Poll: Could there ever be such a thing as "ethical" mind control?

[BloatedGuppy]

Spoiler for Jessica Jones Episode 8 if you want to know what prompted the question:

Spoiler

Jessica takes Kilgrave to the site of a hostage situation, where he uses his powers to talk the hostage-taker into letting his hostages go before turning himself over to the police. Jessica tells him he saved four lives, and briefly considers whether it would be worth surrendering the balance of her own life to act as a caretaker for him, pointing him in the right direction and "using his power for good".

So, my question is this. Presume you had a power to make people do whatever you wanted. You could talk suicides off ledges, you could talk ideological fanatics into reason, you could talk dictators into humanitarians, etc, etc. You could impose your view of a moral society on the world, one hi-jacked brain at a time.

Regardless of the outcome. Let's say you saved thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives. Would the use of that power still not be a fundamentally evil act? Regardless of your intention, you are still violating someone in the most intimate way. You are making them a prisoner in their own mind. You are removing their volition and substituting your will.

Could such an act ever be good? Does the end justify the means?

PLEASE DO NOT POST JESSICA JONES SPOILERS I'M ONLY ON EPISODE EIGHT THANK YOU.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

Well this is sort of the same moral delima as "if you could go back in time and stop Hitler, would you?" The one thing is that stopping conflict can adversely effect human development. For example killing Hitler before he came to power could cause issues like the world getting a worse dictator, or the lack of exposure making things like concentration/death camps acceptable.

The short answer is this: If you have to ask the question; "do the ends justify the means?", or make the statement; "the ends justify the means." You can be fairly assured that the ends most certainly do not justify the means, it's a platitude to assuage one's own guilt in a matter. Nothing more, nothing less, because such statements are almost universally used to justify the most horrific crimes in human history.

As for the mind control question, that's a particularly tough nut to crack. Because using mind control can easy translate to changing who someone is on a fundamental level, even if it saves millions of lives, it's a deep moral gray area. There some very good things that can be done with it, while at the same time it's violating the sovereignty of another's mind. Also if someone could control minds easily there would be a strong temptation to misuse the power for personal gain.

One thing that comes to mind now that the subject comes up is a race trait from Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares. The race trait is telepathic, it's a default trait to the Elarian race. The trait gives automatic spying and diplomatic bonuses, along with the ability to use mind control to make a planet surrender to you, so long as you have a ship cruiser class or larger in orbit. Races without the trait have only a few options for taking a planet: Invasion, which is dependent size and effectiveness of the invaders versus the defenders, along with other racial traits[footnote]Some improve ground combat some harm it, like being high gravity versus being low gravity in origin.[/footnote] and applicable researched items[footnote]These include things like more effective infantry weapons, power armor, anti-gravity bonuses. Also defenders can get a huge bonus with armored units like tanks or giant fighting mechs.[/footnote]. Bombing life off the planet, then recolonizing the planet with your own people. Along with destroying the planet, rebuilding the resulting asteroid belt into a new planet, settling it, then terraforming it and such.[footnote]Requires access to: Stellar Converters, Planet Construction, an inhbited planet in the system to build a new planet, Terraforming, and optimally Gaia Transformation tech.[/footnote] All of which makes mind controlling the planet to take it over the best strategic choice, especially because mind controlled populations are automatically assimilated into your civilization. Still it leaves one to wonder is such a thing is an ethical choice, because you're preventing the death of millions, but at the same time you're robbing choice from the inhabitants.

So with that, I think it's a relatively morally gray subject matter, it's complicated and it depends on personal morals. Plus I don't think anyone here wants to know what would happen if I could control minds.

 

[TakerFoxx]

I guess it inhabits the same morally grey level as killing. Yes, there are times in which it is the lesser of two evils and might, in an immediate emergency, be justified as a way to save lives. But as an institutionalized system it would be downright horrible.

Though I can see it being ethically used as a form of therapy, provided there's consent. Like say someone who had violent impulses or some kind of addiction willingly allowing their minds to be tweaked to remove them, though that leads to another slippery slope.

 

[Zhukov]

*shrug*

People seem generally fine with imprisonment and killing so long as it's done to the right people for the right reasons.

Some will cheer for torture so long as the subject is called a terrorist first.

So what's a little mind control?

 

[I can't enter my old name]

Evil? Well that's silly. You could create world peace.

