Modern WisdomThe Ethics Of Using Drugs To Fall In & Out Of Love - Brian D. Earp | Modern Wisdom Podcast 268
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Should We Medicate Love? Ethics of Drugs, Desire, and Relationships
- Brian D. Earp and Chris Williamson explore how existing and emerging drugs can influence lust, attraction, attachment, and romantic love, and whether using them is ethically acceptable.
- They discuss a biopsychosocial model of love, the neurochemistry behind different stages of relationships, and how psychedelics and MDMA-assisted therapy may help couples break destructive patterns or rekindle connection.
- The conversation also examines “anti‑love” drugs for abusive relationships or uncontrollable desires, the politics of altering sexual orientation, and tensions between bioconservative and bioliberal views on enhancing human nature.
- Throughout, they wrestle with authenticity, agency, the risk of numbing meaningful suffering, and whether technology should reshape something as culturally sacred and personally defining as love.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasLove is a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon, not just ‘chemicals’ or pure feeling.
Earp frames love as arising from biology (evolved mating and bonding systems), subjective experience (how it feels from the inside), and social scripts (cultural stories and values that tell us what ‘counts’ as love).
Existing drugs already shape our romantic lives, often without being studied as ‘love drugs’.
Common medications like SSRIs, hormonal contraception, and even Viagra can blunt or enhance desire, attachment, and relationship satisfaction, yet trials rarely measure interpersonal outcomes such as “Do you still love your partner?”
Psychedelics and MDMA may enhance therapy by disrupting rigid patterns, not by ‘manufacturing’ love.
In controlled settings, these drugs can lower defenses, quiet ego, and allow people to revisit trauma or entrenched couple conflicts with openness, potentially rekindling appreciation for a partner or resolving long-standing issues.
Anti-love pharmacology could help some people align actions with higher-order values.
For those stuck in abusive attachments or with exclusively harmful desires (e.g., self-hating pedophiles), dampening certain drives via agents like SSRIs or androgen blockers might support leaving dangerous situations after other supports have failed—raising hard questions about autonomy, stigma, and victim-blaming.
Authenticity depends less on ‘drug-free’ states and more on reflective endorsement.
Earp suggests feelings are authentic when, on reflection, they fit a person’s considered values and life narrative; a drug that removes barriers to genuine emotion (e.g., PTSD MDMA therapy) can sometimes make people feel more like their ‘true selves’ than their unmedicated, traumatized state.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesLove sits at the interface of biological, subjective, psychological aspects and the wider social historical context.
— Brian D. Earp
Some people who have been in these trials say, ‘I look at my partner like when we first met again.’
— Brian D. Earp
If the effect of a drug was just uniformly to block people's ability to access genuine information from their emotional lives, that would be bad.
— Brian D. Earp
We're taking drugs already that have effects on our romantic neurochemistry. We just don't tend to think of them that way.
— Brian D. Earp
Feeling feelings is hard… but nerfing that, cutting off all of the sharp edges of life by deciding to tranquilize yourself away from bad feelings, to me seems like a cop-out.
— Chris Williamson
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