Moral Psychopharmacology Needs Moral Inquiry: The Case of Psychedelics

Introduction

Earp and colleagues frame a new subfield they call "moral psychopharmacology," born from growing neuropsychopharmacological interest since the 2000s in how drugs influence moral judgments and social behaviours. They note that a range of compounds—antidepressants, oxytocin, stimulants, MDMA, LSD and others—have been observed to alter harm aversion, trust, prosociality and retaliatory tendencies, and that researchers have started applying experimental paradigms from social psychology and behavioural economics to study these effects. In this context, psychedelics attract particular attention because their effects appear highly sensitive to extra‑pharmacological factors (commonly summed up as "set and setting"), raising distinctive scientific and ethical questions about how these substances shape moral attitudes and relationships. The paper sets out to argue for a moral psychopharmacology of psychedelics that integrates pharmacology and neuroscience with historical, anthropological and ethical inquiry. Rather than assuming a single, uniform moral effect, the authors propose investigating whether psychedelics act as non‑specific amplifiers of pre‑existing values or whether they can systematically bias users toward particular moral or political orientations. They emphasise that this question has practical urgency given changing legal regimes, the diversification of users and settings, and the clinical deployment of psychedelics in combination with psychotherapeutic practices.