[gramontblanc]

Moral problems arise not from curing suffering being morally wrong, but the leakage of moral responsibility in medical/psychiatric practice outside of research.

Any tool to 'correct associative pathways' will be used for the conversion therapy of children, punishment of apostates by repressive states, and torture of the criminally convicted within one generation of it's inception. My primary hope for the memory reconsolidation therapies require some kind of actual moment by moment deliberate cooperation by the treated, and can't be performed without an expert (hopefully) bound by professed vows.

[derefr]

I don't see the argument. Pretty much anything can be used for torture. Taking tools of torture away doesn't do anything to stop torture—you can, ultimately, torture somebody (all the way into full-on brainwashing!) with nothing more than your own words and hands. That's how domestic abuse works, usually!

The ethics of state-sponsored torture (and/or state-sponsored "mind control" like conversion therapy) are fundamentally political ethics—i.e. the ethics of choosing which political "machinery" to build, where different formulations of a state can ensure to different degrees that any given (ultimately self-serving) state apparatus will be properly bound to human rights, and properly watched over by people empowered to see and report any human-rights violations that arise.

[gramontblanc]

The use of psychiatric techniques as torture is the history of psychiatry. This is not some petty joke or argumentative stance.

Do you think that Henry Cotton was a problem of political ethics? Supposedly his reputation and political status were so high in his society that patients and their families actively asked for their teeth, gallbladders, ovaries, testes, tonsils, ... to be spuriously removed.

Edit: I mean to say that serious contemplation of the risks and benefits of any medical interventions should always be taken seriously regardless of how severe a medical problem might seem or how exciting a miraculous new cure might appear to be. Most miraculous cures not only don't 'work', but also caused serious harm to their subjects throughout the history of psychiatric medicine.

[lstodd]

Correction of associative pathways is called "learning".

"Memory reconsolidation" my ass. It is used since before there was any civilization worth the name.