Mental integrity, autonomy, and fundamental interests.

J Med Ethics

Center for Bioethics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Published: September 2024

Many technology ethicists hold that the time has come to articulate : our normative claims vis-à-vis our brains and minds. One such claim is the right to ('MI'). I begin by considering some paradigmatic threats to MI (§1) and how the dominant autonomy-based conception ('ABC') of MI attempts to make sense of them (§2). I next consider the objection that the ABC is in its understanding of what threatens MI and suggest a friendly revision to the ABC that addresses the objection (§3). I then consider a second objection: that the ABC cannot make sense of the MI of the This objection appears fatal even to the revised ABC (§4). On that basis, I develop an alternative conception on which MI is grounded in a plurality of simpler capacities, namely, those for , , and Each of these more basic capacities grounds a set of fundamental interests, and they are for that reason worthy of protection even when they do not rise to the level of complexity necessary for autonomy (§5). This yields a fully general theory of MI that accounts for its manifestations in both the autonomous and the non-autonomous.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jme-2023-109732DOI Listing

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