D12
爱情药丸：浪漫真的可以被作为处方药被开出吗？
卫报
For some time, it has been widespread medical practice to treat a range of psychological conditions, which affect levels of serotonin in the brain. But there is one mental category that isn’t considered appropriate for any kind of biomedical intervention: love. Millions of words have been spilled in trying to describe the feeling, but not many have been devoted to the biochemical processes that lie behind it.
In their new book, Love Is the Drug, Oxford ethicists Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu point out that this neglected aspect of love is just as important as its social or psychological structures.
While we have largely come to accept that drugs that affect the brain have a part to play in treating psychological illnesses, the idea that the same approach could apply to love goes against the grain. We think of love as natural and healthy and therefore not something that is in need of “biomedical enhancement”.
The authors, however, argue that it’s time to change our attitudes. “If it becomes possible to safely target the underlying neurochemistry that supports romantic attachment, using drugs or other brain-level technologies,” they write, “then there is reason to think this could help some people who really need it.”
The book states that the “biological underpinnings of romantic love are being revealed” and that the prospect of real love drugs is upon us. However, if and when the aforementioned biological underpinnings are revealed, and we are able to regulate emotions and behavior through biomedical supplements, does that suggest we will become somehow less autonomous and, consequently, more like a programmable machine?
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