Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

5.5. 
Conclusions 
Evaluating criticisms of medicalization poses a difficulty because the empirical data 
needed to evaluate the empirical aspects of ethical arguments is often missing or 
murky. Both medicalization’s critics as well as supporters make empirically 
unsubstantiated claims and over-generalisations (see: Volkow and Li [2004] for 
often cited claims of the benefits of medicalization, some of which some go far 
beyond what is empirically justified). Moreover, the wider societal effects that 
worry many sociological critics are often difficult to evaluate with rigour.
The aim of this chapter was to question the implicit and often negative normative 
attitudes towards medicalization; to introduce the descriptive concept of 
medicalization as a process that, pending a moral case-by-case assessment, should 
be seen as normatively neutral; explore some common worries about the process of 
medicalization and to disentangle the various normally intermingled threads 
running through the arguments. I have proposed that the process of medicalization 
in its current incarnation is wider than that of increasing medical practitioners’ 
power, and happens in the context of scientific and technological developments – 
and increasingly within a market economy. The view of problems as ‘medical’ is 
not restricted to the medical profession, but can be understood as a framework used 
by medical practitioners, scientists, policy makers and the members of society at 

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large. The construction of problems as medical makes some approaches to dealing 
with them more likely than others and comes with benefits and perils. 
The current developments in the neuroscience of morality and the proposals of MB 
via direct emotion modulation stem from a scientific approach to morality which 
merges easily with the medical approach to problems. The prospect of, and 
proposals to pharmacologically modulate romantic and parental love and 
attachment, pro-sociality, the underpinnings of moral judgement and behaviour 
with oxytocin or serotonin, together with the medical diagnoses and assessment 
tools for conditions such as psychopathy, social anxiety and post-partum 
depression, paint a picture of an increased pace in the medicalization of sociality 
and morality. It is important that we attend both to the promise and the limitations 
of the medical-scientific view of the social and moral aspects of our lives, giving 
due weight, however, to both the advantages and disadvantages of medicalization, 
and attending to the way societal values shape the exact results of this process. 

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