Michael Thomas Grooff

In this article, I argue that Peter Kropotkin presents, throughout his works, an apparently contradictory account of sympathy as the driving force behind mutual aid, particularly in his Anarchist Morality. Though he claims to follow the Smithian account, he simultaneously contradicts it. Moreover, if we were to accept Kropotkin’s own claim of following Smith, we would no longer be able to make sense of mutual aid as a broad drive in (non-human) animal life. To make sense of this, I argue for a bipartite reading of Kropotkin’s account of sympathy in terms of both simulation and perception. In my analysis of the latter, I borrow from the phenomenological tradition and its conception of ‘empathy’, which I use to argue that an understanding of sympathy through perception solves the problem of animal sympathy as well as to provide a better account of sympathy as the basis of morality.

Established by the 1971 United Nations (UN) Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the prohibition of the recreational use of psychedelics (lysergic acid diethylamide [LSD], psilocybin, N,N-dimethyltryptamine [N,N-DMT], and mescaline) has two premises. First, recreational use poses a serious threat to public health because psychedelics are highly liable to addiction and abuse. Second, psychedelics have only limited scientific and medical uses. In this article, we raise the following questions: are these premises true such that prohibition is justified? If not, are decriminalization and legal regulation justified alternatives? Drawing on interdisciplinary research, we show that the premises of prohibition are false. Psychedelics are not highly liable to addiction or abuse, and so recreational use is not a serious threat to public health. Moreover, the uses of psychedelics exceed medical and scientific uses. Prohibition, we conclude, is therefore unjustified. We then show that decriminalization is based on the same false premises as prohibition, that legal regulation is based on weaker versions of these premises, and thus that both alternatives entail unjustified restrictions on recreational users. Finally, we present a fourth approach: communalization. This entails that all adults have the freedom to recreationally use psychedelics without restrictions and that communities provide harm reduction and benefit enhancement services to support this freedom.