Mind control is like intimidation, except without the intimidation. You have someone doing something they otherwise wouldn't do, without any fear. It's about as unethical as tricking somebody, unless what you mean is literally possessing them. So in my opinion, how you pull your trick and what is the outcome is what's important, not how evil the action is in itself.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

I would put it in the same vein as killing. Horrific thing to do at random but justifiable in the right situation(Thought always debatable).

You mentioned saving the would be suicie victim, how far do you take that? Do you simply place a sort of geas on him that he just physically cannot ever commit suicide, do you just make him not commit suicide right now to give him more time to think, or do you go into his personality and rewrite fundamental parts of his outlook on life so that he becomes a happier person?

 

[Thaluikhain]

As others have said, I'd put it on a similar level to killing. If the police can kill someone holding a gun to a hostage's head, then they can make that person commit suicide. Or drop the gun, if that works.

Now, I want to know if it's ok to radically change the personality of volunteers. Large numbers of people commit suicide every year, what if you could offer them a new personality that would be happy...but was totally loyal to you?

 

[Jamash]

Doesn't ethical mind control already exist?

What about hypnotism to help people give up smoking?

Hypnotism is a form of mind control, and it's ethical because it's voluntarily consented to by the patient and it's for a beneficial reason.

If we're OK with hypnotism to help people give up vices or overcome fears, then I don't see why we shouldn't also be OK with other forms of ethical mind control.

On the flip side, if we're against mind control no matter how ethical, then never mind dramatic mind control from fiction, there's already plenty of dubious marketing techniques, advertising tricks and sleazy seduction techniques that border on mind control and are already being used today that we can focus our disapproval on.

Also, if any form of mind control is unethical, then were do we draw the line? Is medical hypnotism and therapy unethical because it interferes with a patients freedom of choice and makes them bend to your way of thinking? If someone wants to kill themselves, but another person uses their years of learned knowledge about human psychology to convince that person that their way of thinking is wrong and that they should follow a contrary way of thinking, is that unethical?

At the end of the day, is there really a big difference between relentless coercion to make someone think differently and brute force mind control, similar to is there much of a difference between an intruder picking a lock or just kicking the door down, since the end result is the same?

 

[Recusant]

"My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task. And the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain" -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"
Can it be ethical? Of course. The problem is mostly a lack of imagination in the responses I'm seeing so far. Mind control doesn't necessarily mean a complete subsuming of the will; it can be subtle. Witness marketing and hypnotism. Granted, marketing is rarely ethical in any but the broadest uses of the term, but that points to the broader issue: you're not robbing someone of free will if they don't actually have it in the first place. Cigarette smokers frequently want t stop, but their brains are desperately craving nicotine (and tobacco, too; if you don't smoke, don't start); resisting is more than simply a question of will. Replacing the impulses guiding one towards making certain decisions and choices is not inherently evil, the issue there is the absolutely insane potential for abuse, especially if one is subtle enough that one's victims don't know they've been modified. It's less the ring of Gyges than the ring of Gygax.

Probably the only way you could trust a person with the responsibilities of mind control is if they had their power-lust impulses governed by further mind control.

 

[Kyrian007]

If Cameron can't resist the urge to rule the earth with mind control...I suspect it could never be used for good for long before being corrupted.

Looking at another series take on the issue, Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series had a "class" of magic user called a "confessor" that could basically mind control someone. But it was a pretty stilted look at it. Use of a confessor's power was restricted to compelling criminals to confess or deny crimes... after the power was used the accused could not lie to the confessor. It was also only used when the accused requested to be confessed, usually when it was the only way anyone would believe their innocence. But it was just for the truth's sake, because after being confessed your mind was no longer your own and you only lived to serve the confessor. It was in effect the death of the person you were. And that's how I see mind control, basically murder, the destruction of what makes someone "themselves." So I suppose the answer for me is, if society can (and it often does) rationalize murder as ethically "good for everyone (or at least almost everyone)" then... I guess yes. But if I had that ability... well its one I would trade for just about any other power so I might get one I could use without all the guilt.

 

[Kyrian007]

Darn captcha, sorry for the double post. If it's going to error and make me do another, then why did it post a comment anyway?

