Saturday, December 31, 2016

Here Comes The SOMA!



Having lost the election to other (saner) people's free-will choices, the fearful, huddling and benighted groupthink gangster left is doubling down on stupid, by trying to legislate morality - a concept they clearly refuse to understand - and enforce it on all other people by way of thought-controlling medications!

In today's Ottawa Citizen, (Saturday December 31, 2016, Pp#NP1, NP3) the following article was right next to this one, which is no less all about regurgitating the classical Marxist "Historical Predeterminism" victim alibi to excuse their crimes:

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/welcome-to-the-fourth-turning-the-dramatic-1997-doomsday-prophesy-that-is-coming-true-now

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/1231-moral

What if you could take a pill for a better, more moral, you? Neuroethicists ponder the panacea


What if all it took to make you a better human was a little pill?

Go vegan. Oppose Trump. Drink less. Exercise more. Have more houseplants.

It’s the season of self-delusion with Twitter users pledging resolutions they’ll make and, statistics tell us, promptly break. But what if we could be better people with drugs — more moral mortals by taking a pill?

Neuroethicists and other thinkers are increasingly absorbed by the idea of “moral enhancement” through pharmaceuticals, implanted brain electrodes or other biomedical means.

MAURICIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images
MAURICIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images 
A human brain is displayed inside a glass box in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Leading proponents argue advances in cognitive neuroscience suggest morally desirable capacities may, at least in part, be neurologically&-based and therefore amenable to tinkering.

Some envision a day when we could use drugs that act directly on the brain to dial down aggression and other “anti-social” sentiments and dial up “pro-social” ones like compassion and trust.

Whether that’s a good thing or bad is another question.

Oxford University philosophers Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson have argued that humans now have “the means of wiping out life on earth” and that moral bioenhancement (or “MB”) may be our only hope for averting wide-scale terrorism, climate change and all the other rot in the world. Writing in the journal Neuroethics, they say the capacity for sympathy, in particular, “appears to be biologically based,” and that women tend to be more sympathetic than men, suggesting “that MB could consist in making men in general more like women in general,” at least with regards to sympathy.

They and others argue that, because the moral character of many people is less than ideal, what’s not to love about this new medical approach?

Critics such as John Harris, author of How to be Good, say using chemicals to make humans “better” animals could undermine our “moral freedom.”

Artificially enhancing people to always “be good” would rob them of their free will to make — and learn from — mistakes, they argue.

Then there are the questions of what exactly does it mean to be moral, and who gets to decide?

For now, “the reality is that there is not much out there that allows us to do these sorts of things,” said Queen’s University bioethicist Udo Schuklenk. “Look at the miserable failure that is modern
psychiatry. We just don’t really understand how the brain works,” he added.

Fotolia

FotoliaEthicists warn that a pill to make people more "moral" could pave the way to a world where every bad act begets chemical treatment, voluntary or not.

“But it’s also true they’re making progress in leaps and bounds, and I have personally no doubt that these kinds of drugs will eventually exist,” Schuklenk added

In fact, they may already.

In their 2014 paper, “Are you Morally Modified?” Neil Levy and colleagues cite three widely prescribed drugs that may, unbeknownst to the people taking them, alter their moral decision making and behaviour: propranolol for high blood pressure; the antidepressants known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors); and drugs that affect the release or metabolism of oxytocin, the love and bonding hormone.

One 2013 study involving 40 healthy volunteers found propranolol made men and women more likely to judge harmful actions as morally unacceptable (though only in scenarios involving “up-close-and-personal” harms). The drug also appeared to increase aversion to harming others.

SSRIs, meanwhile, seem to make people more cooperative, less critical of others and more sensitive to other people’s pain.

Oxytocin appears to make people more trusting. Three years ago, an Australian team reported that couples who took a hit of oxytocin through a nasal spray before starting couple’s therapy recalled memories with more emotion and detail and seemed more open to the other partner’s perspective.
The world will be happier; we’ll probably all be happier.
But it isn’t all pretty. A 2014 study by Princeton University researchers found people given oxytocin were more likely to engage in “group-serving dishonesty.” Compared with volunteers receiving placebo, they lied more and lied faster to benefit their groups.

Yep! Sounds like a literal prescription for creating a world full of ever-more leftards, to me!

