Should We Use Neuroenhancement Drugs to Improve Relationships?

A version of this article was printed in Humanism Ireland, July-August, Vol. 147 (2014) 

Love, it is fair to say, is probably the strongest emotion we can experience. It can come in many different forms:  love of one’s parent, sibling, or child. Though most people consider romantic relationships—which include companionship, sexual passion, intimacy, warmth, procreation and child-rearing—as the most significant component of one’s life; and it is probably the thing we find discussed more than anything else in novels, films and music.

Committed romantic relationships tend to occur within the institution of marriage—something that is ubiquitous to most, if not all, cultures.   Indeed, relationships today, which are primarily love-driven, are not just confined to marriages, as many couples sustain relationships outside of wedlock. Being in a love-driven relationship is considered important for most people, as it contributes to happiness—something we all wish for.  Not being in a love-driven relationship, on the other hand, can reduce the chances of happiness. In his text Marriage and Morals (1929), Bertrand Russell conveyed these sentiments on the significance of love: “it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.” We should, of course, try to not generalise too much either: people currently not in relationships (or indeed those with no intention of ever being in one) can also live a satisfying, happy, and meaningful life.

Marriages and other serious relationships, all the same, have become more unstable in recent years and have resulted in more separations and divorces. Rates of divorce soared in the 1960’s and 1970’s. According to the Office for National Statistics, 22% of marriages in England and Wales in 1972 had ended in divorce by the 15th wedding anniversary; twenty years later, that figure was 32% after the same time period.  The actual number of divorces in England and Wales in 2012 was 118,140. The Republic of Ireland, on the other hand, has one of the lowest divorce rates in Europe.  Nevertheless, during the second half of the 20th century, divorce for the first time within Western civilization replaced death as the most common cause of marriage breakup.

What are the possible causes of this trend? Various reasons have being given. One consieration is that following the women's liberation movement, which began in the late 1960s, women began to acquire more social autonomy, and it became more common for them to enter full-term employment. With more independence, divorce became more desirable—more sought-after, in many respects, than earlier generations that were more reliant on their spouses. Around the same time, as attitudes started to change, less stigma became attached to divorce. Some also blame the laissez-faire economic policies, induced by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan, led to more uncertainty of employment and family instability, thus resulting in more divorces at that time.

People also started to acknowledge an elevated conception of what marriage should be; it should not merely include sexual relations and procreation, but also express the intellectual desires, interests, and goals of each partner. If marriages don’t realise the elevated conception, divorce is now considered an appropriate recourse for those within unfulfilling relationships. Indeed, a 1985 study in the Journal of Marriage and the Family suggested that the most common reasons for divorce were unhappiness, incompatibility, emotional abuse, alcohol abuse, infidelity and physical abuse.  On top of that, due to birth-control technology, unwanted pregnancies have allowed us to isolate sex from reproduction, and condoms have also diminished the risks of STIs. In our current epoch, where we have easy and affordable access to long-distance transport, more urbanisation, and the near omnipresence of online social media, opportunistic love-affairs are less risky now than in the past.  

Finally, there are also plausible evolutionary reasons why relationships end. Natural selection did not plan our mating strategies to be in accordance with 21st century relationship ideals in mind. The human animal is the product of natural selection; we are survival machines designed to promote the survival and replication of our genes, not our marital success or individual well-being. In other words, evolution can stand in the way of our marital happiness, by giving different reproductive goals to men and women and through evolving relationship arrangements that promotes fitness over well-being. As Richard Dawkins pointed out in The Selfish Gene (1976), our genes are indifferent to us—they merely use our bodies as vehicles for their replication.  

For this reason, there seems to be some tension between our biological reproductive drives and our relationships as value ideals. Most modern relationships assume monogamy and lasting fidelity, whilst extramarital sex is usually considered a serious moral shortcoming. One possible solution might be to relax the ideal of sexual exclusivity. This could well be something future generations will embrace, but it is unlikely to be something the majority of existing couples will adopt anytime soon. Indeed, there are some good evolutionary reasons why we should be sceptical (or at least cautious) of this suggestion. Since jealousy seems to be something so deeply ingrained in our nature, it is unlikely most couples would be able to entirely avoid this strong emotion. At the same time, our modern sexual mores would seem unimaginable to those living over a century ago, so perhaps future generations will also regard sexual exclusive relationships as archaic. Couples, howbeit, should at least be aware that feelings of jealousy could well be more difficult to remove and perhaps more damaging of relationships than we might assume.

  

It seems, then, at least for the moment anyway, we are only left with the option of aspiring to modern-day relationship ideals, in spite of acknowledging the problems of maintaining lasting relationships. One novel solution, however, was proposed by Oxford ethicists Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg who consider the possibilities of biological manipulating our different love systems—lust, attraction and attachment. First writing in the journal Neuroethics in 2008, they remind us that love portions have a long history, though this was probably “based on symbolism and wishful thinking,” they say. But “today the biological underpinnings of love are beginning to be elucidated, enabling science-based interventions into amour’s domain.” Perhaps we could create ‘love drugs’, they suggest, that could enhance intimacy between couples—for instance, in order to recreate the glorious fulfilment and excitement that rapture the early years that couples usually spend together. They conclude that “[w]e should use our growing knowledge of the neuroscience of love to enhance the quality of love by biological manipulation.”

