The Ethics Of Using Drugs To Fall In & Out Of Love - Brian D. Earp - #268

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, humans of Podcast Land, welcome back. Today's episode is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. Protect your browsing online and get access to the entire world's Netflix library for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. We are probably going back into lockdown. Anywhere that you are on the planet is going back into lockdown, which means that you need more Netflix to watch. And within 30 seconds, you can be signed up to Surfshark VPN, download the app, one click on your laptop or your mobile and you can access everything worldwide on Netflix. All of America's Netflix, which is like every series, all the Marvel films, all of the stuff from Japan, if you're into anime or whatever France has on their Netflix. Also it stops hackers from tracking you and websites from split testing prices on products you're already going to buy. I use it all the time after it saved me in Dubai. And it's weird to think that life without a VPN even exists now. Head to surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom for 83% off, three months free and a 30 day money back guarantee. You can try it out, download it on multiple devices, literally as many devices as you want so the whole family can use it. And if you don't like it, money back within 30 days. surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom. Go and check it out. Onto today's guest, I'm joined by Brian David Earp who is an ethicist and research fellow at Oxford, a philosopher and a writer. Love is a feeling that many of us desire to feel, but the medical developments of the 21st century means that love is moving out of the personal realm and into the medical one. So today expect to learn if we can make ourselves fall in or out of love with drugs, whether we can turn a straight person gay, how anti-love drugs can help reduce domestic violence, the ethics of changing your attractiveness and much more. This is the sort of conversation that I absolutely love having on this program. We really get into the nuance of just what it means to fall into relationships and desire somebody who is augmenting who they are, synthetically, with something that isn't a part of them. Just what does it mean to be us? And some of the discussions around turning gay people straight and straight people gay, orthodox Jews living in a community where they're not supposed to masturbate or have sex for any reason that isn't for procreation. How can we use drugs? Is it ethical? Does it make their lives better? Does it make their lives worse? Should we even be talking about this? It's really cool. It's one of my favorite conversations in a long time. And if you enjoy it, go and pick the book up linked in the show notes below. For now, it is time for the wise and wonderful Brian Earp.
What is love?

**Brian D. Earp** (3:00)
That's a good question. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and obviously so have a lot of other people in a lot of different disciplines and using different lenses. Most of us, I think, probably start to think about love outside of our own experiences through art and literature and maybe philosophy.
More recently, scientists have taken an interest in love and they're starting to figure out what's going on in our brains when we at least report subjectively that we feel that we're in love, and they start to try to triangulate it in and see neurochemically what's happening. I end up adopting a view that tries to integrate all of these different perspectives. I think of love as a biopsychosocial phenomenon. It's something that feels a certain way, so there are subjective components to it, and if you report that you're in love and I report that I'm in love, we're comparing notes and trying to see is what you're feeling, the same thing as what I'm feeling. To do that, we'll often refer to tropes and scripts and concepts in the culture. You might say, well, it feels like that thing that's represented in that movie, or when I read this poem by so and so, it really makes me feel like that's what I'm feeling. And that's one of the ways in which we compare notes is through cultural artifacts. And then there's also stuff going on in our brains, as I suggested. So at the very least, love is scaffolded on top of things that are related to our nature as a sexually reproducing species. So the reason why we're drawn toward, at least some people in this passionate way, and we want to meld with them, has got to be related to the fact that we reproduce sexually. And so we're going to have to have mating partners and love is wrapped up in that. There's some theories that suggest love has kind of different phases or stages. So there's a set of brain systems that are oriented around lust or libido, which is just to drive us toward a potentially range of mating partners. There's attraction, which narrows our focus in on a smaller number of people, maybe one in particular. And then attachment, which is this long lasting kind of pair bond that exists in a lot of different mammal species and in ours. And that's more toward childbearing potentially or long term relationships. So how that plays out in a given cultural or historical context, well, that depends on, you know, accidents of history and, you know, prevailing concepts and ideas. So love just sits at the interface of these kind of biological, subjective, experiential, psychological aspects and the wider social historical context. That's the best I can say of what love is.