It’s worth thinking through how powerful ethical theory will be in advocating for and executing business models within psychedelics. I’m deeply interested in how my philosophical heroes - from Kant to Lao Tzu - can help us advocate as a movement. For clarity’s sake, I’m going to break them into “preaching to the choir” and “preaching to the congregation” meaning that some are to help people within the movement, and other explicitly to reach out across cultural boundaries.
Kant
Kant is the most psychedelic of the say, “big 10” ethical philosophers. (No such list exists that I know of, but conceptually most ethicists would agree there’s a handful of major schools.)
Kant, prior to working on ethical theory, worked on the Nebulae Hypothesis, which is, basically, that we are the stardust. Exceptionally psychedelic. From there, he went on to publish a book literally called The Metaphysics of Morality, which is where he laid out his famous categorical imperative test — do you want to live in a world where everyone behaves as you are behaving, or intend to behave?
I think a modified Kantian test is extremely effective: Do you want to live in a world where all healers act as you are acting or intend to act? Many healers have been healed and can be easily sensitized to this simple test that often neutralizes a lot of unintended bad consequences. It’s also good at rationalizing the significance of the problem at hand. A good ethical theory is like a chisel that can break through stone problems quickly; in this case, choices about policies, practices, even dose management can all be run through the test of how you would feel if everyone did it that way.
The more Abrahamic spin would, of course, be are you doing unto your client as you would have them do unto you? This spin is super problematic because people want different things done unto them, such as a healer who thinks the client needs to hear the healer’s favorite cello concerto, but the client hates cello and doesn’t want to hear it but still has to because the healer is stuck thinking their morally righteous doing unto others as they would have done unto them.
For advocacy purposes, the enlightened self-interest of the categorical imperative test is a great marketing device to preach to the congregation of people who may not know anything about psychedelics, or may fear or distrust them. By saying “hey there is a set of drugs that alleviate depression and help do things like make quitting smoking easier and I want you to have them if you ever need them” is much more likely to work out in contemporary culture than demanding a birthright to some plants for some people or saying it’s only for the marginal, terrible mental health cases. It’s not quite Kant, but he deserves credit for the framing.
Utilitarianism
Without getting too deep into JS Mills and the Benthams, utilitarianism focuses on “providing the greatest good for the greatest number” which is explicitly teleological.
Using the same example as earlier about supply chain considerations, if deciding between advocating for startups that manage their supply chain tightly and have to pass those costs on to clientele, or accepting an imperfect supply chain to reduce costs to gain access — the utilitarian ethos offers many lenses. Are the people in the supply chain made better by buying from them? And if so, to what extent compared to being able to serve two additional clients at a lower prices point? The moral calculus can be measured and tabulated, if for nothing else, something to which one can react intellectually to find their moral compass alignment.
A great tool to show utilitarian ethics in practice would be a market based analysis of who can afford retreat center access at different price points. That likely linear curve will show that the cheaper it is, the more people who can afford it. But, ultimately, it’s a bell curve when we adjust for data about quality of care. Ethics can be made mathematical for analytical processes.
Rawls and The Veil of Ignorance
Runner up to Kant on most psychedelic ethical theorist is Rawls. His seminal work on the veil of ignorance literally encourages to imagine that we are all one universal consciousness that will be downloaded into different players in a game, and we make ethical rules without knowing which player into whom we will be downloaded once we set the rules. (That’s not quite how he would describe it, but the video game metaphor seems fair enough to Dr. Rawls.)
In this model, the healer makes choices based on the interaction as if they could be either the healer or the patient and don’t get to know which they will be. This could be, in many ways, the most powerful tool for ethical practitioners on a strategic basis. Choosing your method, set, and setting as though you will in each session flip a coin to see if you are the healer or healed probably keeps you very honest and stops offenses of lethargy.
To use Rawls for advocacy sake is perhaps more complicated, but also somewhat embedded in the mainstream advocacy. “This could be you or someone you love.” is a key message in much of the psychedelic advocacy content from the past few years.
Amartya Sen, Patron Ethicists of Psychedelics?
Sen is best know for the idea of a “human development index” which is advanced synthesis of agency theory that basically says you can model how actions impact people’s capacity to develop, and despite some generally awful people who are anomalies, most people will progress with the right resources and opportunities.
Sen is directly applicable to advocacy because you simply say “people have more potential to improve themselves with psychedelics than without, so it’s probably ethical, especially given the lack of negative consequences when done right.” Basically, as long as it’s safe, Sen would likely advocate strongly for psychedelics.
Circling back to how it relates to practitioners, there are many examples:
—Should I provide care to a client I’m concerned about? Am I worried they could have less agency after the trip? If so, then no, I should not.
—Should I support other entrepreneurs with whom I disagree? Generally probably yes because it’s their right to develop with agency; a clear exemption would be people trying to limit your agency or others’ agency, especially if it were add more agency and optionality to their development capacity.