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Pre-marital cohabitation endangers your marriage

weepingwomanBy Charles Foster

Marriage is not well served by its defenders. The loudest and best reported of them are often fundamentalist bigots. It’s a shame, for marriage has a lot going for it.

Even if you think that marriage is an anachronistic/bourgeois/theologically contaminated institution, you’ll probably agree that the breakdown of marriages is best avoided. Of course incurably dysfunctional marriages should be ended, but most people aspire to enduring relationships, and the wrench of marital dislocation is emotionally and financially traumatic. If there are children, marriage breakup is painful for the parents and can be enduringly damaging for the children. There are, in short and quite uncontroversially, some significant harms associated with the breakdown of marriages.

How can marriage breakdown – and hence those harms – be avoided?Read More »Pre-marital cohabitation endangers your marriage

Brief announcement: Interview about ‘love drugs’ on “Q” with Jian Ghomeshi

By Brian D. Earp

Interview announcement

This is a brief note to alert the readers of Practical Ethics that research by myself, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu on the potential therapeutic uses of “love drugs” and “anti-love drugs” has recently been featured in an interview for the national Canadian broadcast program, “Q” with Jian Ghomeshi (airing on National Public Radio in the United States).

Here is a link to the interview.

Readers may also be interested in checking out a new website, “Love in the Age of Enhancement” which collects the various academic essays, magazine articles, and media coverage of these arguments concerning the neuroenhancement of human relationships.

Read More »Brief announcement: Interview about ‘love drugs’ on “Q” with Jian Ghomeshi

Love and other drugs, or why parents should chemically enhance their marriages

By Brian Earp

See Brian’s most recent previous post by clicking here.

See all of Brian’s previous posts by clicking here.

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Love and other drugs, or why parents should chemically enhance their marriages

Valentine’s day has passed, and along with it the usual rush of articles on “the neuroscience of love” – such as this one from Parade magazine. The penner of this particular piece, Judith Newman, sums up the relevant research like this:

It turns out that love truly is a chemical reaction. Researchers using MRIs to look at the brain activity of the smitten have found that an interplay of hormones and neurotransmitters create the state we call love.

My humble reckoning is that there’s more to “the state we call love” than hormones and neurotransmitters, but it’s true that brain chemistry is heavily involved in shaping our experience of amour. In fact, we’re beginning to understand quite a bit about the cerebral circuitry involved in love, lust, and human attachment—so much so that a couple of Oxford philosophers have been inspired to suggest something pretty radical.

They think that it’s time we shifted from merely describing this circuitry, and actually intervened in it directly—by altering our brains pharmacologically, through the use of what they call “love drugs.”

Read More »Love and other drugs, or why parents should chemically enhance their marriages