Speech Restoration & Mental Surveillance as Conflicting Ethical Concerns in Neural Speech-Decoding Research

The research program of speech decoding-"reading" words directly from brain activity-elicits an unusually wide range of public responses, reflecting a tension between the ethical goal of restoring speech for people with serious communication disabilities and the ethical goal of protecting mental privacy from neurotechnological surveillance. These competing moral perspectives are informed by intrinsic features of the research but also by the broader sociocultural context in which neuroscience is conducted and is communicated to an increasingly interested public. Whereas prior neuroethical literature has looked "downstream" from this research in proposing governance frameworks, in this paper we turn "upstream" to the neuroscience of language to consider how ethical tensions may be informed by the specific neural circuits from which speech is inferred. Our analysis identifies the communicative intent of neural signals as a key feature of some but not all speech-decoding strategies, and we argue that whether a speech BCI decodes linguistic information with or without communicative intent should inform assessments of the ethical implications of the research. At the level of public discourse, we show how such distinctions can inform responsible science communication about future advances in this fast-moving field.