Advances in neuroscience and neurotechnology offer the potential for extremely precise observation, collection and even alteration of human brain activity.
Emerging cognitive tools, such as brain-computer interfaces and transcranial magnetic stimulation, could bring revolutionary advances in medicine and our understanding of behaviour. However, according to Swiss-based bioethicists Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno, these techniques also raise fundamental questions about human rights that need additional legal protection.
Their concerns, published this week, are valid and appropriate, but we must be aware of the consequences of introducing such rights.
Advertisement
Humans have been intentionally manipulating our brains – and those of others – for centuries. From caffeine to meditation and even advertising, we have numerous legal and socially acceptable tools for trying to change cognitive behaviour. This list swells when we add other drugs and practices of more dubious ethical and legal status.
These methods are often clumsy and hard to measure (marketing pioneer John Wanamaker summed it up thus: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”), but seem to work well enough to persist.
It’s easy to see historical and even some present-day tools of cognitive manipulation as a kind of alchemy. But these are now giving way to a much more scientific and technological approach, and the methods to control the use of earlier forms of cognitive manipulation – largely crude regulation and opprobrium – aren’t suited to this new era of interventions.
Four rights
So Ienca and Andorno propose four core rights: cognitive liberty (the right to alter one’s own mental states with neurotechnologies); mental privacy (the right to forbid the involuntary reading of one’s mental status, structure and content); mental integrity (the right to forbid the involuntary alteration of one’s mental status, structure and content); and psychological continuity (the right to forbid the application of neurotools that would alter your personality).
In short, after establishing a right to say “yes” to your own cognitive choices, these boil down to a right to say “no” to the imposition of cognitive interventions.
These rights are already under threat from various directions, from Facebook trying to change user moods through social contagion to the burgeoning industry of neuromarketing. And while such efforts are currently more haphazard than harrowing, they point to a future of specific, intentional alterations of individual thoughts to achieve social, political or economic goals.
But Ienca and Andorno’s proposed rights also raise some dilemmas. Should parents have the right to alter the mental states of their children with neurotechnologies? Should we have the right to know if someone we depend upon – a teacher, a pilot, a president or prime minister – makes use of cognitive augmentations, or has refused to accept potentially useful neurotechnologies?
Do criminals possess these fundamental rights, and if not, at what point do we accept the involuntary reading or alteration of an offender’s brain? Does society have its own right to mandate the use of neurotechnological interventions that appear to offer a significant social benefit (imagine a neurotech “vaccination” against paedophilia, perhaps)?
These may be difficult questions, but this fact doesn’t render the underlying idea of basic mental rights invalid. Instead, it emphasises the need to begin relevant debate and discussion now. We cannot wait until these technologies are widespread before considering the wisdom of how they are used.
Life Sciences, Society and Policy
