In defence of mental integrity

There is substantial enthusiasm for a right to mental integrity in neuroethics—but less clarity on just what exactly that right would involve. A recent article by Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby and Peter Ubel presses a number of significant challenges to this notion—at least, that it is superfluous (since more familiar rights and wrongs already explain the relevant territory) and that it would demand too much (since we are not bound, in general, not to influence or interpret the minds of others). Responding to these objections can help us to see more clearly what is at stake in discussions about the right to mental integrity—and also what it would take to show that we should endorse rights like this, as a morally important set of considerations that deserve legal recognition. My claim will be that, as in the case of other integrity rights (bodily, territorial, data), mental integrity would have to involve the idea that a certain boundary must be protected in order to maintain the integration of an underlying system. This boundary, I argue, is not the same as the boundaries that define our rights regarding our bodies, selves or lives. Nor, I argue, need we understand any ‘crossing’ of it, without consent, as a mental trespass. I conclude by showing what it would take to fully specify the nature of the right to mental integrity, so understood, arguing that despite many difficulties such a right faces, we may well need it to account for the contours of mental morality.