Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

6.2.
 
Schechtman’s objection to the use of direct brain modulation 
6.2.1.
 
Schechtman’s account of narrative identity 
An influential account of narrative identity, and one that has been explicitly applied 
to the assessment of DBS, is that of Schechtman. Schechtman (1996) makes a 
distinction between a re-identification question (what makes someone the same 
person over time) and characterisation question (what it is to be a particular 
person). She argues that while psychological continuity theorists such as Parfit 
(1984) focus on the former, the latter also merits consideration. According to 
Schechtman:
‘[I]ndividuals constitute themselves as persons by coming to 
think of themselves as persisting subjects who have had 
experience in the past and will continue to have experience 
in the future, taking certain experiences as theirs… A 
person’s identity … is constituted by the content of her self-
narrative, and the traits, actions, and experiences included in 
it are, by virtue of that inclusion, hers.’ (Schechtman, 1996, 
p. 94) 
The characterisation question deals with the ‘set of characteristics that make a 
person who she is’ and is relevant to discussing identity crises, which Schechtman 
understands occur when a psychological state (or combination of states) do not 
cohere with a subject’s total psychology. Consequently, in an identity crisis, a 
subject is unable to integrate such a state as a comprehensible part of his life and to 
accept it to be his own. The approach resembles concerns about authenticity 
(asking, ‘Is the life that I am living my own in a relevant sense?’). However, in the 
narrative account of identity the focus is on whether a subject ‘creates their identity 
by forming an autobiographical narrative — a story of his life’ (Schechtman, 1996, 
p. 113).

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Schechtman raises the question of the criteria required for narratives to confer 
identity, since not all narratives can be identity-constituting. According to 
Schechtman, 
for a self-narrative to be identity-constituting, it must satisfy two 
constraints. First is the articulation constraint (the person must be able to provide 
some account of her history, her life situation, and her motivations) and another is 
the reality constraint (the self-narrative must be coherent with basic facts about how 
the world is).