Document Type

Honors Thesis

Abstract

"Love drugs" can be defined as chemical interventions that affect desire, attraction, and affection. Contemporary advancements in neurochemical interventions have increased interest in love drugs and highlighted the need for accessible love drug analyses. This project explores how love drugs will affect contemporary relationships through realistic literary scenarios informed by current philosophical literature. These scenarios consist of three vignettes compiled into a novella-length creative work. It was initially anticipated that these vignettes would reveal that introducing a meta-biological or chemical intervention into social situations where authenticity is normatively highly valued would prompt participant introspection. In practice, this work finds that love drugs cause relationship members to examine their reasons for creating, sustaining, or leaving relationships and to contemplate any perceived dissonance between declared love and conceptual attachment to love as intrinsically good. The results of this project suggest a significant likelihood that love drugs will drastically alter modern relationship dynamics.

Disciplines

Applied Ethics | Ethics and Political Philosophy | Philosophy

Publication Date

5-2025

Language

English

Faculty Mentor of Honors Project

Eli Shupe

Comments

Thank you to Dr. Eli Shupe, the UTA Biomedical Ethics program, and the Douglas Britt Carvey Memorial Classics Fund.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Download

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.