why not do both. But yes, after taking a pill it's very easy to forget about the need to improve environment. Until you need to take another pill again, and again...
It's literally the point of Brave New World. The whole populace is hooked on beneficial drugs so they don't want to improve themselves and their society.
Would you feel differently if instead of being hooked on drugs, we deployed gene therapy at scale to patch the dysfunctional pathways Western society and economies have taken advantage of? What if patching the genome is helping people so that they have capacity to contribute more to improving society? Consider not only the metabolic changes a GLP-1 agonist encourages (a vaccine against Western diet, if you will), but also inhibits addiction.
GLP-1 pharma intervention is breadboarding the human, next step is a permanent fix. Adversarial bioengineering, if you will.
Then you get into Iain Banks' The Culture where every citizen is basically an artificial creation. I have no problem with any specific solution to our societal problems, I take issue with their externalities.
Regarding your proposed gene therapy, would this gene therapy be available to anyone? Could it be refused? Is it reversible? Who would pay for it? The beauty of The Culture is that it is not monolithic, has no border, has godlike AI that takes care of all the problems, and can be abandoned or joined by anyone.
I think we are quite a bit away from that future, but I can understand the concern and moral hazard, the future is hard to predict. In the near term, if we can fix this specific reward and metabolic pathway with gene therapy, the therapy is safe, and can be made broadly available, I think it should be done.
I think the cost of the pill is a pretty strong incentive to want to stop taking it. If the pill is cheap and harmless, then that's just great, there's no need to spend effort improving your environment at all, you've solved the problem already.
