Smart Drugs

Who sets the task that require us to do more than we are naturally capable of doing and ought we to accommodate them?

Children can be persuaded to take drugs that can help them meet performance targets if we show disappointment with the fact that they cannot complete a task. And parents can be persuaded to give enhancing drugs to their children if we tell the parents that their child is ill becaue it can't complete a task. This is what is happening today.

This is why it is important to undermine a person's autonomy and happiness of self if we want to promote performance enhancing drugs. The "fallen-enhanced" are the soldiers of the drug enhancement brigade. Only if people have a terminal sense of social failure and personal misery can they be expected to want to accomplish tasks that are naturally beyond them. Once they are infected with this angst of spirit then the idea of amelioration in the form of drugs is easily sold.

Yet it is strange that while we subject children to drugs that make them reach performance targets on the grounds that it makes them happy, no such ethical due is given to children who just take drugs to be happy. The only difference is that in the former we claim a cure is being engineered, or, we are offering them mature choices. The choice is Hobson's - rejection or the submission of autonomy to someone else's values.