Concept

Neuroethics

Overview

In philosophy and neuroscience, neuroethics is the study of both the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. The ethics of neuroscience concerns the ethical, legal, and social impact of neuroscience, including the ways in which neurotechnology can be used to predict or alter human behavior and "the implications of our mechanistic understanding of brain function for society... integrating neuroscientific knowledge with ethical and social thought".

Some neuroethics problems are not fundamentally different from those encountered in bioethics. Others are unique to neuroethics because the brain, as the organ of the mind, has implications for broader philosophical problems, such as the nature of free will, moral responsibility, self-deception, and personal identity. Examples of neuroethics topics are given later in this article (see "Key issues in neuroethics" below).

The origin of the term "neuroethics" has occupied some writers. Rees and Rose (as cited in "References" on page 9) claim neuroethics is a neologism that emerged only at the beginning of the 21st century, largely through the oral and written communications of ethicists and philosophers. According to Racine (2010), the term was coined by the Harvard physician Anneliese A. Pontius in 1973 in a paper entitled "Neuro-ethics of 'walking' in the newborn" for the Perceptual and Motor Skills. The author reproposed the term in 1993 in her paper for Psychological Report, often wrongly mentioned as the first title containing the word "neuroethics". Before 1993, the American neurologist Ronald Cranford had used the term (see Cranford 1989). Illes (2003) records uses, from the scientific literature, from 1989 and 1991. Writer William Safire is widely credited with giving the word its current meaning in 2002, defining it as "the examination of what is right and wrong, good and bad about the treatment of, perfection of, or unwelcome invasion of and worrisome manipulation of the human brain".

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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It loses its thinness and shrillness as well as its vagueness. It gains agencies that are efficacious. But the gain is not confined to the side of moral science. Natural science loses its divorce from humanity; it becomes itself humanistic in quality. It is something to be pursued not in a technical and specialized way for what is called truth for its own sake, but with the sense of its social bearing, its…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
States what Neuroethics is.
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It is suggestive that European philosophy originated (among the Athenians) under the direct pressure of educational questions. The earlier history of philosophy, developed by the Greeks in Asia Minor and Italy, so far as its range of topics is concerned, is mainly a chapter in the history of science rather than of philosophy as that word is understood to-day. It had nature for its subject, and speculated as to how…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Neuroethics is.
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It is customary, however, to include under the term moral knowledge, and even (though improperly) under that of moral science, an inquiry the results of which do not express themselves in the indicative, but in the imperative mood, or in periphrases equivalent to it; what is called the knowledge of duties; practical ethics, or morality. Now, the imperative mood is the characteristic of art, as distinguished from…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Neuroethics is.
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Philosophers who discussed Neuroethics

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Outline of ethics

Place in the tradition

Part of Bioethics.

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