Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

6.3.5.
 
Against Ricoeur’s homophony criterion 
An alternative approach within the narrative psychological view incorporates the 
thoughts that emerged from our discussion above and is rooted in the idea that life 
narratives can be conceived as the outcome of dialogical processes of negotiation, 
tension, disagreement, alliance, and so on, between different voices (or 
perspectives) of the self. This approach has been influenced by authors such as 
Hermans and Kempen (1993). Drawing on Bakhtin (1929/2000), they propose that 
the self resembles a polyphonic novel, containing a multitude of internalised 
‘voices’ engaged in internal dialogue. In this view, psychopathology is considered 
the result of fragmentation within those voices and/or the dominance of one voice 
over others. In stark contrast to Ricoeur’s view, a dialogical disruption can also 
occur when the diversity of voices collapses into the monologue of a single voice. 
The other voices of the self are silenced, making different constructions of the 
events difficult or even impossible. Accordingly, in these narratives, the 
construction of reality is characterized by redundancy and loss of complexity as 
experiential diversity is discarded or ignored. Thus, the aim of therapy is to 
facilitate a reconstruction of the patients’ repertoire of positions in such a way that 
he or she can move flexibly between positions (Hermans, 1997; Hermans, 1996). 
Although those theories do not explicitly consider situations when different 
‘stances’ are taken due to a biomedical intervention or changes in mood, the general 
approach can be consistently extended to such cases.

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Consequently, a person who chooses to use oxytocin for moral reasons and marvels 
at the different experiences of life that the change in perception gives, might 
experience a process of tension between those views that could be both confusing 
and creative. His narrative (or perhaps – dialogical) identity will be mediated by 
this internal discussion and we can easily imagine how his experience may be given 
meaning and structured in that dialogical internal environment. Thus, an internal 
story that does not fulfil the Ricoeurian criterion of homophony can nevertheless 
serve all the purposes that Ricoeur sees a narrative as fulfilling: the mediation 
between sameness and selfhood, structuring and making meaningful the voluntary 
and involuntary aspects of the internal and external, setting an environment in 
which life-plans are constructed and enacted. Thus, either homophony is not a 
necessary feature of identity-construing narrative, or narrative identities are not the 
only way in which one can make sense of one’s life experience.