Abstract
Emerging technologies raise the possibility that we may be able to treat trauma victims by pharmaceutically dampening factual or emotional aspects of their memories. Such technologies raise a panoply of legal and ethical issues. While many of these issues remain off in the distance, some have already arisen. In this brief commentary, I discuss a real-life case of memory erasure. The case reveals why the contours of our freedom of memory—our limited bundle of rights to control our memories and be free of outside control—already merit some attention.
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Notes
We happen to live in a world where memory erasure is strange and peculiar. If it were more common, doctors might be sued for negligently failing to erase memories. Then, we would confront questions about the valuation of traumatic memories that could have been erased but were not due to a physician’s failure to erase memories in a timely fashion.
There is even a growing field of “relaxation” dentistry that takes advantage of memory dampening techniques. According to an article in the New York Times, “[i]n the last five years, thousands of dentists have been trained to administer drugs to anxious patients using medications that doctors say create a mild amnesia for patients who are awake, but not necessarily alert, and may forget the whole experience or have only vague recollections” [9].
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Kolber, A. Freedom of Memory Today. Neuroethics 1, 145–148 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-008-9011-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-008-9011-y