There is an explicit Talmudic passage that they tried to stop the sexual urge, and life came to a halt, so they brought the urge back. It sounds a bit like Freud. In my humble opinion, the message from that Talmudic passage is very clear: we have no interest in stopping the sexual urge.

There is a famous story about the Vilna Gaon, who asked the Dubno Maggid to say words of moral rebuke before him.
Since the Gaon would study with the shutters closed, the Maggid turned to him and said:
Is it any great wisdom to serve God behind closed shutters?? You have to open the shutters and overcome the evil inclination!!!

The Gaon said to him: You may be right. But I am not a trick artist.

The Talmud says that a person is forbidden to provoke his evil inclination.
Therefore, it seems to me that one should do everything within the framework of our earthly abilities, so as not to be caught in the net of that scoundrel.

Maybe you should also take a sleeping pill every time the Sabbath begins, and then sleep the whole Sabbath so you won’t desecrate it? Or cut off your own hands so that there won’t ever be a situation where you are without tefillin.

David,
These are simplistic examples. If you have an urge that makes it hard for you not to desecrate the Sabbath, I wouldn’t rule out such a pill. I already mentioned an appetite-suppressant pill as help for dieting (or even taking medicine to reduce a fever instead of waiting for it to pass). There is a very blurry line between cases where we use artificial means and situations where we do not. And the answer here is not nearly as simple as you are trying to make it out to be.

So in what situations do we use artificial means?
And another question: suppose I took the pill in question—am I exempt from forbidden sexual relations, for example the prohibition of seclusion?

To suppress all of life’s problems, you can take a cyanide pill.

As I understand it, this issue is also connected more generally to the whole category of pills that affect the mind and emotions, including psychiatric ones and others.
It’s also never clear to me what the distinction is—how far, and in what situation, it is appropriate to take them, and in what situation not. Usually there are many people on each side of the divide, because it feels to me like it’s very hard to put your finger on it.

I once heard a distinction based on Maimonides’ Eight Chapters: regarding rational commandments, if a person is not properly “fixed,” then he can take pills; but regarding commandments the Torah forbade, like shaatnez and so on, there is no point in taking pills.

By the way, this question is not entirely hypothetical, because as is well known there are many rumors about various places where they allegedly give the dear yeshiva boys pills against the sexual evil inclination…

Eitan, are you sure you’re with us? I answered twice that I don’t have a line, and you ask what the line is? I don’t know. To each person his own line, if any.
If you took the pill, you certainly are not exempt from the prohibitions of forbidden sexual relations. What does one have to do with the other? If you’re asking about seclusion, then simply speaking, no there as well. Though one could discuss whether we follow the reason for the rule, since the Sages themselves set different circumstances in which seclusion is permitted because there is no concern involved (her husband is in town, an open door).

K, in my opinion this has nothing to do with Maimonides’ distinction in chapter six of Eight Chapters. Even if it is preferable to straighten one’s heart, it may still be preferable to do so by yourself and not by means of a pill. In general, it is always better without a pill, but when there is a serious concern that you will not succeed, there is room to use one. Where is the line? I don’t know.

There is something to what David says.
If the urge is neutralized, has the person really kept the commandment? How is this different from a secular person who lives in a Muslim country and cannot obtain pork? Has he really been protected from the prohibition?
Or a normal person who would not eat human flesh (according to those who forbid eating a human being, like Maimonides).
Has a person who gave charity without intention and without faith really fulfilled a commandment?
I find it hard to believe that a person who has no possibility of committing a certain transgression has really refrained from that prohibition.

Interesting whether castration would also be an option. Maybe there is a prohibition, and there is also the commandment to be fruitful and multiply that has to be fulfilled, but perhaps a halakhic solution could be found so that he would not violate the prohibition. For example, he could freeze sperm beforehand, or the castration could be done in a way that would not violate the prohibition.

By the way, I remember a case from about a decade ago in which a Haredi man cut off his hand with a fish saw so as not to commit wasting seed.
It was reported at the time on Ynet.

The Last Decisor:
There’s also a story I read in Be-atzakh, I’ll copy it verbatim:

“I know this is not directly related to the course of the discussion, but I can’t help telling the following story (completely true):
A remarkably talented young man studied with me in yeshiva. Every so often his brother (who studied in a different yeshiva) would come to the yeshiva in order to study with him in havruta. On one of those occasions, the discussion turned into an argument over whether there is a prohibition to commit suicide through indirect causation. My friend argued that it is forbidden, while his brother held that it is permitted. Not long afterward, the brother committed suicide through indirect causation! (At the time he was an active-duty soldier. He tied a rubber band to a rifle and activated a mechanism that ended in a gunshot that caused his death.) He left behind a detailed letter explaining that nothing was bad in his life, but he also did not find much meaning in it, and so he decided to end it. The letter included a discussion of the dispute between the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai over whether it is better for a person not to have been created, etc.
At the time I was deeply shocked by this. I could not understand how a person could lose one of the most basic human values and yet still preserve his halakhic values without seeing any contradiction in that. Later I learned that there are indeed spiritual schools that try to build all their values on the world of Jewish law and nothing more. These are the results of adopting that approach consistently. I am still shocked, and I would be glad to hear the insights of the forum members on the subject.
(As stated, hard as it is to believe, this really happened. I attended the funeral, and during the shiva call the parents handed out copies of the letter…)”

Interesting when the day will come that a person commits suicide in a way that will not count as suicide according to Jewish law in order to avoid prohibitions that he may, or is highly likely to, violate.

And what about a heretic? Should he also take a pill that will prevent him from heresy? Maybe we should give him a lobotomy? After all, there are halakhic decisors who would see denial of a certain principle of faith as a transgression more severe than any other transgression, including in the sexual realm.
According to that, in the eyes of a large portion of the decisors, many of the commenters here are heretics, and it would be proper to make them stop their heresy by artificial means.

Pini,
A prohibition is not something you have to fulfill. You just have to avoid stumbling in it.
A commandment without intention depends on the dispute over whether commandments require intention, but even there a great deal of analysis is possible.

I would suggest just taking medication or some other treatment that would eliminate hearing and speech ability, and then you’d already be exempt from all the commandments.

Yes, but I’m talking about someone who refrains from a prohibition without real intention or faith. After all, a secular person who doesn’t murder is not doing so because he believes in a commanding God who determined that murder is forbidden. It’s hard to see that as refraining from the prohibition of murder.
Or a secular person who happened to sleep through the entire Sabbath—did he really keep it? And if so, what about a non-Jew who happened to sleep on the Sabbath and ended up “keeping” it? After all, he is liable to death.

What happens in a case where a person has no possibility of violating a prohibition—is he considered to have refrained from the prohibition, even though in a different situation he might have violated it?

True, regarding that secular person who does not murder one could speak about grasping the truth and acting on it, and according to some medieval authorities that might count, but in the other cases that is not the situation.

The medieval authorities expanded a great deal on the service of the limbs as opposed to the service of the heart.