What shall we do about all these people running around without masks on? Ah! One ethics expert has the solution. He claims we should drug them into submission.
My research in bioethics focuses on questions like how to induce those who are non-cooperative to get on board with doing what’s best for the public good.
Okay. So far, so good. There are lots of ways to induce non-cooperative people to change their behavior. You can try to persuade them. You can fine them. You can even use subtle psychological tricks, like marketers regularly do.
For example, hotels try to find ways to get more people to participate in their “save the earth, use a dirty towel” efforts. They experiment with different messaging, and find that some messages work better than others. For some odd reason, messages that compare the performance of the floor you’re on to the rest of the hospital seem to work. Why “go team 2nd floor” works is pretty doggone weird, but it does, and it doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, so … go for it, I say. (Although I always use the clean towel myself. To heck with the planet. Last time I looked, it had plenty of water.)
To me, it seems the problem of coronavirus defectors could be solved by moral enhancement: like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behavior. Could a psychoactive pill be the solution to the pandemic?
I see. So when you check in to a hotel, they give you shot to make you more likely to use yesterday’s towel.
I believe society may be better off, both in the short term as well as the long, by boosting not the body’s ability to fight off disease but the brain’s ability to cooperate with others.
We can engineer a better man through chemistry!
Sounds like “the pax” from Firefly, and I’m with Mal Reynolds on that front. “I don’t hold to that.”