Memory erasure as transformative experience: reconsidering the moral significance of neurotechnological interventions.

Abstract

We now possess various neurotechnologies that precisely modulate the nervous system. Among these, memory erasure technology (MET), aiming to weaken or eliminate traumatic memories via neuropharmacology, neurostimulation and optogenetics, has sparked intense ethical debate. At its core, the ethical complexity of MET stems from foundational questions about its moral significance. A neurophenomenological approach reveals that MET generates experiences that are epistemically and personally transformative, thereby influencing the process of decision-making. At the individual ethical level, the consequences of MET are difficult to assess rationally, as individuals make transformative choices amid profound uncertainty regarding how their experiential and value frameworks may shift in the future. At the social ethical level, MET challenges the legal, historical, distributive and epistemic dimensions of justice related to memory, while its transformative potential simultaneously offers opportunities to transcend existing forms of injustice. Thus, the argument that MET is morally unacceptable because it deviates from natural forgetting fundamentally misunderstands the basis of its ethical implications. The moral significance of MET is neither instrumental nor contextual; rather, it resides in the inherent capacity of neurotechnological interventions to generate transformative experiences that fundamentally reshape human moral decision-making.