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Responses and Dialogue
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The following are responses to "The Medicalization of Love" by Brian D. Earp, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu (CQ 24(3))
Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
In a recent paper in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Brian D. Earp, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu consider various objections to the proposal of using "love drugs" to enhance romantic relationships.1
As the authors observe, some of the objections to using drugs for love enhancement are based on the assumption that love is too special an experience to be analyzed, medicalized, and pharmaceuticalized. Earp and colleagues rightly point out that counseling and psychotherapy also attempt to analyze and medicalize romantic love. However, unlike love-enhancing drugs, few people object to using such forms of treatment to improve loving relationships.
They suggest that this opposition to using drugs to "enhance" romantic relationships (that is, to pharmaceuticalize)--which could also mean to diminish lust, attraction, or attachment in cases in which such feelings are harmful--is founded on the assumption that love and romance are different from other human experiences (which, conversely, might be enhanced through drugs and not only through psychotherapy). For instance, Evans has suggested that critics of medicalization would argue that we should not accept the medicalization of love, because "there are, or should be, experiences that use an older logic, which are under the jurisdiction of another profession or under no jurisdiction at all. We can all fear the medicalization of love."2
In this article I argue that we should not fear the medicalization of (at least) one particular kind of love: that is, unrequited love. I argue that, because (1) unrequited love can be--and often is--a very painful experience and because (2) people are entitled to avoid pain (if they wish to), medicalization and pharmaceuticalization of broken hearts should be an available option. I also argue that it should...