Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

6.3.6.
 
How many voices are too many? 
When we emphasise the fact that the narrative structure proposed by Ricoeur brings 
with it the danger of discarding meaningful perspectives and experience if they do 
not ‘fit the bill,’ the same objection can be mounted against dialogical perspectives. 
A strong A vs B (e.g. ‘being a mother’ narrative vs ‘having a successful career’ 
narrative, ‘being-Indian’ narrative and ‘being-British’ narrative, etc.) dialogue of 
narratives can lock a person in the perceived opposition, to the exclusion of other 
possibilities and experiences. A response to that problem could be a) discarding one 
of the options as less dominant or b ) treating one of the options as a footnote to the 
other, thus trying to merge the two narratives (both of which solutions could be a 
creative way of resolving conflicts but, arguably, also be charged with resulting in 
rejecting meaningful parts of experience).
Alternatively, one could work on enriching the dialogue with other voices. This last 
solution could be in principle pursued to the limits of the cognitive system’s 
capacity and result in interpretative and decisional paralysis. Many of us can recall 
the experience of trying to take into account several points of view and giving them 
their due consideration, which at times might have led to an exasperated 
exclamation: ‘I don’t know what to think anymore!’ Since the capacity of our 

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cognitive system is limited, we have to attend to some and ignore other potentially 
relevant and meaningful experiences. This happens both on a very early level of 
attentional processing (the top-down aspect of perception) and can also happen on a 
cognitively complex level of narratives and internal dialogues. I want to suggest 
that the cost-benefit analysis (epistemically and pragmatically) need not turn out in 
favour of a single, homophonic narrative view, even if the narrative is flexible, 
dynamic and can be rewritten.
How many voices and perspectives one can maintain (without decisional 
paralysis), and how strong and pervasive several voices can be maintained and at 
what cost, may differ between individuals. Moreover, I do not see a good argument 
in favour of a particular stance towards this issue. Just as writers may choose to 
develop and perfect ‘their own writing style’ or choose to play with a multitude of 
heteronyms, as in Fernando Pessoa’s case, similar options are open regarding 
identity – identity rooted in one or multiple voices or stances.