Bioethics and PMS

I have been ripping apart the first chapter of the dissertation. I'm essentially rewriting it from the ground up, which means I'm also revisiting many of my old sources. Perhaps because I'm finding a congruence between personal experience and academic reading, I've found the following two passages about pharmacological enhancement from Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness by the President's Council on Bioethics particularly interesting today:

"This enhanced ability [in drugs like Ritalin] to make children conform to conventional standards could also diminish our openness to the diversity of human temperaments. As we will find with other biotechnologies with a potential use beyond therapy, behavior-modifying drugs offer us an unprecedented power to enforce our standards of normality" (103).

and

"...behavior-modifying drugs might not only deprive that child of an essential part of this [socialization] education. They might also encourage him to change his self-understanding, by coming to look upon himself as governed by chemical impulses and not by moral decisions grounded in some sense of what is right and appropriate... technologies aside, merely regarding ourselves and our activities in largely genetic or neurochemical terms may diminish our sense of ourselves as moral actors faced with genuine choices and options in life" (106).

While this isn't the first time* I've read an argument that Ritalin is tamping down our children's abilities to experience a full range of emotions, I'm interested in the connection to morality in the second half. And my first thought is that the writer must be a man if he can't see that it is possible to understand the influence of brain chemistry on emotion while AT THE SAME TIME understanding that it is not the only force controlling behavior.

Any woman with PMS knows what brain chemistry is capable of doing to her emotional stability. But most women learn to control those impulses. There are times of the month where I want to hurl the salt shaker across the table at someone just for talking to me. But I don't. Because I know *I* don't really want to do that, it's just the whacked out neurochemicals that make me feel that way.

In fact, I think that experiencing such forces makes it easier to see how one can choose to entertain emotions or choose not to let them dictate your behavior.

That's not to say it's easy! Don't ask my parents about hurling things - they have some embarassing stories to tell from when I was younger! But without having to overcome those urges and not allow them to dictate behavior, you do become more aware that you do not have to be blown about by the turbulence of neurochemistry.

This is also why I get so angered at men who have assumed that as an angry woman, I'm just experiencing PMS. For me at least, it takes immense amounts of self control at times to not express the emotions I'm feeling, so assuming that I give in to them is insulting. It of course also assumes that they haven't done something to warrant being angry at, which is a whole other story!

This post isn't really about men and women or PMS, but I did find it interesting that the kinds of arguments against using pharmacology as a technology of enhancement for children actually seems to be about more than just children and individual parents' choices about whether to use those enhancements or not. It seems the more we imagine how to get to the "better" posthuman, the more difficult it is to ascertain what we mean by "better."

*The first time I came across the argument, it was actually that Ritalin makes little boys sit still and calm down, while Prozac makes grown women perk up, which pushes both groups towards a homogenous middle. Interesting thought.