Article Text
Abstract
In this paper, I focus on a kind of medical intervention that is at the same time fascinating and disturbing: identity-changing interventions. My guiding question is how such interventions can be ethically justified within the bounds of contemporary bioethical mainstream that places great weight on the patient's informed consent. The answer that is standardly given today is that patients should be informed about the identity effects, thus suggesting that changes in identity can be treated like ‘normal’ side effects. In the paper, I argue that this approach is seriously lacking because it misses important complexities going along with decisions involving identity changes and consequently runs into mistakes. As a remedy I propose a new approach, the ‘perspective-sensitive account’, which avoids these mistakes and thus provides the conceptual resources to systematically reflect on and give a valid consent to identity-changing interventions.
- Informed Consent
- Decision-making
- Deep Brain Stimulation
- Neuroethics
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Funding Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (WI 4519/2-1).
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
- The concise argument
Other content recommended for you
- Comparative effectiveness of neuroablation and deep brain stimulation for treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder: a meta-analytic study
- Deep brain stimulation for obsessive–compulsive disorders: long-term analysis of quality of life
- Competence, Consent and Complexity
- Neuropsychological changes following deep brain stimulation surgery for Parkinson's disease: comparisons of treatment at pallidal and subthalamic targets versus best medical therapy
- Stimulating brains, altering minds
- Comparison between deep brain stimulation and magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound in the treatment of essential tremor: a systematic review and pooled analysis of functional outcomes
- Incoming ethical issues for deep brain stimulation: when long-term treatment leads to a ‘new form of the disease’
- The burden of normality: from ‘chronically ill’ to ‘symptom free’. New ethical challenges for deep brain stimulation postoperative treatment
- Outcomes from stereotactic surgery for essential tremor
- Early versus Late Application of Subthalamic deep brain Stimulation to Parkinson’s disease patients with motor complications (ELASS): protocol of a multicentre, prospective and observational study