I Hope That We Are Not Living in a Post-Fact World

摘要

I certainly would not have written this commentary based on the conclusions of Harris Wiseman's (2014) "SSRIs as Moral Enhancement Interventions: A Practical Dead End." Single dose laboratory experiments have been conducted with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and other drugs to study social and moral emotions-with the approval of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). It is very unlikely, however, that blinded, randomized control drug trials of adequate power and duration would be seen as ethical if the indication were manipulation of the moral emotions in healthy people. It would also be no easy task to identify tractable real-world endpoints. With respect to SSRIs, experiments in healthy people have thus far yielded rather small effects. Thus, even if we bracketed the concerns about clinical trials, SSRIs might very well represent a practical dead end.