Cognitive liberty is a neuroright that protects the self-determination of mental processes. Its protective content comprises three components: the right to self-determination over one’s own state of consciousness, the right to protection from coerced neuro-surveillance, and the right not to be forced or structurally compelled into cognitive augmentation.
In terms of the ontology of personhood, the right is anchored in the interiority and in the personal autonomy of the person. The person is not a resource of the collective, the employer, or the state; she disposes over her mental processes as the innermost of herself. The notion goes back to Boire and Sententia (Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, early 2000s) and was prominently placed in the soft-law landscape by the 2025 UNESCO Recommendation.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: neuroright; related to: free will, right to freedom of conscience.
Three Protective Components
Self-determination over states of consciousness — the person has the right to modulate or not to modulate her own mental states of her own accord. This includes the right not to have to take medications, stimulants, or cognitive modifiers that are not medically indicated. It does not include the arbitrary right to administer to oneself any substance whatsoever — self-determination stands in relation to the truth of the good.
Protection from coerced neuro-surveillance — no one may be forced to disclose their mental inner life technically. This rules out coerced EEG measurements in the workplace, coerced imaging in criminal proceedings without a judicial order of the highest threshold, and all forms of sub-rosa decoding analysis.
Protection from coerced augmentation — no duty of cognitive upgrading. When enhancement BCI becomes available on the market, a competitive pressure arises that de facto compels augmentation: whoever does not go along falls behind in the competition. Cognitive liberty demands that this pressure be legally counterweighted — through protection of non-augmented employability, through protection of non-augmented paths of education and examination.
Anchoring in the Ontology of Personhood
Cognitive liberty is, in personalist terms, not an invented supplementary right, but the concretization of the person’s disposition over herself at the mental level. Three ontological arguments carry the level of protection:
First argument — the person as her own mode. According to Spaemann (Persons, ch. 5), the person is a being that relates itself to itself and in this self-relation takes up its mode. Whoever determines a person’s mental processes from without — through coerced surveillance, through pressure toward augmentation, through prescribed modification of consciousness — withdraws from her precisely the region in which self-relation is performed. The result is no diminution of ontological personhood (which remains), but a dissolution of the practical conditions of self-relation.
Second argument — protection of interiority as the space of personal acts. Unlike mere data protection, cognitive liberty protects not information about the person, but the space in which the person performs herself. Thoughts are not primarily data, but acts. Whoever penetrates the space of these acts, whether by the state or by the market, abolishes the condition of the performance of acts. Personalist ontology defends this space not out of a preference for privacy, but out of the necessity of performance.
Third argument — the right to the non-augmented. The dignity of the person subsists independently of augmentation status. A society that de facto compels augmentation contradicts this equality of dignity not through words, but through structures. The right not to be augmented is, in personalist terms, the mirror image of the right to therapeutic augmentation: both protect the person as what she is — not as what the market would like to make of her.
Conflict with Security and Market Interests
Security interests — criminal prosecution, national security — press toward mental decoding. Market interests — advertising, personnel selection — press toward mental profiling. Both are in principle unbounded without cognitive liberty; only a robustly enforced neuroright maintains the balance.
The EU AI Act already protects cognitive liberty at points: the prohibition of emotion recognition in the workplace and in educational institutions (Art. 5(1)(f), since 2 February 2025) addresses the market-side threat; the prohibition of subliminally manipulative systems (Art. 5(1)(a)) protects the free formation of the will. A systematic consolidation as a free-standing fundamental right is still pending in Europe — Chile undertook it in 2021.
Connection to Free Will
Cognitive liberty is not identical with free will, but stands at its side. Free will is the ontological capacity of the person to determine herself. Cognitive liberty is the legal and institutional safeguarding of the conditions under which free will can be exercised at all. Whoever is mentally surveilled or manipulated has not lost his free will — but he has no protected space in which it can unfold.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- UNESCO (2025): Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology.
- Sententia, Wrye (2004): Neuroethical Considerations: Cognitive Liberty and Converging Technologies for Improving Human Cognition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1013: 221–228.
- Boire, Richard Glen (2001): On Cognitive Liberty. Journal of Cognitive Liberties.
- Bublitz, Jan Christoph (2013): My Mind Is Mine!? Cognitive Liberty as a Legal Concept. In: Cognitive Enhancement. Trends in Augmentation of Human Performance, ed. Elisabeth Hildt & Andreas G. Franke. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 233–264.
- Future of Privacy Forum (2024): Privacy and the Rise of Neurorights in Latin America.