Timothy Hsiao is a controversial Christian thinker. He defends factory farming and supports the Second Amendment. He writes in support of beating children and waging the war on drugs.
Hsiao holds that mind-altering drugs are unethical beyond very narrow and well-defined exceptions. He condemns all recreational use as an immoral misuse of our faculties, the ones that make us free and human.
Hsiao’s Opposition to Psychedelics
Hsiao takes a 'common sense realist' approach to psychedelic states. People high on psychedelics are mentally and perceptually impaired. The tripper is hallucinating. “LSD significantly impaired executive functions, cognitive flexibility, and working memory” on neurophysiological tests. The same study, administering the drug in one hundred microgram doses to twenty-five participants, did not admittedly find any difference in risk-taking behaviour, as measured by a gambling task. Their power to navigate risk in real-world settings would clearly be impaired, however: hallucinogen research guidelines specify the need for sober minders, that all windows be shut, and all sharp and dangerous objects be removed from surrounding areas.
One popular commentary summarises: “there’s ample evidence that psychedelics are as likely to contribute to fantasies and false beliefs as they are to insights or improvements in well‑being”. Psychedelic drugs activate the brain’s ‘Eureka!’ circuit. For this reason, false beliefs are likely under-reported, because the good ideas people report having are probably not as good as they think: their antennae for assigning meaning and truth have been impaired. Psychedelic thinking is hyper-associative. The tripper finds miraculous connections between disparate domains in a manner similar to magic.
It is not for nothing that early researchers called them 'hallucinogens' and 'psychotomimetics'.
LSD and psilocybin produce states of aesthetic and mystical quality. The same can be said of those in mania and psychosis. Individuals high on methamphetamine may believe they are in contact with occult forces, God, spirits, Jesus, or that they have been vouchsafed with esoteric knowledge of conspiracies. Hsiao's fundamental concern is that drugs work by neurocognitive impairment. He believes there is no way around this.
He believes that deliberately engaging in such impairment, and risking prolonged damage to one's faculties – while reasonably doubting whether the same benefits could be achieved otherwise – is immoral. For this reason, he objects to all recreational use of psychedelic drugs. Hsiao permits the use of psychoactive drugs in the case of restoring function, like the treatment of delusions with antipsychotic drugs or manic states with lithium.
Being that psychedelic drugs do not reliably outperform SSRIs, Hsiao may object that the induction of impairment renders psychedelic therapy morally impermissible.
Why is Hsiao Opposed to Recreational Drug Use?
The human being is always and everywhere facing a moral question: what do I do right now? The Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism regards intoxication as morally dangerous, conducive to heedlessness (pamada). The author of the First Epistle of Peter advised his readers “be sober minded, for your adversary the devil prowls like a lion looking for anyone whom he can devour”.
For Hsiao, moral practice is an essentially rational exercise: the discernment of good and evil. The power of reason – tethered to affection, love, and goodwill – is the sine qua non of ethical practice. We are emotional beings who fail reliably to act from or convey our convictions. Our intuitions struggle to handle maths and science. But reason is not thereby annulled: reason remains the essential sieve through which these appetites may be sorted and expressed, and by which we glimpse the errors of those same intuitions. Ethics is also rational because it involves language, and communication is another domain considerably damaged by the psychedelic state.
It is extremely common for people to do things they wish they hadn’t while drunk. The same almost certainly occurs with psychedelic drugs, especially when consumed in naturalistic settings. A Johns Hopkins survey of nearly 2,000 psilocybin users who reported their “worst bad trip” found that 11% put themselves or others at risk of physical harm, 2.6% became physically violent, and 2.7% sought medical help during the episode. Even while rare, the risk of mortal disaster is non-trivial and directly extends from the irrational state into which one has plunged.
This leads to the second pillar of Hsiao’s argument. Reason is a basic good, along with our inclination to love. Without reason, ethics cannot make sense. It is the grammar through which the ethical life is lived. The true value of reason is therefore inestimable in a consequential schema, which looks at the measurable quantities of costs and benefits from some decision. To evaluate the balance sheet of depriving one’s power of reason is a performative contradiction. Why? Such a tally is a rational analysis – indeed, the rational analysis, whereby reason itself may be appraised ‘from above’ in a kind of God’s-eye perspective. Reason is always what makes us free decision-makers. To choose to take drugs is to make oneself a mental slave.
