A rapidly growing number of Americans are rebelling against governments overreaching their authority by shutting down churches, issuing unneeded mask protocols and unwarranted business lockdowns, More and more people are defying these orders, going to court to get them overturned or organizing recall elections against the officials who issue these dictatorial decrees.
Turns out, there are a number of "experts" who would put an end to that, and we wouldn't even know.
In an article so shocking it at first reads like satire, an ethics professor at Western Michigan University advocated for the promotion of psychoactive “morality pills” in order to alter the behavior of those skeptical of lockdown regulations, suggesting that such drugs could be made compulsory or administered secretly via the water supply.
The article was published last week in The Conversation, a news site focusing on content “sourced from the academic and research community” and supported by universities from around the world. The Conversation lists a number of U.K. universities as its “founding partners.”
In the article, Parker Crutchfield of WMU's School of Medicine, argues that “when someone chooses not to follow public health guidelines around the coronavirus, they’re defecting from the public good” and that such “defectors” require chemical “moral enhancement” substances to help them “reason about what the right thing to do is.”
“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?” Crutchfield writes.
“It’s a far-out proposal that’s bound to be controversial,” he concedes, but nevertheless is one Crutchfield believes “is worth at least considering, given the importance of social cooperation in the struggle to get COVID-19 under control.”
Crutchfield says that one challenge in implementing such a system is that “the defectors [emphasis added] who need moral enhancement are also the least likely to sign up for it.”
Western Michigan University School of Medicine ethicist Parker Crutchfield advocates “slipping the public a Mickey” in the form of covertly administered medications to make them “more moral” in following COVID mandates. (Photo: ACV Reports)
“As some have argued, a solution would be to make moral enhancement compulsory or administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply. These actions require weighing other values,” he writes.
The chemicals mentioned by Crutchfield are oxytocin, a natural hormone produced in the brain, and psilocybin, the active psychedelic ingredient found in illegal so-called “magic mushrooms.” Crutchfield rightly claims these ingredients “may cause a person to be more empathetic and altruistic, more giving and generous.”
The irony of this proposal is that Crutchfield’s professional research is in bioethics. Both the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association consider such “covert administration" of any drug, vitamin or compound highly unethical.
While Crutchfield writes that his work “focuses on questions like how to induce those who are noncooperative to get on board with doing what’s best for the public good," simply suggesting chemical solutions to eliminate noncompliance puts him in direct conflict with the ethics of the organizations that will eventually license his student.
Twitter users appalled by Crutchfield's article did their own research on his academic history, and posted a 2019 paper of his entitled “Compulsory moral bioenhancement should be covert.”
In at least one instance Twitter subsequently placed the link behind a warning sign, saying “The following media includes potentially sensitive content.”
The abstract for that paper reads:
Some theorists argue that moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory. I take this argument one step further, arguing that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration ought to be covert rather than overt. This is to say that it is morally preferable for compulsory moral bioenhancement to be administered without the recipients knowing that they are receiving the enhancement. My argument for this is that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration is a matter of public health, and for this reason should be governed by public health ethics. I argue that the covert administration of a compulsory moral bioenhancement program better conforms to public health ethics than does an overt compulsory program. In particular, a covert compulsory program promotes values such as liberty, utility, equality, and autonomy better than an overt program does. Thus, a covert compulsory moral bioenhancement program is morally preferable to an overt moral bioenhancement program.
No stranger to biomedical controversy, Crutchfield criticized residents of the state who forced an end to scheduled mosquito spraying by aircraft last year. (Photo: Michigan Live)
A number of Crutchfield’s articles can be found on the U.S. government’s PubMed.gov site.
One is titled “It is better to be ignorant of our moral enhancement: A reply to Zambrano.” The abstract for that paper reads:
In a recent issue of Bioethics, I argued that compulsory moral bioenhancement should be administered covertly. Alexander Zambrano has criticized this argument on two fronts. First, contrary to my claim, Zambrano claims that the prevention of ultimate harm by covert moral bioenhancement fails to meet conditions for permissible liberty-restricting public health interventions. Second, contrary to my claim, Zambrano claims that covert moral bioenhancement undermines autonomy to a greater degree than does overt moral bioenhancement. In this paper, I rebut both of these arguments, then finish by noting important avenues of research that Zambrano's arguments motivate.
"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, written in 1931, is probably this "ethicist's" favorite book. If Crutchfield were to be successful in the implementation of his heinous concepts, he would help the novel arrive in the future it predicted.
ACV Reports has emailed Crutchfield to ask him whether he believes that the covert administration of psychoactive “morally enhancing” chemicals is in keeping, not only with physical and mental health ethics, but more so with the U.S. Constitution. Thus far, no response has been received.
In Melbourne, Australia, the political authorities have adopted much simpler and overt methods for ensuring the public complies with government lockdown regulations, with the police given the power to enter private homes without a warrant or permission to carry out “spot checks.”
Singer-songwriter Cassie Koutras contacted American Conservative Voice on it's Facebook page a week ago to report the tactics are "gestapo-like." The highly restrictive laws — only one person in the supermarket at a time, only one hour of outdoor exercise per person per week, all businesses and churches close, papers required for travel, even to the hospital — have turned Victoria into a communist landscape.
The Victoria Police Commissioner Shane Patton unapologetically explained that officers have in some instances been smashing car windows due to people inside the cars not cooperating with them or following the newly imposed health guidelines.
Whether the tactics are those of Crutchfield or those of Patton, it is becoming clear that the power given state and local authorities around the world in reaction to the COVID virus is not going to be relinquished easily. We may have to take it back, by ballot or by force. Citizens of the world need to be prepared to do one, the other, or both.
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