Direct-to-Consumer Neurotechnologies and Quantified Relationship Technologies: Overlapping Ethical Concerns

摘要

In her target article, Karola Kreitmair (2019) discusses what she calls direct-to-consumer neurotechnologies (DTC neurotechnologies): technologies available on the market for monitoring or modulating neurological and psychological functioning. Kreitmair's aim is to identify a set of basic ethical concerns that apply to this class of technologies—a class which, Kreitmair acknowledges, is unwieldy. We recently undertook a similar project in a joint pair of papers (Danaher et al. 2018a, 2018b): we identified an unwieldy class of what we call quantified relationship technologies (QR technologies): technologies used for tracking or logging aspects of romantic or other intimate relationships with the aim of improving them. In our articles, we identified and critically assessed a set of ethical concerns related to such technologies. In this commentary, we wish to explore the relationship between our treatment of the ethics of QR technologies and Kreitmair's treatment of the ethics of DTC neurotechnologies. We see the classes of DTC neurotechnologies and QR technologies as overlapping or intersecting. Accordingly, some of the ethical concerns that we discussed in relation to QR technologies should plausibly be added to the list of basic ethical concerns about DTC neurotechnologies that Kreitmair has assembled. Below, we first explain and motivate this claim, and then discuss the status of these different ethical concerns. In particular, we ask whether they should be regarded as knockdown arguments against these technologies, or as ethical constraints to be respected in their potential development or use. Before proceeding, however, we wish to note that we are in broad agreement with most—if not all—of what Kreitmair argues in her article. What follows is therefore not so much a criticism of her discussion as it is an attempt to develop and expand upon it.