Neurocosmetology

by John Perry

Progress in neuroscience may soon make possible an age of
neurocosmetology: the use of drugs to let people affect the way their
brains work, so as to make them more effective, more attractive, and
more like their "cognitive ideal."  A world where all the women are
beautiful and all the men handsome might be bearable if boring. But
would a society full of type-A's work at all?  Can it be rational to
choose to change in ways that may change who you are?  Should there be
moral or legal prohibitions against healthy people messing with their
own brain chemistry?

 

Our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Amy Standen, asked,

"Is neurocosmetology a word?  The only two entries for it on
Google are from Philosophy Talk."

Well, that suggests a topic for another day, when does something
become a word?  We'd have to ask Geoff Nunberg for his opinion.

I first heard this particular candidate for wordhood used by tomorrow's
guest, Sam Barondes, at conference last Fall on neuroscience,
bioethics and personal identity sponsored by Johns Hopkins' Pheobe
Berman Bioethics Institute. Philosophers and neuroscientists talked
about a few case studies which involved Alzheimer's patients, steroid
addiction, frontotemporal dementia, and severe apathy, and the
questions the diminished rationality such cases involved raised
problems about personal identity. 

Barondes a UCSF neurogeneticist and the author of Molecules and
Medical Illness,  Mood Genes, and Better than Prozac, was a panelist
with lot of interesting things to say.  In the free-wheeling
discussion at the end, he and Michael Gazzaniga, another panelist,
talked about the coming possibilities of neurocosmetology.
Gazzaniga, as I remember, was worried that there was sort of a wisdom
of nature, that had led to such things as the distribution of type-A
and type-B personalities across populations.  What if everyone wanted
to be a type-A?  What would a world with all type-A's be like?
Cosmetic surgery is now pretty commonplace.  Maybe someday men my age
will be without wrinkles.  Wierd, but no great threat to the
functioning of society, I suppose. But a world with only type-A's?
Somewhat frightening.  Barondes, as I remember, was a bit more
sanguine.  It seemed to me a topic that had some interesting
philosophical angles.  Here are some that come to mind:

• Some philosophers make a distinction between first-order freedom, which means
  being able to base your action on your own desires, and higher-order
  freedom, which means actually having responsibility for the desires
  that motivate you. But of course these choices would themselves be
  based on desires about what sort of desires one wants to have.  Is
  neurocosmetology then basically an extension of human freedom, giving
  us the ability to choose not just what to do, but what kind of person
  to be?

• Our ordinary repertoire for dealing with each other involves such
  concepts as character traits and personality. We tend to assume that
  once one has reached adulthood, if not before, certain personality
  and character traits have become deep-seated.  We use these to form
  our expectations about what others will do.  We don't trust dishonest
  people.  We don't want absent minded careless people to be airline
  pilots. The way we treat such personality and character traits is not
  unlike the way we treat traits of appearance.  We don't rule out
  change, but we expect it to be gradual, except as a result of
  physical or emotional trauma. Will neurocosmetology undermine these
  expectations, and the ways we deal with one another, and perhaps our
  very concept of a person?

• Would it be such a bad thing if our very concept of a person was
  undermined?  Derek Parfit argues some years ago that our ordinary conception of
  personal identity locks us into a sort of dangerous fiction.  Better
  to think of people as processes various temporally close parts of
  which can be expected to have similar desires, goals, beliefs, and
  consciousnesses linked by memory, but longer stretches of which may
  be as unlike one another as stetches drawn from completely separate
  lives.
• Lots of things we do when we are young lock us into things we may not
  want when we are old: tatoos, debts, professions, educational
  opportunities taken and not taken. Neurocosmetology may radically
  increase such opportunities for the young to screw up the lives of
  the old --- or, by careful choices, to improve them.  Is there any
  new principle involved when one is choosing the basic parameters of
  one's personality?
• Employers now sometimes feel the need to make sure that people don't
  use certain sorts of drugs.  Will there be pressure for people to
  avail themselves of neurocosmetology.  Will "big-league" executive
  take the neurocosmetological equivalents of steroids, so they can be
  super type-A's. 

These are some of the issues we may be to tomorrow, or we may
not. You may have a more interesting angle.  Call or email.  We don't
usually get to all the calls, or read all of the emails, for lack of
time.  But we appreciate them all.