Someone might say we shouldn't waste our time assessing the possibility of using something to enhance our relationships that may not actually arise, and focus instead on actual sociological and environmental reasons why relationships fail. The possibility of designing love drugs, at the moment, is not merely speculative though. Granted, the capacity to do this kind of scrupulous engineering is beyond the ability of present-day neuroscience, but there is growing research developing such prospects. As Savulescu and Sandberg outline below:

“In the near future, as our understanding of the neuroscience of love grows, there will be more opportunities to modify lust, attraction and attachment. We may be able to modify these factors either by blockers or enhancers to achieve a variety of valued outcomes: greater attractiveness to others, initiation of relationships, prevention or termination of relationships and improvement in the quality of relationships, for personal, couple-centered, child-centered or social reasons.”

They make a number of strong arguments in favour of the biological enhancement of love. Firstly, there’s no morally significant difference between relationship therapy, a massage, a glass of wine, or indeed viewing a romantic movie together. In terms of consistency, they all seem to function at a basic biological level to release substances like oxytocin and dopamine. In this way, it shouldn't really matter which way enhancement was precisely achieved.  Secondly, western societies, by and large, value personal freedom and this ought to include human relationships. That is to say, people should be free to steer their relationships, assuming it isn't harming anyone, in ways which best suit them.

Thirdly, healthy relationships promote well-being and have a strong positive impact on happiness. Among the separated and divorced, not surprisingly, unhappiness and depression are more common. Separation and divorce can also be upsetting, stressful and harmful for children and other family members. Couples, therefore, have an obligation to preserve their relationships for the sake of their own well-being, their children, extended family and perhaps society at large. In short, love drugs may help couples better synthesise their biological instincts with their relationship values. Finally, love drugs should not only appeal to progressives (who generally tend to be more open to the idea of technologies for human enhancement), but conservatives too. Enhancing the stability of marriage and family ties are some of the primary objectives of many conservatives, so, therefore, it would be surprising to see many of them opposing something like this that would serve these values.  

Of course drugs like these should only be permissible on the condition there aren't any serious side effects and where users would not become addicted. There’s also the possibility of one partner coercing the other into taking the love drugs. This is more likely to happen in bad or abusive relationships, but not exclusively so either. There’s also the threat of someone using them to forcefully initiate a love affair, by taking advantage of another person, say, through spiking her drink. These examples, of course, would all be morally indefensible, but if we accept the notion that all agents taking love drugs are fully autonomous in deciding how their relationship will succeed, and with a good understanding of the outcome, then it seems more difficult to find a reason to say using love drugs are morally objectionable.

One objection variously expressed is that love drugs would render love inauthentic. You would only be attracted to the other person, it is sometimes said, because of the facilitated chemical enhancement, but this isn’t ‘true love’.  Savulescu and Sandberg argue that they aren't endorsing any substance that would be analogous to soma—a fictional hallucinogenic remedy from Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932)—which would work like some kind of magical hedonistic portion. In fact, they seem to be invoking something different: love enhancement drugs, they maintain, could be used by couples who are already dedicated to each other and want to build and develop existing bonds. In fact, nobody would say a couple that enhances their relationship by regularly watching romantic movies together, along with a few glasses of wine, is not authentic. By themselves, love enhancements are unlikely to strengthen existing relationships without any additional effort. Say it were possible to create love drugs that were much more powerful, then perhaps there is a stronger case to resist them, that is, say, if they were powerful enough to fundamentally alter a person's identity, to the extent of her being a different person. But this is not what Savulescu and Sandberg seem to be proposing here.

Another possible objection would be to focus on altering the environmental and sociological causes of relationship break-up, instead on altering humans. In short: “change society, not people.” Savulescu and Sandberg are somewhat sympathetic to this idea. They acknowledge we should focus on relationship therapy, psychotherapy and other social interventions ahead of biological ones, since they are likely to be more successful and probably safer. At the same time, this consideration doesn’t rule out the possibility of love drugs either, they declare, as they could be more effective for particular things. They say “there may be many inherent biological obstacles to a good and enduring marriage” that conventional interventions cannot fully care for.

Overall, Savulescu and Sandberg’s argument, I must say, sounds persuasive.  If we have the capacity to enhanced human relationships with love drugs, thus advancing the well-being and happiness of individuals (and assuming it can be fulfilled at an appropriate cost), these are certainly fruitful benefits. Meanwhile, we should also consider some of the political and economic forces that can have an influence on public health policy and on drug research and administration—something Savulescu and Sandberg seem to mainly bypass. We might, for example, worry that therapists would start to over-prescribe love drugs at the expense of more time consuming psychotherapy. Further, we should not assume that the emergence of love enhancement drugs will fully attain its original expectation, bearing in mind that scientists often overestimate the prospects of their research; the expectations, in brief, may only be partially reached.  

Arguably, this is what’s happening, at the moment, with anti-depressants. The psychologist Jonathan Rottenberg, author of the newly published The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic (2014), claims that antidepressants on the market today are no more effective as those developed nearly 60 years ago, and that two-thirds of those who are treated with them “continue to be burdened with depressive symptoms.”  To be sure, these discussed points are not reasons to necessarily resist the prospect of pharmacological love drugs—as I maintain, they may help impede separation, divorce and family instability.  As the case may be, we should proceed towards its aspired expectations with prudence.  All the same, and in presupposing its actual feasibility, we should generally welcome their future emergence.