Can we take enhancement drugs? It depends

Abstract

The goal of my paper is show that we should abandon the treatment/enhancement distinction in favour of a particularist approach when evaluating the ethics of non-clinical uses of psychiatric drugs because there is no principled way to draw the distinction between treatment and enhancement. To meet my paper’s objective: I will first introduce the significance of the treatment/enhancement distinction in influencing healthcare policies. In section two, I give reasons for why I think that if there was an objective way to capture the idea of normal functioning, the statistical approach would be the best candidate. Next, in section three, I will argue that both Tyrer and Steinberg’s and Boorse’s statistical approaches are inadequate in giving us a defensible conception of normal functioning. In light of this, I propose in the fourth and final section, that we should consider the particularist approach over the generalist approach.