The GULAG

GULAG was the Soviet acronym for “Main Administration of Corrective (my emphasis) Labor Camps and Labor Settlements. It was a government-administered program of forced labor camps, active from the 1930s until the 1950s. One of the functions of the GULAG was to use forced labor as a means of reeducation in order to “correct” the ego-centered consciousness of the bourgeoisie and transform it such that it developed an altruistic sense of collectivism and proletariat solidarity. The scientific justification of the GULAG’s moral enhancement agenda was developed by followers of the Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov’s, work in classical conditioning that could be used to change the way people think.^{Footnote 2}

Abuse of Psychiatry

“Philosophical intoxication,” characterized by being outspoken in opposition to authorities, was widely used to diagnose mental disorders. Such a diagnosis gave the state license to detain people against their will and force them, in the interest of the state as well as in their own, to submit to therapy to correct their Anti-Soviet behavior. Treatments in the network of psychiatric hospitals included drugs, restraints, and electric shock therapy. Psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky, an academician at the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, broadened diagnostic categories by inventing the term “sluggish schizophrenia,”^{Footnote 3} whose symptoms of pessimism, poor social adaptation, and conflict with authorities were used to describe a special form of the illness that supposedly only affected the person’s social behavior. Such a diagnosis established the very preconditions under which nonstandard beliefs could easily be transformed into a crime.

In May, 1959, Pravda, the official newspaper of the Community Party, printed a speech by Nikita Khrushchev that illustrated the link. “A crime is a deviation from generally recognized standards of behavior. Can there be diseases, nervous disorders among certain people in communist society? Evidently yes. If that is so, then there will also be offences, which are characteristic of people with abnormal minds. Of those who might start calling for opposition to Communism on this basis, we can say that clearly their mental state is not normal.”^{Footnote 4}

Today, as more methods for moral bioenhancement are developed, bioethicists argue over whether there is justification, or perhaps an imperative, to use neuroscience to enhance our moral capabilities. It only takes reading the morning paper to know that Julian Savulescu is right in warning that currently we are not morally equipped to meet the challenges of collective problems (e.g., climate change, global poverty, or mass violence) or ward off “ultimate dangers” such as the destruction of humanity.^{Footnote 5} Would it not follow, therefore, that if we could produce a positive outcome without imposing force, coercion, or punishment, we have a moral imperative to do so? If science can be used to improve our lives by allowing us to live longer and be smarter, why not also use it to make ourselves more empathetic and cooperative and with a better sense of justice?^{Footnote 6}

With regard to methods of implementation, Savulescu proposes that when people are allowed to choose new technologies for themselves, they will choose what they see as being in their own best interest, or what they believe they should do. However, if the intervention proves to be “effective, safe, and good,” from Savulecu’s perspective, it should become compulsory.^{Footnote 7}

This line of argumentation has a great deal of appeal, and would be more persuasive for me if I had not lived in a time of state-determined moral enhancement programs. Before we move too far down the moral enhancement road, I would urge that we take a lesson from the past and ask ourselves whose values and virtues should we wish to enhance? Which will make society better off? What will count as moral progress? Some seem obvious, such as altruism, empathy, and compassion, but it is more complex than that.

What it is that constitutes moral progress is not the same for everyone. What one group or era sees as a moral advance can be viewed by others as destructive and discriminatory. For the Soviet Union, moral enhancement meant preserving allegiance to the state, and struggles for truth and justice were reinterpreted as mental illness and, ultimately, crimes. One person’s idea of virtue can easily be someone else’s view of vice; or even what is a vice in one situation can be a virtue in another. “Soma” in Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World,^{Footnote 8} a drug-like substance with the power to produce a blissful state of oblivion, would today be welcomed by some as a solution to the stresses of modern life, but rejected by others as dehumanizing. Even the seductions of an imaginative “God Machine” that could do our moral thinking for us and shield us from ethical errors has its drawbacks.^{Footnote 9}

Technologies are moving swiftly to develop new and more effective means of changing the way we think and behave. Because the ethical issues and implications raised will affect all of us; it is incumbent to move the discourse beyond academic debates and engage the general public in open discussion. If we do not decide our future together, I fear it will be decided for us.

As the biblical reference points out, What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.^{Footnote 10} Is there anything of which we can say, “Look, this is totally new and without precedent?” Moral enhancement has a history as a state-imposed policy. I have lived it. This is all the more reason to take lessons from the past, recognize the mistakes, correct them, and point the way toward better decisions in the future.