Abstract
Enhancement can be defined as the improvement of normal individuals. There are several categories of enhancement, including physical enhancement, cognitive enhancement, and moral enhancement. In this chapter, I focus on the argument that cognitive enhancement using pharmaceutical means could cause disruptive changes in personal identity. I distinguish between numerical and narrative identity. I argue that cognitive enhancement would have no effect on numerical identity, but it could affect narrative identity. Narrative identity approximates the common notions of identity because it is characterized as a first-person effort to construct a concept of self. Despite the potential effect on narrative identity, I argue for the permissibility of the use of cognitive enhancers. I maintain that psychological traits can change without disrupting psychological continuity. This view is supported by evidence that individuals experience a great deal of psychological change over time, and the evidence that even when those changes are caused by the use of medication, they do not always create a disruption in narrative identity. I conclude that cognitive enhancement is permissible even when it produces changes in narrative identity.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For more puzzles about identity of objects, see Nozick (1981).
- 3.
There is an alternative formulation of the problem of identity over time, based on which identity is conceived as the relationship that holds among continuant persons instead of among person stages. For more see, Lewis (1983).
- 4.
Locke provides a similar biological criterion: “An animal is a living organized body; and consequently the same animal,…is the same continued life communicated to different particles of matter as they happen successively to be united to that organized living body. And whatever is talked of other definitions, ingenious observation puts it past doubt that the idea in our minds of which the sound man in our mouths is the sign, is nothing else but of an animal of such a certain form…” (Locke 1995 ed. 178).
- 5.
See, for example, Schechtman (1996).
- 6.
Locke notes that sameness of consciousness could be realized in a variety of distinct substances, but remains neutral as to the nature of the substance. But he does argue that personal identity depends on the existence of that substance. Thus, if the self is realized by Mary’s pinky, and if the pinky becomes separated from Mary’s body, she would survive as her pinky finger (Locke 1995 ed. 186).
- 7.
Whether a sense of continuity depends on the maintenance of particular memories will be discussed further in Chap. 5.
- 8.
Such a criterion is described in Perry (1978).
- 9.
- 10.
The justification of this premise is based on the conceivability of the claim that an individual who has lost half of her brain (due to a stroke, for example) could still be judged to be the same person as before she lost half of her brain (see Nozick 1981, pp. 39–40). The premise should not be construed as a factual claim about human psychology.
- 11.
The thought experiments described in this paragraph were adapted from a series of thought experiments presented by Nozick (1981, pp. 39–43).
- 12.
David Lewis (1983) argues that problems of fission can be resolved through a weaker relationship of identity, i.e., tensed identity. We speak of individuals being identical at a particular time. New Mary and Old Mary were identical at all the times before the car accident, but they are not identical after the accident. In this way we can preserve our manner of speaking of there being one Mary before the accident and two Maries after that, but without postulating the relationship of identity between the one Mary before and the two Maries after the accident (Lewis 1983, pp. 12–24).
- 13.
In this illustration, degrees of psychological connectedness trail temporal proximity, but that is not required based on Parfit’s view.
- 14.
- 15.
I am not attributing this view to either Parfit or Nozick. In fact, Parfit adopts a very permissive view on what could constitute “the right kind of cause” (Parfit 1984, p. 215).
- 16.
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Gligorov, N. (2016). Cognitive Enhancement and Personal Identity. In: Neuroethics and the Scientific Revision of Common Sense . Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0965-9_4
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