Positive Liberty

As with much I have written, this post began as a comment on something I read at In The Agora. Soon it became a creature of its own. Paul Musgrave writes,

So what’s wrong with performance-enhancing drugs anyway? Only the strictest moralist or some subsets of the religious object to the use of one performance-enhancing substance, caffeine, which some authors have seen as the drug which created the modern world. And alcohol, the well-known mind-altering substance, is available on practically every street corner. If drugs are okay in the workplace and the bar, then why shouldn’t athletes and students be allowed to boost their own performances through chemicals?

More of Paul’s thoughts can be found here, where he argues that there is nothing wrong in principle with taking drugs to enhance one’s brain power.

One common objection is that performance-enhancing drugs deprive us of the character-enhancing benefits of hard work and discipline. I disagree.

While I firmly believe in the virtues of good hard work, I have a difficult time condemning mind-enhancing drugs, or even steroids, as the moral danger that many claim them to be, at least not in situations of market competition. On the contrary, technological advances that allow for more marginal productivity and exchange are the very engine of capitalism. Merely because these advances are sometimes ingested does not change their fundamental character.

As Paul notes, we live surrounded by inventions that make “hard work” a whole lot easier. Do we complain that cars rob us of the work ethic, because we no longer have to walk or ride horses to our jobs? Do we curse the dishwasher and the central heating system because they let us stay warm and tidy with a minimum of work? Are computers a temptation? Then what about paper, which has robbed us of the salutary work that went into making parchment and vellum? Where exactly do we draw the line?

I take steroids every day for asthma. The result? I can run faster, work harder, feel more alert, and never have to struggle with my lungs to get more air. Does this mean I’m doing something immoral? Does it become immoral only when I start being able to play baseball well?

At some point, we have to say that while hard work is wonderful, so is technology, which allows us to use our labor on making new artworks, writing stimulating literature, inventing life-saving medicines, and so forth–rather than endlessly scraping the parchment of tradition, hoping thereby to build our characters.

Work is essential to the modern concept of well-being, as is innovation–and so too is marginal exchange for the useful goods made by others. If I can produce something that benefits me, great. But if I can produce and sell something that benefits others, too, then everyone wins. To buy a drug and use it as a way of increasing your personal productivity is nothing less–and nothing more–than an act of marginal exchange: The buyer trades his excess, comparatively unuseful dollars for pills that have a higher utility to him, but less marginal utility to the manufacturer. This utility allows the buyer to do more work, just like buying a computer or a bulldozer might do in only a slightly different situation. In such a way our resources are allocated–and expanded–to maximum efficiency.

Interestingly, neither computers nor any other performance enhancers will do much of anything unless there is some actual performance to enhance. Will the enhanced person achieve more than someone who did not have such tools? He should, and he will, provided only that he works at it, for the market rewards the wise allocation of labor and capital.

Our lingering fear of marginal exchange, of the unfair magic it seems to work on its participants, has held back human progress in more areas than I can even begin to count, from trade protectionism and price controls all the way to the development of new drugs like these. Are your performances enhanced? Good, I say. More power to you. It’s that much more that you might trade with me, and I like to have a lot of choices. Who doesn’t?

There is one situation, however, where performance-enhancing drugs make things a bit more complicated: Within an academic program, the goal is not quite to produce and exchange as much surplus value as you can. Instead the goal is to develop one’s mind, a furiously difficult thing to measure. So far as I can tell, education may be done either with or without the use of mind-altering chemicals (though I personally would never have gotten through grad school without caffeine, and alcohol certainly didn’t hurt either).

Here’s a science-fiction scenario: As mind-enhancing drugs improve, grading academic assignments by weighing them against one another may one day become appreciably more difficult, just as steroids have already compromised athletic records. While I view the latter as less of a problem than most, the arrival of a drug that significantly enhances personal intelligence would make everyday classroom life a lot more complicated.

As an instructor, I would want my students to take it, because I like being able to multiply the power of my labor. Yet I would also respect the decision of a student not to take the drug, even while I might disagree about the wisdom of the choice. Grading a mixed class fairly, though, would be difficult to impossible. In other words, while I would love to have drugs that increase intelligence, I’m also glad that they aren’t here quite yet. Ironically, I have a lot of thinking to do before they arrive.

For all the havoc it would create in the universities, our sci-fi mind-enhancer may yet be a blessing in disguise. Though many instructors don’t like to admit it, college grades are already a threatened institution, withering under the twin assaults of massive grade inflation and massive online cheating. We might even be better off without grades at all, and if finding a drug that makes us all more intelligent means that we must give up certain letters that perhaps never sufficiently measured intelligence anyway, I think we might stand to profit in the exchange.