Alexandre Erler

Does Memory Modification Threaten Our Authenticity

One objection to enhancement technologies is that they might lead us to live inauthentic lives. Memory modification technologies (MMTs) raise this worry in a particularly acute manner. In this paper I describe four scenarios where the use of MMTs might be said to lead to an inauthentic life. I then undertake to justify that judgment. I review the main existing accounts of authenticity, and present my own version of what I call a “true self” account (intended as a complement, rather than a substitute, to existing accounts). I briefly describe current and prospective MMTs, distinguishing between memory enhancement and memory editing. Moving then to an assessment of the initial scenarios in the light of the accounts previously described, I argue that memory enhancement does not, by its very nature, raise serious concerns about authenticity. The main threat to authenticity posed by MMTs comes, I suggest, from memory editing. Rejecting as inadequate the worries about identity raised by the President’s Council on Bioethics in Beyond Therapy, I argue instead that memory editing can cause us to live an inauthentic life in two main ways: first, by threatening its truthfulness, and secondly, by interfering with our disposition to respond in certain ways to some past events, when we have reasons to respond in such ways. This consideration allows us to justify the charge of inauthenticity in cases where existing accounts fail. It also gives us a significant moral reason not to use MMTs in ways that would lead to such an outcome.

Mental Disorder and the Concept of Authenticity

Authenticity has recently emerged as an important issue in discussions of mental disorder. We show, on the basis of personal accounts and empirical studies, that many people with psychological disorders are preoccupied with questions of authenticity. Most of the data considered in this paper are from studies of people with bipolar disorder and anorexia nervosa. We distinguish the various ways in which these people view the relationship between the disorder and their sense of their authentic self. We discuss the principal modern accounts of authenticity within the analytic philosophical tradition. We argue that accounts based on autonomous, or wholehearted, endorsement of personal characteristics fail to provide an adequate analysis of authenticity in the context of mental disorder. Significant elements of true self accounts of authenticity are required. The concept of authenticity is a basic one that can be of particular value, in the context of self-development, to people with mental disorder and to others experiencing substantial inner conflict.

Academic Performance Enhancers and the Goals of a University Education

mative requirements on the kinds of dispositions and motivations that agents ought to have. I suggest that some tasks require agents to be self-motivated as a token of sincerity or authenticity for the task to be properly performed. This is why Motherol, an imaginary MED intended to motivate unhappy parents and schoolteachers to care for children, seems ethically suspect. It appears that the authenticity or sincerity of the agent’s motivation will be open to ethical scrutiny because of the importance of the interpersonal dimension of certain tasks. Such tasks take place within personal relations through which parties expect or desire to relate to one another as authentically as possible. Your friends, for instance, expect to relate to the “real you.” Relatively few tasks require unaided motivation. If Jill were my lawyer, I would be concerned with how well she pleads my case, not about whether or not this task is performatively or existentially meaningful to her. If Jill were my wife, however, I would be gravely concerned if she took motivation enhancers to summon the willpower to have sexual relations. The focus is on the “purity” of agency rather than on behavioral performance. Consider forgiveness: your friends do not just want you to apologize, they want you to apologize, and this “you” to be as authentic as possible. Drunken excuses are perhaps less valued than sober ones in part because of how difficult it is to summon the willpower to perform them. Whether this authenticity requirement is metaphysically deluded or not (and what ethical implications this metaphysical finding would have), which specific notion of authenticity would require medically unaided motivation, what kind of roles and relations require it and why, and what kind of harm MED would do to the agent taking it, to the agent’s role, to the relation it is affecting, and to other parties to this relation, are all issues that remain to be explored.

Intending Versus Merely Foreseeing Harm: When Does It Make a Difference?

Birks and Buyx (2018) offer an interesting and sophisticated argument to the effect that mandatory neurointerventions (Ns) applied to criminal offenders are ethically more problematic than at least “minimally decent” incarceration (I). While their reference to the impact of Ns on a subject’s mental integrity has significant plausibility, it seems to me that the particular version of the so-called Doctrine of Double Effect with which they supplement their argument to refute the Punishment Equivalence Thesis raises greater difficulties. Birks and Buyx thus argue that “at least some [harms to mental integrity] caused by Ns are intended, whereas the same [harms] caused by I could be unintended but foreseen” (133). They add that “this matters if one holds that it can be more difficult to justify intended harm than harm that is unintended but foreseen” (133). And there is no doubt that this principle has plausibility in certain paradigm cases. Such cases include familiar examples from the context of war (see, e.g., FitzPatrick 2012). Consider the two following variants of what I refer to as the “bombing case”: