mockbee wrote:Yeah, does AS promote improving on human 'normal'?
Sure, child rapists and PTSD, etc. could benefit from chemical treatment, but if you are delving into improving upon 'general human state' via pharmaceuticals...yikes. The only plausible way forward I see with that in terms of normal human condition, is general cognitive behavioral therapy methods. Count me out if behavioral medications become standard issue.
I think that most people are stuck thinking about human nature according to traditional Christian conceptions (which are actually neo-Platonic and Stoic, and then later Cartesian, but never mind...) of freedom and responsibility. And I further think that this is one of two conflicting foundations of the modern Liberal tradition. And what's worse, I think that this standard way of thinking about ourselves is the CAUSE of a significant amount of harm in the world.
The objections to "medicalizing" human behaviour are rooted in this way of thinking about ourselves, and I think that this is noble but foolish at best, and harmful at worst. The way in which I think it's noble is that there is a worry about, say, overprescribing very strong personality altering drugs to children, or overlabeling and thus overdiagnosing symptoms which fall within the "normal" range of behaviours (as many suspect is the case with ADHD or Depression). These are genuine worries, but they are not genuine because these disorders don't really exist or because most people should be able to "fix themselves" without it, they are genuine worries because we shouldn't want lazy doctors or to inadvertently cause people to believe things about themselves that aren't true.
However, there is a huge underlying issue, derived from these "folk conceptions" of individual freedom that I mention above, that there is something called "Normal" in which humans, when they fall under that category (which they are supposed to by default) are specially endowed with faculties of free will and responsibility that allow them to escape from the natural causal order of things. The upshot is that we have legal categories which absolve certain individuals of responsibility: insanity, mental retardation; but we aren't sure what to do about borderline cases (e.g., what exactly is 'temporary insanity'? What about children tried as adults? What's going on there?)
Most people seem to believe that, even if there isn't an immaterial Cartesian 'soul', there's something called 'You' that has the responsibility and the freedom, and that any physico-chemical alteration of that must somehow be inherently "bad" or at least worrying. But this, I really honestly think, is simply false. Hopefully I've gestured enough in the direction of the reasons for my thinking this that you can sort of see what I mean... I don't want to overload this post with more information than is readable.
I'm heavily influenced, here, by Skinner's "Beyond Freedom & Dignity" and "Walden Two". The former is probably a quicker read, and the latter is just great.
