Ethical restraint

There is a reluctance to attribute so-called bad behavior or loss of ethical restraint to a psychoactive substance. Western philosophy, religion, and tradition tend to hold human beings responsible for their harmful behaviors and eschew excusing such behavior on the basis of so-called mental illness. Indeed, the concept of mental illness has been subject to challenge by this author and many others. Nonetheless, the weight of considerable evidence indicates that psychoactive substances can play a role in causing suicide, violence, and other forms of disinhibited criminal... 

Third, many physical disorders also affect mental attitudes and behavior. Hyperthyroidism as well as overdoses of thyroid hormone can increase anxiety, irritability, and other emotions that the individual would not ordinarily experience and that can lead to behavioral abnormalities. There are, of course, many similar examples involving hormones such as testosterone and cortisone. More to the point, accidental brain injury to the frontal lobes and surgical lobotomy usually impair judgment, ethical restraint, and self-reflection. The character of the injured individual is often viewed as changed and worsened. 

The debate over human responsibility will always remain at root ethical and philosophical. However, empirical data must be taken into account. A mountain of experimental and clinical data, some of it reviewed in this report, supports the concept that psychoactive substances are frequently associated with an increased rate of disturbed mental and behavior reactions, causing some individuals to act as if they have lost their customary ethical restraint and self-control. 

It may be argued that some individuals will not lose ethical restraint regardless of the nature or intensity of an involuntary intoxication. However, even if some individuals are relatively immune to behaving badly under the influence of drugs, while others seem especially susceptible, this merely reflects human variation, a factor that complicates most research in medicine and behavioral science. The reality of human variation does not undermine the validity of the association between certain drugs and... 

Of course it always depends on what restraints are used and how they are used. As described in Chapter 2 there are two kinds of restraints direct and relative ones. The former restrain a variable (e.g. an interatomic distance) to a certain target value, while the latter relate variables within the model without imposing any outside values. Relative restraints generally exert much milder influence on the model than direct ones, and even a very large number of justified SADI and delu restraints cannot jeopardize the ethical integrity of the model. This may be entirely different with direct restraints, and the use of many strong dfix and ISOR commands to make the model look the way the chemist wants it to, can indeed result in questionable crystal structures. ... 

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