Of course it isn’t ethical to deliberately edit someone’s mind without consent.
An Orson Scott Card novel (or novel series, I can’t remember) called the Worthing Saga explored this idea a lot better than Men In Black did. Spoilers for the book are in the next paragraph, so if you intend to read it stop here.
A super-advanced group of humans with psychic powers basically babysat a few hundred worlds worth of pre-industrial humans. The psychics spent literally 100% of their time watching every single citizen, and preventing them from hurting themselves or others, “forcing” them to live in happiness and content.
So, how much does context matter? I was hinting at this a bit in my OP with the questions about situations and role models. I don’t think characters in comedies are generally considered role models, and I’m unfamiliar with the Orson Scott Card and Spider Robinson works mentioned with similar devices, so how about another well-known series which uses the device? In JK Rowlings Harry Potter series, there is an entire arm of the magical government dedicated to maintaining the “statute of secrecy.” The statute was designed to protect the wizards from persecution by non-wizards by segregating the communities. This segregation is performed by various means, muggle-repelling charms, hidden areas(like Diagon Alley and Platform 9 3/4), and members of the Ministry of Magic called Obliviators. These are the equivelant of the MiB using the flashie thingie. They modify the memories of people who have witnessed wizard activities. They seem to be generally more scrupulous than the MiB, and target only those memories, with deliberate full scale reprogramming being mentioned only once in the series as far as I am aware. Still, these characters are in a childrens novel, which is arguably the most popular childrens series in history. The Oblivators are “good guys” and I wonder if this sends a good message to the readers of the series.
For a more specific question, read below. This contains a minor spoiler(within the first six chapters) of the just-released Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Hermoinie Granger, in preparation to accompany Harry on his mission to stop Voldemort, performs extensive memory modification of her parents. She removes all their memories of her, changes their names, and implants a desire for them to move to Australia. This was done to protect them so they couldn’t be tortured for information about her, or indeed located by the forces of evil at all because they weren’t her parents at all. Her intention was to go back to find them if she survived and lift the charm, but if she did not survive then her parents would live the rest of their lives not knowing their true identities, that they had ever been parents, or pretty much anything about their past.The issue comes front and center, to me, with this development. Can this character continue to be considered a role model, as it has been thus far throughout the series? Is this action, well-intentioned as it was, a deal breaker?
On the ‘panic’ and thoughts of people upon finding that htere were, in fact, extra terrestrials living umong us -
If we, as a ‘society’ are still having trouble with skin color and sexual proclivities (from our ‘human’ counterparts), how do you think we would be able to deal with things that aren’t even ‘human’ but want equal rights, etc?
Context matters a lot, in that in the dramatic case of misuse of the neuralizer in MiB (Jay’s attempt to give a ‘happy’ scenario to the farmwife), he was clearly fumbling around and not knowing what he was doing. We are intended to laugh at his bumbling and the somewhat unexpected and random details he comes out with.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the neuralizer only effects a specified amount of previous time, and that with the exception of the two times it is used to erase MiB agent histories, it’s presumed to only be set for as long as it would take to erase the recollection of the recent incident. So, the only people for whom a significant amount of their past histories or identities are erased are the agents themselves; other people simply lose as little as a few minutes.
It’s also worth speculating about the sort of dumfounded, presumably suggestible state people are left in after being neuralized. This state is never explicitly explained, but at worst it means you’ll blindly accept whatever’s said to you immidiately after being neuralized. Of course, in the movie we’re never shown an agent using this for evil, so we’re back to the cops-with-guns scenario; they never use it for evil, so it’s “okay”, if a little problematic ethically. (Of course the next obvious alternative would be to incarcerate or eliminate all witnesses, so it’s somewhat relative, as well.)
As for the HP7 situation presented, [spoiler]I gathered in reading that that we were meant to be somewhat shocked at the drastic measure Hermione had taken, but to also recognize it as a self-sacrifice Hermione had made, in that it had clearly hurt her to make her parents forget her. Thus is underscored the seriousness of the situation, etc, etc, etc. I *don’t think that we were supposed to think it was a hunky-dory moral thing to do, but rather as a very difficult decision made for the safety of her parents and their mission.
Also I’m not sure how much of a moral example Hermione actually is. She’s on the side of light, yeah, but have you seen her when she gets jealous or mad? She’s brutal![/spoiler]
There also was a pivotal comic book that dealt with this a few years ago: Identity Crisis by Brad Meltzer. It’s revealed in flashbacks that for years, members of the Justice League (without the knowledge of the “big three”: Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman) have been erasing villains’ memories to protect everyone’s secret identities. After a supervillain invades their headquarters and rapes one of their wives, they decide to go further then usual and attempt to tweak his personality to keep him from attempting the same thing again. It doesn’t work as selectively as they had hoped, and after that, he’s still a supervillain, but inept and non-threatening.
Later in the series, it’s revealed that Batman “walked in” while they were doing it, so they took his memories of the night too.