Can Psychoactive Substances Change Morality?

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I think there's an important distinction between what these substances are doing to the brain in real time versus the type of knowledge you can gain from them. Many people who have this kind of experience report that it is epistemically transformative. And so, those effects are lasting well after the acute effects of the substance have worn off. I'm certainly very willing to believe that even after, you know, the neurological effects of the drugs have worn off, you report a different sense of self or whatever. But I want to question the self reportedness of that. Is there evidence that people actually act differently long after they've done this? Maybe I'm just being overly cynical here.

Most of us strive to be good, moral people. When we are doing that striving, what is happening in our brains? Some of our moral inclinations seem pretty automatic and subconscious. Other times we have to sit down and deploy our full cognitive faculties to reason through a tricky moral dilemma. I talk with psychologist Molly Crockett about where our moral intuitions come from, how they can sometimes serve as cover for bad behaviors, and how morality shapes our self-image.

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Molly J. Crockett received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge. She is currently Associate Professor of Psychology and University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

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