The Ethics of “Smart Drugs”: Moral Judgments About Healthy People's Use of Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs

What moral concerns are relevant when judging the use of cognitive-enhancing (CE) drugs by healthy people? University students evaluated competitive fairness, distributive fairness, peer pressure, naturalness, and dosage form. Participants condemned CE drug use when there were long-term negative effects on health and when CE drug use was seen to provide an unfair advantage in an exam situation to someone while others were not taking the drugs. Further, participants judged CE drug use more harshly if the drugs were artificial rather than natural and if they were in the form of an injection rather than a pill, suggesting that moral intuitions relating to purity also influence opinions on CE drugs.