“Five or 10 years ago the evidence seemed to suggest oxytocin was just this universally good thing — that if we just dosed everybody up with oxytocin they’d all be walking around like love puddles,” said James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Willington, CT.

Still, we do have drugs such as those used to treat attention deficit disorder — a behaviour that would have been classified as some kind of moral failing in the past, Hughes said.
We could end up in a world where every kind of political or moral deviance is subject to some kind of mandatory treatment.
“We no longer consider ADHD a moral failing because we’ve medicalized that moral failing. And that is part of what moral enhancement is about — to recognize the natural diversity of brains, and that some of us are just born with a poor roll of the dice that doesn’t give us enough self-control, executive function or capacity for compassion or moral cognition.”

Brains come in a bell curve of moral capacities, he argued, “and the folks who are on the lower end of that bell curve can be moved up to the middle and perhaps we can all be moved up towards the top.”

The result? “The world will be happier; we’ll probably all be happier,” Hughes said.

The downside? “We could end up in a world where every kind of political or moral deviance is subject to some kind of mandatory treatment,” he said.

“I think there is such a thing as pathological xenophobia, pathological racism. But do I want to see every racist in the United State rounded up and put in a re-education camp? I don’t think so,” he said.

“We do have to figure out where these lines get drawn.”

No one is suggesting morality drugs be added to the drinking water like fluoride — for now anyway. It would be up to the individual to voluntarily pursue moral neuroenhancers — assuming they worked.

But what does it mean to become morally better? “Morality is like the snitch in (Harry Potter’s) Quidditch: it’s elusive, very hard to pinpoint or catch,” Saskia Verkiel, of Georgia State University’s Neuroscience Institute, writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics blog. “You think you have it, and then you don’t.”

An extreme case would be psychopaths. “They’re so far off out of the norm that maybe bringing them back to the norm would be generally understood to be advantageous,” Brian Earp, associate director of the Yale-Hastings program in ethics and health policy at Yale University, said in an interview.
More broadly speaking, the drugs could be used to augment the things people already pursue to try to better themselves, Earp said. “They go to church, they go on spiritual retreat, they speak with their friends about moral issues.” That’s why he and his colleagues have built their arguments around the notion of voluntary moral self-enhancement. There’s not going to be a pill that makes us more moral, he said. “But you might take a pill that makes you more susceptible to, or find more compelling the sorts of moral lessons you’re already engaged in.”

Most people fall short of their own view of what would be morally acceptable behaviour, he added. Personally, he thinks it’s wrong to eat meat, but he does sometimes.  “I act against my own better judgement because of a weakness of will. If there was some pill I could take to help me with that, I would be behaving in accordance with my own better judgment.”

Schuklenk, of Queen’s, questioned whether we should be investing in research and development of moral modulators at all.  “Your gut response would be, well this would be a pleasant place to be,” he said. “But what if the country next to us did the exact opposite, and invested in drugs that made their compatriots more aggressive, more competitive?”

Most importantly, “how do we decide what constitutes a moral deficiency? Who should be allowed to make these decisions about what is good and what is bad?”

As was previously presented to an unsuspecting public by their masters at the New York Crimes:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/are-we-ready-for-a-morality-pill/?_r=01

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Leftists fear other people's free-will choices. ALL criminal gangsters (leftists, muslims) want the POWER to forcibly CONTROL all other people, (whom they fear), through fear, simply because they can not trust them selves. As fear-fearing phobophobes, they are scared of others' fears, and so always accuse them of being afraid (as if being afraid or a phobe were some sort of thought-crime)!

Here's a short list of THEIR most prominent common phobias:

Racist, (melanin-o-phobe; or, more accurately, their own fear of those too-smart, scary white people who lack it) Sexist, (femophobe) Homophobic, Xenophobic, Islamophobic, (aka Crime-o-phobic) - you name it.

Yet the only real thought crime is in refusing to think at all, because one is scared of the pain of fearful thought!

In one word, what they fear the most is "Freedom!" In stead, they prefer the safe surety and security of "inevitable" slavery! They are cowardly, suicidal masochists at heart - always seeking to control their own fears, BY causing those very same, worst-case scenario problems which cause the pains they fear the most!

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