Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other
John Adams, October 11, 1798
At The Conversation Parker Crutchfield argues for “morality pills”:
Economists use public goods games to measure how people behave in various scenarios to lower collective risks such as from climate change or a pandemic and to prevent the loss of public and private goods.
The evidence from these experiments is no cause for optimism. Usually everyone loses because people won’t cooperate. This research suggests it’s not surprising people aren’t wearing masks or social distancing – lots of people defect from groups when facing a collective risk. By the same token, I’d expect that, as a group, we will fail at addressing the collective risk of COVID-19, because groups usually fail. For more than 150,000 Americans so far, this has meant losing everything there is to lose.
continuing
It seems that the U.S. is not currently equipped to cooperatively lower the risk confronting us. Many are instead pinning their hopes on the rapid development and distribution of an enhancement to the immune system – a vaccine.
But I believe society may be better off, both in the short term as well as the long, by boosting not the body’s ability to fight off disease but the brain’s ability to cooperate with others. What if researchers developed and delivered a moral enhancer rather than an immunity enhancer?
Moral enhancement is the use of substances to make you more moral. The psychoactive substances act on your ability to reason about what the right thing to do is, or your ability to be empathetic or altruistic or cooperative.
For example, oxytocin, the chemical that, among other things, can induce labor or increase the bond between mother and child, may cause a person to be more empathetic and altruistic, more giving and generous. The same goes for psilocybin, the active component of “magic mushrooms.†These substances have been shown to lower aggressive behavior in those with antisocial personality disorder and to improve the ability of sociopaths to recognize emotion in others.
Unfortunately, as he points out, oxytocin also tends to make people more racist or, as he puts it “ethnocentric”. The question I would ask is who decides what constitutes moral behavior? IMO his proposal is out of the question on First and Fourth Amendment grounds.
This seems to fall in the I want a pony category. Of course you do, but you arent getting one. What would be a bit more interesting is why some other countries can do this and we cant.
Steve
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”
I think that you can make a case that this may also be true for capitalism.
Steve
So Crutchfield thinks it’s a good idea to drug the people that he can’t convince.
Problems he presents, such as coronavirus or the receding ice age affect different people differently.
He wants collective solutions. That they even exist outside of the collectivist mind is a fantasy.
But he’s got an audience and a future selling his medicated society to the authoritarian regimes polluting the planet.
Just not here.
Crutchfield is a totalitarian monster of the Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Hitler ilk. But he is in good company: Paul and Anne Ehrlich, John Holdren, Van B.. Weigel. All want to use brute force to coerce the behaviors they favor.
First comes the Revolution, then the Terror and the guillotine, and it is the Revolutionaries who get it in the neck.
“I think that you can make a case that this may also be true for capitalism.”
Personally, I’ve never seen anyone make that assertion. In fact, just the opposite; it is assumed that people will pursue their own self interests and the resulting tug of war that ensues will yield the best, if not perfect, result. At least in a nation of laws and minimized political leverage.
Further, the notion that an alternative system such as socialism or communism would somehow magically be populated by morally superior people is absurd on its face and not consistent with historical empirical results.
Then this is a good place to drop this in:
https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/
clearly written and so true.
“Personally, I’ve never seen anyone make that assertion. ”
Challenge yourself and read some ethics. Anyway a moral and religious person is more likely to actually compete with others and then we end up with that best result. Those without morals and ethics are more likely to find ways to avoid competition through colluding (did you ever actually read any Adam Smith?), using the government or illegal/fraudulent means.
Beyond that, we see that a large number of our modern CEOs now come from wealthier families. They grew up in the gated communities, on to Harvard/Yale/Princeton and really have very little in common with most of us. Its a lot easier to screw your own company or screw your community if you just don’t have attachments to them. Just imagine if the entire business world functioned with the same morality of the finance sector.
Steve
What I think is true is that a market system promises an optimal allocation of resources but not that nobody will starve to death or suffer want. Preventing that in the context of a market system requires a merciful populace, either willing to settle for less than optimal allocation of resources or willing to provide for the needy themselves. That can’t be legislated or coerced.
“What I think is true is that a market system promises an optimal allocation of resources ”
Make that an ideal market system. The further it deviates from the ideal ie more crony capitalism, more fraud, more using the government to eliminate competition, the worse that allocation.
Steve
Exactly. That’s why I say “promises”.
However, it’s not just unfair anti-competitiveness that reduces competition. So do all government-granted monopolies including intellectual property, state licensing, zoning, certificates of need, and many bank regulations. Every tax expenditure is, in effect, a government-granted subsidy on certain behaviors which reduces competition.