Alone With Our Thoughts

Here is an abstract for a talk I will be giving at the Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights Conference at Stanford University, this May. The conference will take place from the 26th through the 28th. My talk is entitled, "Alone With My Thoughts: Private and Public Faces of Cognitive Self-Determination."

Concerns with "recent inventions," "mechanical devices," new photographic processes and mass circulation newspapers preoccupied Warren and Brandeis’ canonical 1890 essay “The Right to Privacy,” just as quandaries with new forms electronic surveillance bedeviled privacy cases like Olmstead and then Katz. The pattern reiterates itself again and again, from the privacy debates that raged around cases securing personal autonomy in matters of contraception and abortion, through to contemporary debates about assistive reproductive technologies (ARTs), proliferating surveillance cameras and profiling software. Throughout its career, the notion of a right to privacy has been a unique and even primary location in culture in which we have negotiated our sense of personal autonomy and dignity in the face of ongoing technodevelopmental change. And in these debates, the notion of “privacy” itself has taken on many different forms and entailments.

Given this background, my first claim is quite simply that it is inevitable that competing conceptions of privacy will be central in legal, policy, and popular discourses we take up to cope with emerging neuroethical dilemmas. And my second claim is that we will want to be especially careful to foreground just those dimensions in privacy that speak to our particular concerns.

For me, the concept of informed consent is crucial as we struggle to balance demands of personal autonomy with demands of public welfare in the matters of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification that preoccupy our conference. And so, in my talk I will highlight those aspects in the history and concept of privacy that best facilitate legible performances of informed consent to procedures of medical modification. I will emphasize the ways in which privacy has articulated the notion of secure intimate associations (as between doctors and their patients, for example) and downplay the ways in which privacy has sometimes facilitated the disruption or dismantlement of public spaces.

For me, informed consent is not a “natural capacity” that we must recognize and defend but a kind of public “scene” that is constructed and maintained in our ongoing negotiation of the legal, normative, fiscal, institutional/architectural “lines” between the public and the private. To the extent that “consenting” is conceived itself as a kind of cognitive act the demand to secure the scene of its legible performance in matters of cognitive modification will bring into special relief, and possibly bring into crisis, the dilemmas that attach more generally to the defense of morphological freedom, defined as the defense of consensual practices of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive self-creation and self-determination.