Marc Jonathan Blitz – författare

Freedom of thought is one of the great and venerable notions of Western thought, often celebrated in philosophical texts – and described as a crucial right in American, European, and International Law, and in that of other jurisdictions.

Freedom of thought is one of the great and venerable notions of Western thought, often celebrated in philosophical texts – and described as a crucial right in American, European, and International Law, and in that of other jurisdictions.

This book asks if we have a constitutional right to see or sense our surroundings with technology.  Do we have a constitutional right to record our surroundings with cameras embedded in smartphones or drones?  Or to enhance our vision with extended reality technology, bionic eyes, or brain-computer interfaces? Courts in the United States have already provided a possible foundation for answering such questions.  There is, they have said, a right to document matters of public concern by creating and sharing recordings with others.  Such recordings extend our perception: They let us watch events that are remote in space and time.  Yet sharing them is also a kind of communication and thus, the creation of “speech” protected by the First Amendment.  So too might be other ways of seeing with technology. This emerging case law raises interesting questions and challenges, such as how enhancement of our perceptions can leave room for others’ privacy.This book explores such questions, focusing on American constitutional jurisprudence. It also argues that, in doing so, it is helpful to recognize that our interest in using and enhancing our perceptual power isn’t only an interest in doing so as part of First Amendment communication.  It is also linked closely to other rights - to personal integrity and the liberty to use our body’s perceptual powers and to the constitution’s protection for freedom of thought or what some scholars call “cognitive liberty:” Our exercise of perception and our use of it to learn about our surroundings is a crucial part of exercising our and shaping our mind.

This book is the second volume of The Law and Ethics of Freedom of Thought.  The first, published in 2021, explored conceptual questions regarding what a right to freedom of thought does or should protect, the history of that concept, and its implications in the twenty-first century.  This volume looks more closely at the challenges raised for liberty and privacy of thought raised by emerging neurotechnologies. In doing so, it analyzes arguments for “cognitive liberty” and how courts defining and applying freedom of thought in international law might understand the right and give it effect. The book addresses key issues related to mental privacy and the challenge of protecting it when the contents of our minds become more objectively manifested through techniques such as neuroimaging.  It also explores how questions about the privacy of thought relate to the challenge of more clearly defining the right to freedom of thought: What does the “thought” protected by that right mean more precisely, and does it enjoy a privileged, even absolute protection against the use by governments and private actors of new technologies of “brain reading”?Chapters 1, 2 and 8 are available as Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

This book examines the ethical and legal challenges presented by modern techniques of memory retrieval, especially within the context of potential use by the US government in courts of law.