Ethical Dilemmas Of Altering One's Memory

The concept of altering one’s memory has been with us for a long time due to science fiction and has some mixed feelings surrounding it. Some may consider that it would be a godsend to be able to erase or alter one’s memories. Others may think that would it create major issues. How beneficial would technology like this really be though?

Memories are how we store information in our minds. Research from Paul Reber, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University says all our neuron connections in our brains could be able to store around 2.5 Petabytes of information. This is approximately 2560 TB which currently would be enough for 300 million hours of TV shows or if you were to watch that non-stop 300 years. This is just the surface of
Conflicts between ethics do arise which create moral issues for the patient and the doctors in charge as it may go against one or more ethics if they follow what the patient wants/what the patient's family wants. There are four main principles in medical ethics which are Autonomy, Justice, Beneficence and Non-Maleficence. For a procedure to be considered ethical it has to meet all four of those ethics. Autonomy is where the patient must be aware of risks undergoing procedures and must make their own decision regarding procedures. Justice deals with the distribution of medical resources and whether a patient should have those resources used on them. Beneficence is where the doctor acts in the best interest of the patient and Non-Maleficence is “First, do no harm”. These ethics regard memory manipulation greatly as you would need to consider the risks of undergoing such a procedure such as brain damage, memory loss, personality differences and range of other possibilities that can go on as we research this topic further. These would create conflicts between Beneficence and Non-Maleficence as it may be of the patient and doctor's best interest to relieve the patient of their plaguing memory, but in doing so may put the patient in harm due to the risks or other possibilities that could occur. Morally this would seem like the right way of doing things. However, ethically it may not be. This would create issues in quite possibly how well this could be executed in the future, but mainly depends on how far the science can take us on creating an effective way of doing this