Creativity is basically having mental flexibility–being able to imagine more than one way to do something. When you're conditioning yourself (even without drugs) to think in one particular mode, say every day at work, then you're strengthening those pathways and not spending time strengthening others. Having free time is great, but how are you going to spend it if your creative pathways are so under-utilized?

In any case, creativity was just one example of a way of thinking that could potentially be sacrificed for, say, fact memory. There are certainly other mental faculties that could be adversely affected, or maybe there are none. The point is that we really don't know enough, either about the drugs or about the brain to really have make an informed decision.

You make a better arguement than Bernard, but ultimately a healthy, informed adult should be able to make these choices for themselves. Creativity may be useful for some professions and not for others, and if these drugs surpress creativity (which I am not convinced of) then someone can choose not to use them.

If I have 5 units of work to do today and 10 units of time to do it, and normally I finish one unit work/unit time, then I have 5 units of time to persue other creative activities. If these drugs help me complete one unit work in 0.5 units time, that leaves much more time to persue these these. Assuming one works because they have to (not because they want or enjoy it) as I do, thats a win in my book.

The one thing I would add is that this line was also particularly bad: “And this would be the case even if one conceded what is most assuredly dubious—namely, that public policy could be crafted and enforced so as to minimize the deleterious effects of the widespread distribution and use of such drugs.”

As if the current public policy of making them illegal is effective in stopping usage and doesn't have the deleterious effect of turning many otherwise law abiding citizens into outlaws purchasing drugs of unknown quality over the internet. Cough, nubrain.com, cough.

I don't really have a problem with the idea of 'cognitive enhancement', but with how we can, again, 'responsibly' put it into practice. Of course it would be great to have a better memory for facts, or a greater working memory load, or a heightened ability to recognize patterns, or a better integration of auditory and visual input, or a more refined ability to direct my attention. Due to our brains' remarkable plasticity, humans have always had a way to go about doing this–training and repetition, which we've formalized with schools. The use of pharmaceuticals as cognitive enhancers is–at this point–merely to accelerate this learning process. Will it always be such?

For me, the main problem with the use of drugs for cognitive enhancement, aside from our utter ignorance of their full effects, is not the drugs themselves but our education system. Depending on your family and cultural upbringing, there are many ways we define success in school, but our current system holds test scores up as the ultimate measure, and the use of standardized testing is only growing. You can go elsewhere for a full take-down of the sheer idiocy of this, but we've made a single way of thinking the “best” way for an entire generation. And then there's the ever-increasing pressure to “succeed,” get into the “right” college, and the valuation of certain careers (law, medicine–thankfully finance may not be on the list anymore) well above others. Throw the additional selecting pressure of long-term use of cognitive enhancing drugs into this mess and to me it's a recipe for a generation of homogeneous thinkers. Will they still retain that most powerful of human cognitive abilities that allowed us to populate the entire planet and flourish in the face of all its varied and constantly changing dangers–creativity?

Blogs were made to permit this kind of grand-slam rebuttal.

When we start over, with what values are we starting over? Or how radically to start over.

Whose well-being and flourishing do we wish to maximize? Only human well-being and flourishing? Or is it the well-being and flourishing of life or of moral agents more generally?

“For while the capacities to paint one's face and nails are indeed goods of human life, they are neither the highest of human goods nor are they ends in themselves. Yet, the use of cosmetics by the healthy implicitly treats the single good at which the product aims as though it were the most important or only good of one’s physical life considered as a whole.”