INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE IN NEUROETHICS

Abstract

Neuroethics is a field that studies the implications of modern neuroscience for human self-understanding, ethics, and policy. Although neuroethics is, by its very nature, interdisciplinary, it includes issues that naturally lend themselves to broader philosophical analysis. As soon as we reject any general ban on altering or digging into the human mind, as we believe is increasingly the case today, it becomes important to think about the values to be used in deciding for or against any proposed intervention, as well as about the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions on the basis of which such decisions are made. Having this perspective in mind, what we wanted to do in this special issue was to find the most pertinent questions of neuroethics from the viewpoint of philosophy and to challenge philosophers to address these questions. The authors of this issue represent a selection of contributors who accepted our challenge. They are well-known scholars from Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States and have worked with the philosophical questions of neuroethics for a number of years. The aim in all of the papers is to tease out certain underlying questions of value and metaphysics common to neuroethical debates. The analyses offered in this special issue provide an overview of the major debates in the philosophy of neuroethics and an examination of the view that neuroethical issues are both theoretical and evaluative in a way that is context-dependent. The first three papers of this collection deal with the limits of the moral and philosophical implications of neurosciences. The questions addressed here include the relevance of moral physiology to normative ethics and the implications of neuroscience to philosophical discussions on free will and moral responsibility. Another philosophically important aspect raised by neuroscience concerns the elusive notions of personality and personal identity. Two of the articles focus on these issues. And of the last two articles, one discusses the question of the alleged unnaturalness of certain neuroscientific interventions and the other the question of mental privacy. This special issue opens with a paper by Stephan Schleim and Felix Schirmann on moral physiology. In the article, they provide a detailed overview of the empirical, methodological, and theoretical aspects of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that are relevant when the possible normative implications of the results of fMRI studies are assessed. The authors argue that these aspects and the many related uncertainties are too often dismissed when the implications of fMRI are discussed. While it is possible that fMRI might yield some normatively significant findings, Schleim and Schirmann show how these only become relevant in a predetermined philosophical context. It is the philosophical assumptions that give meaning to the findings; the findings do not, in and by themselves, yield normative implications. In his contribution, Gardar Arnason studies the common claim that neuroscience poses a challenge to the existence of the free will. According to Arnason, the challenge works on three levels--the metaphysical, the epistemological, and the empirical--and he considers them in turn. Both the metaphysical and epistemological challenges can be seen to be based on scientific assumptions and hence to be such that they can never be empirically fully verified. The most potent of the challenges lies, according to Arnason, on the empirical level. Neurological research seems to show that much of our decision-making happens on an unconscious level, and if this really were so, it could be seen to undermine the notion of free will and the idea that we are morally responsible for our actions. Arnason's answer to this challenge is twofold. On the one hand, it seems that the science behind many of these studies is not reliable; and on the other, he suggests that perhaps we should redefine the notion of consciousness to better correspond with the increasing understanding of it and its levels. …