There are immediate objections one can make. The psychedelic effect will wear off. There is little evidence of prolonged neurocognitive impairment, and certainly no evidence of a necessary form of mental injury. One may think more clearly than otherwise while under psychedelic drugs, in a way one did not anticipate during a recreational trip. Positive personality changes may even occur through graver means than drug use. Consider head injuries, comas, and the onset of dementia, which are typically followed by personality deterioration. More than a fifth of patients with frontal focal damage in one case series showed positive personality change. “Patient 2410,” a 30‑year‑old man with aneurysm-related frontal damage, shifted from short‑tempered and “mopey” to laughing, joking, and more easy-going. A group of Vietnam veterans with prefrontal lesions were found to be protected from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Is it intrinsically wrong that their faculties were damaged, even if the visible effect was for the better?
The term “recreation” is likewise doing a lot of work: can fun experiences outside of doctors’ clinics not have a medical benefit, even if the drug was not consumed for that purpose alone? Hsiao uses his case to support prohibition, which exacerbates and distorts many of the risks of drugs.
But I wish to investigate the more fundamental nature of Hsiao’s claim.
Objections to Hsiao’s Position
Hsiao’s argument rests on the formal immorality of perverting one’s rational faculties. He holds to a teleological and natural law conception of ethics in which good and evil consist in essential functions and their deprivations. A good knife, for instance, is one that cuts well. A good tree is one that bears fruit. A good glass of water is one that hydrates. Following Aristotle, Hsiao ascribes the good of the human being to their rational command: the right use of reason to pursue the good and avoid evil is the function and site of flourishing for the human being. Being distinguished by powers of reason, humans are obliged to reason well. Reason provides the meaning and message of good and evil, whose discernment is never optional. There is never any setting in which evil may be consciously chosen, or its rational perception is ever optional.
The immediate and best-known objection to this case is the naturalistic fallacy devised by G.E. Moore and David Hume. Insofar as the function and end of a knife are to cut and slice, in what sense do we locate any imperative for the knife to do so? It is a feature of human beings making use of a knife for specific functions that vary from context to context. What is the need of supposing a supra-rational layer of pure functions, in which morals apparently consist? This is also known as the is-ought gap.
The second objection follows absurdities. Things have clear primary functions, but they also have secondary ones. A knife handle may be used to break open a safe. Even if a more suitable object were available, the knife worked fine. Is it morally wrong to use a knife in such a fashion? Or consider the act of shaving, which frustrates the function of follicles to produce hair, or holding one’s breath. All of these acts involve the technical perturbation of faculties for perhaps no good reason other than whimsy and pleasure. For Hsiao, the fact that no visible ill comes from such trivia is beside the point: it is the misuse of natural faculties in which immoral action occurs.
Hsiao responds that holding one’s breath and shaving are not perversions of bodily function, but acts of refraining from engaging them. Is there really such a difference? To what extent is one not engaging one’s respiratory system in order to draw in breath and hold it in, or to use one’s reason to take drugs that purportedly suspend reason? Consider someone who chooses not to eat or drink water for no good reason for a few days. This frustrates the appetites for no rational reason. He is not trying a new diet or engaged in religious fasting. We would be hard-pressed to call this decision immoral, though we may call it eccentric. If it occurred repeatedly, we may wonder whether this person has a certain psychopathology, or simply a quirk from which we might learn to challenge our dysfunctional societal relationship with food. Either way, is this person obliged to eat and drink in this fashion, even if no visible ill occurs?
