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Cognitive Enhancement and American Constitutional Law

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NeuroPsychopharmacotherapy

Abstract

In recent years, there has been significant research and debate about whether individuals can – and should be able to – improve their memory or other aspects of their cognition with cognitive enhancement drugs.

This debate has largely been about ethics, but a debate has also emerged in legal scholarship about whether, if constitutional systems give individuals the freedom to shape their thinking in other ways (with books, conversations, software, or games), it should also give them freedom to safely do so with cognitive enhancement drugs. In the American context (which is the focus of this chapter), certain scholars argue that individuals’ long-recognized right to “freedom of thought,” under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, should, in the twenty-first century, be understood as a broad right to “cognitive liberty,” allowing us to shape our own minds medically as well as culturally.

This chapter provides an overview of this argument and then examines two major reasons why American courts might resist it. One concerns the risks and uncertainties about the safety of pharmacological cognitive enhancement. Individuals have constitutional freedom to take action that comes with at least some risks to safety: Many forms of protest can involve physical action government has cause to regulate. So it is not safety risks by themselves that weigh against finding constitutional rights. It is rather because courts may well find, in analyzing laws about cognition enhancement drugs, that it is harder to disentangle safety issues (that government does have grounds to regulate) from liberty interests (that government does not). A second reason courts may continue to treat different forms of cognition enhancement differently is that historical tradition does so – and traditional differences may, in rights jurisprudence, often override functional similarities. The chapter ends by considering how, even when individuals lack constitutional rights to use pharmacological means of cognitive enhancement, legislatures can give them “quasi-constitutional” rights to do so.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Other scholars have explored the implications of cognitive liberty in European law. Charlotte Walsh argues that right to freedom of thought and cognitive liberty in the European Convention on Human Rights justify decriminalization of psychedelics, and also argues that “should inform not only defences raised in court but also the discourse of drug policy activism more broadly.” (Walsh 2016). Understanding the constitutional status of cognitive enhancement might also be informed by a deeper exploration of scholarship on the ethics of cognitive enhancement in the United States and Europe. (See e.g., Jotterand and Dubljevic 2016; Hildt and Franke 2013; Helmchen 2021; Menconi and Dubljevic 2021).

  2. 2.

    It did so, for example, with respect to smoking cessation drug, varenicline. See Food and Drug Administration. FDA Drug Safety Communication: Safety review update of Chantix (varenicline) and risk of neuropsychiatric adverse events.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oklahoma City University School of Law, Okahoma City, OK, USA

    Marc Jonathan Blitz

Authors
  1. Marc Jonathan Blitz
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Correspondence to Marc Jonathan Blitz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept Psychiatry , Psychosomatics & Psychotherapy, University of Würzburg, Medical School Clinical Neurochemistry, Würzburg, Germany

    Peter Riederer

  2. Inst für Psychologische Medizin, Haag, Bayern, Germany

    Gerd Laux

  3. Fujita Health University School Medicine, Toyoake, Aichi, Japan

    Toshiharu Nagatsu

  4. Center Translational Res Neurol Diseases, Dalian Med Uni Shanghai Inst Health Sc Center Translational Res Neurol Diseases, Dalian, China

    Weidong Le

  5. Würzburg, Bayern, Germany

    Christian Riederer

Section Editor information

  1. Center of Mental Health, Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Peter Riederer

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Blitz, M.J. (2021). Cognitive Enhancement and American Constitutional Law. In: Riederer, P., Laux, G., Nagatsu, T., Le, W., Riederer, C. (eds) NeuroPsychopharmacotherapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56015-1_383-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56015-1_383-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-56015-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-56015-1

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