Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

participation. This conclusion seems counterintuitive.
I do not think that the 
counterintuitiveness
of such a conclusion is a good reason to 
abandon doubts about MB altogether. In fact, it might be worth looking more 
closely at the influence of SSRIs on our moral action and reasoning. This is 
especially important given that millions take those drugs and that the effects of 
those drugs on moral agency and reasoning specifically were not evaluated to a 
great extent. The few conducted studies demonstrated a weak effect. Those results 
evoked considerable discussion (Crockett et al., 2010, for discussion see for 
example: Harris and Chan, 2010; Chan and Harris, 2011) but a more careful 
examination of the effects is needed to make strong conclusions about the effects of 
SSRIs on moral reasoning and action. When SSRIs are used to alleviate strong and 
debilitating depression, it is plausible to assume that that the overall obvious effects 
in relieving depression and the related increase in the ability for moral review and 
action outweighs the less noticeable and speculative impairments. This argument 
becomes weaker and weaker as the drugs are taken by people with lesser and lesser 
severity of mood disturbance. As a result, I think that there is merit in, and a need 
for, further investigating the effects of SSRIs on moral and social reasoning and 
action. 

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However, given the scarcity of current evidence I think that the claim that SSRIs 
substantially impair moral review is currently unwarranted. Even if SSRIs influence 
cognition as well as emotionality and general mood, people who take them seem 
generally able to reflect on their stance towards the effects both online and offline 
(Prince et al. 2009). There is no obvious reason why such review should selectively 
cease to apply to moral actions and pro-social inclinations, and those taking SSRIs 
at least appear as perfectly able to care about the world's great ills and engage in 
political debate as others.
However, the matter merits further discussion and empirical investigation, 
especially as we are talking about the impact on everyday moral agency. Everyday 
and face-to-face moral agency may be more affected by the emotional dispositions 
of the agent, and there are some reports indicating that some patients taking SSRIs 
experience emotional blunting. Opbroek at al. study suggests that a subpopulation 
of SSRIs users experience emotional side effects, including less ‘ability to cry, 
irritation, care about others' feelings, sadness, erotic dreaming, creativity, surprise, 
anger, expression of their feelings, worry over things or situations’ (Opbroek et al., 
2002, p. 147) More recently, Sansone and Sansone (2010) reviewed the evidence 
for what they called ‘SSRI-induced indifference,’ an SSRI-related state that 
includes both emotional blunting and behavioural apathy and Marazzati et al.’s 
(2014) research suggests that antidepressants significantly affected patients’ 
feelings of love towards their partners. 
Although there is a need to further investigate the morally-related effects of 
currently used biomedical emotion modulation, in the absence of further argument 
the objection that biomedical direct emotion modification impairs moral review 
does not apply to biomedical ways of influencing morality any more than it does to 
our moral life without such influence. As a result it cannot ground a decisive 
objection against the use of biomedical emotion modulation.