercept (2019); S. Bradshaw & P. Howard, Oxford Internet Institute (2019); T. Diehl, B. Weeks & H. Gil de Zúñiga, New Media & Society (2016); J. Beck, Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond; K. Miyazono, Delusions as Harmful Malfunctioning Beliefs (2015); Oxfam, “Ten harmful beliefs that perpetuate violence against women and girls” (2018); J. M. Berger, Extremism (MIT Press, 2018); B. Earp in Quartz (2016); Slate, “Why we are so alarmed by the idea of a moral-enhancement pill”.
About me: I’m a Brazilian filmmaker and writer (director, producer and photographer on documentaries and TV focused on social-environmental issues since 2007; writing articles since 2018). I studied Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo.
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