# The ethics of anti-love drugs qua precommitment strategy

## TL;DR

This paper explores the ethics of using drugs to reduce love feelings as a way to prevent future actions based on current preferences.

## Contribution

It introduces the concept of anti-love drugs as a precommitment strategy, linking it to existing ethical debates.

## Key findings

- Anti-love drugs can be understood as a form of precommitment strategy.
- Existing ethical discussions on precommitment can inform debates on anti-love drugs.
- The ethical implications of these drugs are significant due to their impact on personal values like love.

## Abstract

The ethics of anti-love drugs – pharmaceutical interventions to dampen one’s feelings of love for, say, a former partner – have been the subject of a growing body of research. Scientific research on these drugs is fairly nascent and ethical debates about their implications are therefore by necessity largely speculative. Nonetheless, insofar as future developments in anti-love drugs propose to affect a value as personal and important as love, these ethical debates are imperative. In this article, I propose to add a new dimension to ethical discourse on anti-love drugs by contextualising it within existing ethical debates on precommitment. An agent who consumes an anti-love drug does so to limit their future behavior – i.e. preventing themselves from reigniting their former relationship—based on their present preferences. The use of anti-love drugs is therefore an unambiguous example of a precommitment strategy. This recognition therefore allows one to draw on existing ethical research on precommitment to invigorate ethical discourse on anti-love drugs.