As regular readers will know, Gabriele Giacomini is a long-time friend of the Bassetti Foundation. Alongside his own multi-media production carried on the website, readers can also find a review of his recent book The Arduous Road to Revolution. Resisting Authoritarian Regimes in The Digital Communication Age, which very much sets the stage for his latest publication that opens the Artificial Intelligence, Neurotechnologies, and Neuroethics Special Issue of the Neuroethics journal.

This particular special issue aims to collect interdisciplinary perspectives on the ethical and societal implications of emerging neurotechnologies, particularly closed-loop and affective Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). A central aim is to advance the debate by moving beyond traditional dichotomies (e.g., natural/artificial, treatment/enhancement) and explore an alternative welfarist-oriented framework for neuroethics, the main question addressed being the extent to which neurotechnologies ultimately support or undermine human flourishing and well-being.

Giacomini contributes The Habeas Mentem Principle. Reframing Neurorights in the Digital Age, addressing the question of how mental freedom and citizens’ decisional autonomy can be defended in an era in which political and technological power is capable of intervening in individuals’ cognitive, emotional, and decision-making processes.

The author critically analyzes the ambivalent role of digital technologies in processes of political mobilisation and authoritarian control, showing how they may weaken, rather than strengthen the right to liberty theorised by the liberal tradition. Giacomini proposes the principle of Habeas Mentem as a contemporary extension of classical guarantees of liberty, intended to safeguard mental freedom, cognitive integrity, and citizens’ privacy, and to provide a theoretical basis for new rules, rights, and institutions.

He advances the thesis that the protection of mental freedom cannot be ensured through a single regulatory instrument nor through the mere formal recognition of subjective rights. Rather, it requires a multi-level institutional architecture capable of integrating neurorights, algorithmic regulation, antitrust policies, infrastructural transparency, critical education, and the production of cognitive public goods.

Moving beyond the arguments addressed in his book linked above related to authoritarian regimes, the author argues that the transition from digital repression to cognitive repression should be understood in a specific sense: censorship, surveillance, internet shutdowns, and algorithmic propaganda do not affect only external communication, but also the conditions through which individuals orient themselves, form judgements, regulate fear, and decide whether to act politically.

Addressing this as a political dimension of mental freedom, Giacomini highlights the risk that liberal democracies may also drift into suppressing democratic autonomy if digital technologies operate in the absence of effective rights, independent oversight, informational pluralism, and adequate institutional checks and balances.

Governments, together with technology companies, now possess tools capable of systematically influencing citizens’ attention, preferences, beliefs, and political behaviour, creating the need for a systematic framework of protection that would require the integration of neurorights (such as cognitive liberty and the protection of privacy) into the concept of Habeas Mentem.  Such a framework would entail the establishment of independent authorities, mechanisms of public supervision, and instruments of legal accountability capable of monitoring the exercise of mental power, in order to defend individuals against illegitimate forms of cognitive interference, informational exploitation, neural and behavioural surveillance, and algorithmic manipulation.

Such social, institutional, and epistemic conditions would allow citizens to form autonomous judgements, access pluralistic information, understand digital environments, and participate meaningfully in democratic life. These conditions would have to be defined by individual and digital rights, the separation of digital power, platform regulation, and antitrust. Education, cognitive welfare, and informational pluralism would express its social and enabling dimension, alongside a division of power that would involve strengthening antitrust competences and criteria, as well as intensifying oversight of major technology companies.

The author concludes that Habeas Mentem may be conceived as a principle of the integration of rights, rules, and institutions which is aimed at ensuring that the cognitive power exercised through technologies respects citizens’ freedom.

This is a very stimulating open access publication which we have great pleasure in recommending to all of our readers.