 

[Strazdas]

lets preface with "If i could do it, hell yeah i would". That being said, the answer is still no. Perhaps you have saved some people, perhaps you have only used that power to save these people. the problem is, i dont know and cannot possibly know whether or not you have mindraped me to think that you only used it for good. Thats really a problem though, it is impossible to know how the power is used if you cannot trust that what you know is actually what you know and not just mind control.

On the flip side, if we're against mind control no matter how ethical, then never mind dramatic mind control from fiction, there's already plenty of dubious marketing techniques, advertising tricks and sleazy seduction techniques that border on mind control and are already being used today that we can focus our disapproval on.

considering how many people rage about clickbait, native advertisement becoming a dirty word and sponsored content not have huge flashing sticker claiming it is sponsored content is flat out illegal (at least in US), yes, we DO disapprove of techniques we know of.

Though I can see it being ethically used as a form of therapy, provided there's consent. Like say someone who had violent impulses or some kind of addiction willingly allowing their minds to be tweaked to remove them, though that leads to another slippery slope.

sci-fi has explored a similar concept of consensual memory wiping. It is a very scary concept when you think about it, and that is something that is probably going to be possible soon considering how fast neurology is progressing.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

I see a bunch of equating hypnosis to mind control, because apparently people don't understand how hypnosis works in the real world. As someone whose experienced being hypnotized, the first thing to realize is that all hypnosis is self hypnosis, so to even be put in what's called "trance" you have to have a willing subject. You see the parlor trick hypnosis where they make someone act like a chicken, but the funny part, I've never seen it done once where the subject wasn't a plant in the audience. Usually some obnoxious dude staunchly going "I can't be hypnotized!", seen it, also saw the guy back stage with the hypnotist both before and after a show. Aside from that, your unconscious, or subconscious mind as it's more commonly known, will not accept a hypnotic suggestion that you're staunchly against, it instantly brakes a hypnotic state. The only thing that hypnosis does is put you in a state where your unconscious mind can accept post hypnotic suggestions, those suggestions have to be acceptable to your mind, otherwise you'll break straight out of the state. Finally one big thing that's required with hypnosis is repetition, you have to go under several times to see any long term results, otherwise the suggestions will wear off as your set habits take back over. So no, hypnosis is not mind control.

Edit: One thing I will admit here is that some people are far more suggestible than others, usually the more creative a person the more suggestible, because they can go into deeper trances.

 

[PBMcNair]

snip

I'd say yes, in a limited capacity. Like talking getting someone suicidal off a ledge.
But then what ? You get them to help. If you tried to MC them into having a normal life, I'd consider that wrong.
How long would it hold ? What if you died, lost your ability, left some arbitrary range ? They may end up back on that ledge.

I feel a good example is the scene with the deathstick dealer in Attack of the Clones. Obi-wan uses his suggestion(MC) to remove a distraction. But he doesn't attempt to directly change the person, just suggests they go home and rethink their life. How they rethink, and what they do afterwards, is still their choice.

 

[NoeL]

I'd argue yes, without question. Grappling with someone's mind is no more inherently unethical than grappling with their body, and if there's no moral dilemma with karate-chopping a gun out of an attempted shooter's hand I don't see why anyone would object to brain bending to achieve the same goal.

 

[chocolate pickles]

Yep. In fact, every prisoner and degenerate criminal deserves it - if they can't play by the rules of society, then they should be forced to.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Yep. In fact, every prisoner and degenerate criminal deserves it - if they can't play by the rules of society, then they should be forced to.

Oh, that's a point...should anyone who takes an oath to perform a certain duty be mind controlled in order to uphold it?

Soldiers, police, politicians and so on.

 

[chocolate pickles]

Yep. In fact, every prisoner and degenerate criminal deserves it - if they can't play by the rules of society, then they should be forced to.

Oh, that's a point...should anyone who takes an oath to perform a certain duty be mind controlled in order to uphold it?

Soldiers, police, politicians and so on.

If they are proven to have broken that trust? Yes. As a standard? No. Soldiers and Police officers are generally better people than criminals, and so are some politicians.

Criminals already have broken that trust.

 

[wizzy555]

This will be one of those fundamental moral questions, like the geth dilemma from ME2:

Spoiler

why was mind rewrite paragon while blowing them up renegade?

I could see some serious situations were it may be permissible, like hostage situations. But frankly I'd rather the police or government just not have the power in the first place.