You are at a dinner party with Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, Henry Ford, Aristotle, Carol Gilligan, and a couple more of your favorite philosophers and intellectuals. You bring up in conversation one of the topics that was discussed in your discussion section for the E125 class. How will you explain this topic and the ethical issues that emerge from it to Jeremy, John, Immanuel, Henry, Aristotle, Carol and the other people who are present at the party? How will they respond?

If I were talking to Jeremy Bentham about manipulating memories, I would tell him about how

In terms of utilitarianism, Jeremy will most likely respond favorably. The ethical issues that would arise would most likely revolve around using memories for psychological therapy and treatment, as well as for pleasure. Because memories are a personal object, it only seems to affect one person. Thus, if the memory engineering can be beneficial to that one person, then it is moral according to Bentham.

John Stuart Mill would seem to agree to a certain extent. Because memories are exclusive to each person, by the freedom principle, people should be allowed to manipulate their own memories if they want. However, he may bring up some concern about how memory engineering might be used to treat sociopaths and psychopaths.

Kant may not be able to find much wrong. Because memory engineering is so new, there aren’t very many norms that could be brought up when talking about this. However, on the ethical issues, but he wouldn’t agree that memory engineering to include happiness or pleasure are not the driving force for the morality of such actions but rather the duties involved.

Henry Ford seemed to be absolutely ecstatic about the idea.  The ability to implant memories can help to artificially craft people’s memories, specifically how to build a car for example. Typical of his Fordist philosophy, he sees the idea of being able to manipulate memories as a step to change man’s brain to contain more information, just like a robot.

Aristotle sees memory engineering as a possibility to instill memories into people as just the start of what might be possible: to implant virtues into people. By giving children especially these memories, the brain can help guide them, along with their moral superiors, to be more virtuous: that is, more honest, kind, intelligent, for example.

Carol Gilligan, however, seemed really antithetical to the whole idea. She was worried that falsifying memories would cheapen actual experiences, and the concept of “walking in another person’s shoes” could imply be as easy as taking an injection of a memory supplement. Thus, the moral wasn’t really learned but was manufactured.