Personal information about our bodies is collected and generated in abundance in research projects, for medical diagnosis and treatment, by health trackers and other consumer technologies, and for surveillance purposes. Our own encounter with this information raises ethical issues, notably on what and how bioinformation should be disclosed. Embodied Narratives by Emily Postan argues that to govern access to bioinformation ethically, it is essential to consider identity-based interests in addition to the commonly invoked concerns regarding the subjects’ health, avoidance of psychological distress, respect for privacy, and the promotion of autonomy and personal utility. Learning about one’s donor origins, genetic risks, or results from psychiatric neuroimaging can have far-reaching impacts on our identities. So far, the relevance of bioinformation for our identity has been recognized legally and in the ethical debate nearly exclusively for information about genetic heritage for donor-conceived individuals. This book offers a novel and detailed analysis of what our identity-based interests are, how bioinformation beyond genetic heritage impacts our identity interests, and which responsibilities for an ethical disclosure of personal bioinformation arise. Thereby, it significantly broadens the debate and provides a novel normative framework to identify identity-related ethical issues and their solutions.

Novel and emerging technologies can provide users with new kinds and unprecedented amounts of information about themselves, such as autobiographical information, neurodata, health information, or characteristics inferred from online behavior. Technology providing extensive personal information (PI technology) can impact who we take ourselves to be, how we constitute ourselves, and indeed who we are. This paper analyzes how the external, quantified perspective on us offered by PI technology affects identity based on a narrative identity theory. Disclosing the intimate relationship between PI technology and identity sheds light on a whole new range of ethical issues that have so far not received sufficient attention. Personal information provided by technology is not just information that belongs to individuals but that changes them.

Among the people who have been hailed for being particularly authentic are notorious liars. But this seems like a contradiction. Can you be authentic if you lie about what you value, believe, or feel? This brief article explores this question and the unique stances on honesty that different notions of authenticity take.

Novel technological devices, applications, and algorithms can provide us with a vast amount of personal information about ourselves. Given that we have ethical and practical reasons to pursue self-knowledge, should we use technology to increase our self-knowledge? And which ethical issues arise from the pursuit of technologically sourced self-knowledge? In this paper, I explore these questions in relation to bioinformation technologies (health and activity trackers, DTC genetic testing, and DTC neurotechnologies) and algorithmic profiling used for recommender systems, targeted advertisement, and technologically supported decision-making. First, I distinguish between impersonal, critical, and relational self-knowledge. Relational self-knowledge is a so far neglected dimension of self-knowledge which is introduced in this paper. Next, I investigate the contribution of these technologies to the three types of self-knowledge and uncover the connected ethical concerns. Technology can provide a lot of impersonal self-knowledge, but we should focus on the quality of the information which tends to be particularly insufficient for marginalized groups. In terms of critical self-knowledge, the nature of technologically sourced personal information typically impedes critical engagement. The value of relational self-knowledge speaks in favour of transparency of information technology, notably for algorithms that are involved in decision-making about individuals. Moreover, bioinformation technologies and digital profiling shape the concepts and norms that define us. We should ensure they not only serve commercial interests but our identity and self-knowledge interests.

A recent tendency in contemporary bioethical literature involves the understanding of authenticity as a necessary condition for the decisional autonomy of rational agents, rather than as a distinct moral concern. We can depict at least two directions amounting to the same reductionist view of authenticity. According to one of them, authenticity is not a very helpful idea in the context of bioethical debates (in particular, those pertaining to the use of biotechnologies and recent neurotechnologies such as DBS or optogenetics) as long as it is understood on its own, as a clean-cut demand, because it is basically one of the conditions for relational autonomy, and to be more specific for one generic dimension of it, which is self-governance. A second direction pertains to views developed on the basis of the standard individualist account of autonomy in bioethics, which also tend to disregard any potential tension between autonomy and authenticity concerns. For instance, from the point of view of a rationalist coherentist understanding of procedural autonomy, the value of authenticity might be regarded as a supplementary condition to the standard account (the latter entailing that an agent’s decision is autonomous when it is made intentionally, with understanding, and without controlling influences that determine her action). But the tendency to merge authenticity and autonomy runs even deeper and has to do with the way ethicists inspired by Frankfurt or Dworkin spoke about the ‘authenticity’ condition of individual autonomy, holding that “agents are autonomous when they ‘identify’ with the lower-order desires that move them to act following critical evaluation and confirmation by desires of a higher order”. We wish to argue that both ways mentioned above of understanding authenticity in close relation to autonomy are actually too restrictive, thus leaving aside important features for which people value authenticity so much in our culture.

