No Longer “Super”: Soldier Disenhancement, PIAAAS Harms, and the Duty of Long-Term Care

The pursuit to manufacture “super-soldiers” using neurotechnologies to enhance the physical and mental capabilities of soldiers creates potential calls to disenhance some of them. By disenhancement, we refer to the deactivation or removal of devices that have enabled persons to possess new or amplified capacities so that they return to their pre-enhanced or “normal” states of being. This paper argues that disenhancement could produce harms to a soldier’s personality, identity, autonomy, authenticity, agency and/or self (or PIAAAS). Therefore, the pursuit of military enhancement generates the responsibility of military institutions to provide long-term care to soldiers undergoing disenhancement to mitigate any PIAAAS-related harms that may follow from their disenhanced state. This is a duty grounded in the values of beneficence and justice, especially the principle of reciprocity given the soldiers’ contributions to compromise their bodily and mental integrity in the service of a state’s sociopolitical goal.