The ethics of anti-love drugs qua precommitment strategy.

Abstract

The ethics of anti-love drugs - pharmaceutical interventions to dampen one's feelings of love for, say, a former partner - have been the subject of a growing body of research. Scientific research on these drugs is fairly nascent and ethical debates about their implications are therefore by necessity largely speculative. Nonetheless, insofar as future developments in anti-love drugs propose to affect a value as personal and important as love, these ethical debates are imperative. In this article, I propose to add a new dimension to ethical discourse on anti-love drugs by contextualising it within existing ethical debates on precommitment. An agent who consumes an anti-love drug does so to limit their future behavior - i.e. preventing themselves from reigniting their former relationship-based on their present preferences. The use of anti-love drugs is therefore an unambiguous example of a precommitment strategy. This recognition therefore allows one to draw on existing ethical research on precommitment to invigorate ethical discourse on anti-love drugs.