That the world we seem to experience around us might be nothing but a simulation – perhaps generated by a demon or super-computer – is a perennial theme in science fiction movies. Muriel Leuenberger explores a recent example.

The potential of memory modification techniques (MMTs) has raised concerns and sparked a debate in neuroethics, particularly in the context of identity and authenticity. This paper addresses the question whether and how MMTs influence authenticity. I proceed by drawing two distinctions within the received views on authenticity. From this, I conclude that an analysis of MMTs based on a dual-basis, process view of authenticity is warranted, which implies that the influence of MMTs on authenticity crucially depends on the specifics of how memory modification would eventually work. Therefore, I continue with a systematic analysis of possible properties of MMTs in which I distinguish between the dimensions of memories and the kinds of experiences that can be modified as well as the properties of the process of memory modification. The impact of MMTs on authenticity is analyzed regarding the possible properties of MMTs and based on a narrative approach to authenticity which fulfills the requirements of a dual-basis, process view of authenticity. Lastly, I explore the potential of MMTs to shift the balance between self-discovery and self-creation within authenticity and thereby alter the concept itself.

The profound changes in personality, mood, and other features of the self that neural interventions can induce can be disconcerting to patients, their families, and caregivers. In the neuroethical debate, those concerns are often addressed in the context of possible threats to the narrative self. In this paper, I argue that it is necessary to consider a dimension of impacts on the narrative self which has so far been neglected: neural interventions can lead to a loss of meaning of actions, feelings, beliefs, and other intentional elements of our self-narratives. To uphold the coherence of the self-narrative, the changes induced by neural interventions need to be accounted for through explanations in intentional or biochemical terms. However, only an explanation including intentional states delivers the content to directly ascribe personal meaning, i.e., subjective value to events. Neural interventions can deprive events of meaning because they may favor a predominantly biochemical account. A loss of meaning is not inherently negative but it can be problematic, particularly if events are affected one was not prepared or willing to have stripped of meaning. The paper further examines what it is about neural interventions that impacts meaning by analyzing different methods. To which degree the pull towards a biochemical view occurs depends on the characteristics of the neural intervention. By comparing Deep Brain Stimulation, Prozac, Ritalin, psychedelics, and psychotherapy, the paper identifies some main factors: the rate of change, the transparency of the causal chain, the involvement of the patient, and the presence of an acute phenomenological experience.

Open Peer Commentary on the paper “Personality and authenticity in light of the memory-modifying potential of optogenetics” by Zawadzki and Adamczyk. In this commentary, I make a distinction between a process and a conservation view of authenticity and argue that authenticity hinges on narrative identity.

This paper presents a functional genealogy of essentialist authenticity. The essentialist account maintains that authenticity is the result of discovering and realizing one’s ‘true self’. The genealogy shows that essentialist authenticity can serve the function of supporting continuity in one's individual characteristics. A genealogy of essentialist authenticity is not only methodologically interesting as the first functional genealogy of a contingent concept. It can also deepen the functional understanding of authenticity used in neuroethics, provide a possible explanation for the prevalence of the idea of an essentialist true self and justify the use of the ideal of authenticity. First, essentialist authenticity is defined and explained through the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Second, a general need to have steady characteristics is derived from basic human practices. Third, circumstances that make it more challenging to steady oneself are identified and shown to have become more prevalent in the age of modernity when the ideal of authenticity emerged. Finally, it is shown how essentialist authenticity helps to steady the self.

This paper ties in with the ongoing debate on authenticity and the influence of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) on authenticity, in particular with the exchange between Pugh et al. and Nyholm and O’Neill. Both argue against a narrative approach to authenticity, which will be defended in this paper. First, it is shown that the critique they offer does not hold against a more refined view on narrativism. Second, a narrative approach to authenticity is introduced. To be authentic is to have a self-narrative 1) that is sustainable in the sense that it is easy to uphold because it is not in tension with one’s lived experience, and 2) that constitutes a well-defined person, which means that vastly different, more coherent and intelligible counternarratives are excluded. Third, the advantages of a narrative account of authenticity are discussed, including a short overview of the influence of DBS on narrative authenticity.