New paper on public views of doctors’ use of illegal stimulants for performance enhancement published in Neuroethics

Would you want to be treated by a surgeon who uses an illegal stimulant to perform better? In this paper, we report two factorial survey experiments with Germany-wide random samples of adults (N = 1,346 and N = 2,161). Grounded in the Agent–Deed–Consequence model of moral judgment, we varied whether a surgeon had egoistic or altruistic motives, whether they prepared for surgery or used the illegal stimulant “speed” to enhance performance, and whether the surgery succeeded or failed. Stimulant use substantially lowered moral judgments of the surgeon, which in turn partly explained respondents’ lower willingness to be treated by them. The surgeon’s motives and the outcome of the surgery further shaped these effects. Our findings suggest that the public views illegal neurocognitive enhancement by doctors as morally problematic, which professional bodies should consider in order to maintain trust in medical care.

Read the paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-026-09637-5