Perhaps Hsiao will not let us off so easily. Not every philosopher accepts that an is-ought gap obtains. Consider the example of a tree. It is simply in the nature of the tree to stretch its limbs towards the sun and its roots to spread to moisture below. It bears fruit and spreads its seed, and thereby provides shelter for birds and beautiful forms. There is direction to its nature. Equally, the human being is, on the whole, a choicemaking creature drawn to benefits over costs. There is a hierarchy of attention and decision baked into the human nervous system, which evolved as the accretions of better-adapted decisions by its evolutionary forebears. To reason is to prioritise one fact over another. There is no is-ought gap.
Do we avoid arbitrariness? The human mind, in the many cultures over millennia in which it has evolved, is drawn to and produces altered states of consciousness. This ought to be so, because producing ecstasy yields benefits for people and their communities. Even if there is no direct medical or religious function, the suspension of ordinary sober reason for recreation, bonding, community, and humour is historically established. This would imply that humans ought to be intoxicated to some extent by means of their socio-biological nature. Consider a drug whose only effect is to make the sky look green and grass blue. Is this immoral? Or an individual who wears tinted sunglasses indoors without any need for sun protection. The world now looks orange, and appears blue when he takes them off for a few minutes while they rebalance. Is this wrong? Colour vision is not ethically costless. Colours allow us to distinguish objects, which is the cornerstone of reason. The colour of people’s skin is no small matter. May we regard wearing the glasses as a heedless instrumentalising of one’s own perception? It seems we have bigger fish to fry.
Hsiao permits the use of sleep as a “restoration” of reason. God forbid someone who stays awake till 3 am, and spends the next day fatigued, for this must be essentially immoral. Why can a psychedelic trip that “clears the cobwebs” not be an equivalent? Hsiao makes no exception for reasons of “recreation”, or “pleasure”, but the role of problem-solving and creativity, among innumerable other motives nested in that category, are not explored.
Altered states of consciousness may enhance reason. René Descartes used to meditate on the verge of sleeping to bypass his critical filters. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulatory system, would contemplate while in coal mines. Or consider Richard Feynman, who developed an obsession with the physics of spinning plates. It mystified at least one colleague, who didn’t understand why Feynman focused only on the physics that he found fun. An idea later struck Feynman: perhaps he could apply the angular momenta of plates to elementary particles. Feynman won the Nobel Prize for describing the orbital movements of electrons. It is not always clear how things ought to be done, and “proper function” resists being put in a neat box. The benefits may not become clear for years to come, like Steve Jobs’ use of LSD. Or it may occur directly, like Cary Mullis’ use of psychedelics to invent the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
There are other problems. Without the theological system held by Hsiao, it is difficult to describe the interaction of biological material and natural laws. What are these natural laws, these intrinsic functions embedded in objects? What are they made of? Why do natural laws and biological impulse so often conflict? In a post-Darwinian world, in which the distinct kinds assumed by our forebears do not exist, we must wonder how hard-and-fast laws could prevail over biological kinds that lack essences. These questions would require their own lengthy elucidation.
We would suppose that these laws, adequately understood, would be eternal. But the jurisprudence of natural law has a checkered history. Aristotle, for instance, supposed that certain human beings were “natural slaves” whose essence compelled them to bondage. The reasoning power that provided humans’ core function was likewise the preserve of free men, not women. The Church Doctor Thomas Aquinas believed that women were “failed men”, kinds of mutants. The hierarchical power of reason – the sovereign to which these passions are subsumed – reflects the social nature of feudal and slave-based societies, with strict pyramidal structures less well-received today. This doesn’t mean that natural laws cannot be revised in line with reason, much as any system of thought develops over time. But no science or philosophy worth its salt will claim to trade in eternal claims about the essences of objects, which no time or intention can break.
We may raise several other more trivial questions of Hsiao. What is reason? It is never defined at length, which is understandable. But without a clear idea of what reason is, it is difficult to make basic moral claims. It is difficult to disentangle rationality from true or justified beliefs. Though reason is a faculty, and is not entirely reducible to certain beliefs and contents, we know reason is working when it draws certain conclusions. But if the irrational consists in false beliefs, is it morally wrong to hold them? Is it immoral to believe that a cabal of lizard beings runs the world? Even if beliefs are of an involuntary nature, reading the books of David Icke was a freely deliberated choice. Equally, to take the tab of LSD was voluntary, even if one cannot help believing irrational material afterwards. False beliefs certainly have a noxious quality and do not predict beneficial behaviours. It is not clear that calling false beliefs morally wrong is entirely necessary.
Another trivial question may ask whether the rational and irrational are really separable. The problem of ‘form and content’, for instance, describes the struggle of rationalist systems to place in logical terms why and that the world is as it is: what we call the givenness, or facticity, of the world, which must be accepted as a predicate. Axioms, propositions, and conclusions likewise rely on intuition, which is a non-rational reflex. The intuition simply happens in a startling, and perhaps psychedelic, manner. If we grant that Hsiao’s presentation is faithful to reason, how do we use reason to justify itself? Is this not circular? In this respect, we may see that the aspects of ‘non-rational’ psychedelic states may serve a didactic function. What appears to be the great fault of psychedelic drugs, their delusive quality, is instead its greatest gift: that the drug detaches the sense of revelation from immediate and normal facts. This prompts us to consider the delusions of the everyday.
Consider the absence of revelation with which the world’s social miseries and their possible solutions strike us. We often make decisions on hunches, motivated reasonings, and instincts. The psychedelic drug may raise the volume of such machinery to psychodramatic heights. It certainly can make one more irrational. But this depends on navigating the psychedelic state for better or worse. One important function is ‘integration’, in which the ‘revelations’ are sorted through and ruthlessly filtered. The stakes of the psychedelic state are higher, with emotions and perceptions heightened, so that cognitive skills of mindfulness, sensemaking, and detachment undergo intensive training. More simply, it may be said that an essential knowledge obtained through the psychedelic state is to know what it feels like to take them. Psychedelia has been a mainstay of human cultures for millennia. It is difficult to know what they’re like without having tried them.
If the purposeless derangement of reason is immoral, we may ask whether the purposeless denial of enhancement is immoral, too. Hsiao mentions the use of caffeine as morally defensible, because it enhances cognitive work. We may extend this to amphetamine within considered doses, or modafinil if we are concerned by the addictive and euphoriant effects of the former.
Hsiao contends that the state is justified in enforcing prohibitionist policies to control the use of reason-damaging drugs. May the state use coercion to enhance cognition to the same degree? Governments already make education compulsory to late adolescence; taxpayers are threatened with prison to fund the schools. If a blind man decided to reject corrective surgery, simply because he didn’t want it, would we call him immoral? Or what of someone who rejects a procedure to correct colour blindness? Is the state justified in forcing them? Hsiao suggests that properly functioning reason and perception form the basis of freedom: the drug user is not free while he is intoxicated. Is the blind man less free? It seems so. May we override his freedom of choice to make him more free beyond his will? While Hsiao affords little prima facie value to bodily autonomy itself, these counter-examples may convince us to place the value in regard.
The priority of reason cannot be separate from the body. Physical health promotes cognition. Is it immoral to eat an unhealthy meal for the mere purpose of pleasure? Some fatigue and temporary cognitive damage will follow. We may ask whether ever failing to take a run, even when one is capable and has the time and knows it will deliver net benefit, is morally wrong. Even if these decisions were made once a year, once a decade, Hsiao must maintain that they are morally wrong. The programme implies a moral perfectionism in which virtues of humanness and spontaneity, so regarded in Zen and Daoism, are degraded. The human being loses their reflexive “common touch” in favour of a metallic and total system. Likewise, the ethical burden would be so great as to be unlivable, which would only damage reason. Calling trivial behaviours “immoral” may feel wrong for the more prosaic reason that moralism is anti-social. The Bible, for instance, is rich in commands not to judge, to pay heed to one’s own failings, and likewise to live by grace.
Concluding Thoughts
What I appreciate in Hsiao’s thesis is the moral seriousness of modifying one’s reasoning. The psychedelic state should be approached well and interrogated, its potential for delusion accepted. It may be advised to exhaust other options before taking the risk. But it is far from clear that drug taking, more than any activity and in a way intrinsic to the mind, is always and everywhere inadmissible beyond narrow domains.