Cognitive Modification and Consent

Emerging pharmacological interventions into mood, memory, and perception are growing more sophisticated and ubiquitous. These developments are taking place in the context of the disastrous racist and puritanical War on (some but not other) Drugs (by means of yet other Drugs), which perniciously distorts nearly every effort to think clearly about the issues involved.

My first impulse (as your typical "Pro-Choice" liberal feminist queer) is to say that of course people should always be able to do what they want with their own bodies and brains, so long as they do not endanger the health, safety, or wellbeing of others to whom they are responsible. But come to think of it, we will not be able to rely on a naïve voluntarism to govern decisions about the kind of radical cognitive modifications that are arriving soon, and of which contemporary pharmacological interventions are the first premonition. This is because the whole point of too much cognitive modification will be to intervene in the capacities and effects on the basis of which we judge something to be voluntary in the first place.

It is easy to imagine intelligence enhancements for which the case could be made that only someone who has undergone the enhancement itself is in a position to be considered fully informed about it. Is it easy to imagine cognitive modifications that would induce hyper-efficacious kinds of monomania or enable forms of exhilaration or special sensitivities that simply could not be judged "rational" or "sane" by the standards of normative conduct that underlie these judgments now.

What if a person seeks to erase significant stretches of painful memory or to efface what have been characteristic but are now unwanted elements of personality? (Or, to speculate in a wilder-eyed way for the longer term, what if a person chooses to immerse themselves via, say, a neural interface into a distributed network in a way that seems to subordinate their individuality to something more like a collective mind?) What of the claims of loved ones that such modifications will constitute a kind of suicide, or more strongly are signs of incompetence justifying custodial protection?

What is wanted in general for now is policy that simultaneously: one, encourages the development of useful neuroceuticals and increased research into their effects; two, liberalizes their availability to those who want to use them; three, restricts the circumstances in which their use would be imposed by authorities; and four, increases education into effects to ensure that individual choices are informed ones. But I fear this center will not hold for long.

Eventually, it may be that the contemporary association of "consent" with privacy will be displaced by a state of affairs in which the maintenance of consent will rely very conspicuously on public monitoring, reversibility of modification, and maintaining mediated pathways to intersubjective intelligibility even where there can be no assurance that political peers will be able to communicate with one another even in principle their individual stakes in the world they share.