Handbook of Neuroethics Jens Clausen • Neil Levy Editors Handbook of Neuroethics With 31 Figures and 11 Tables Editors Jens Clausen Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine University of Tubingen€ Tubingen,€ Germany Neil Levy The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health University of Melbourne Parkville, Australia ISBN 978-94-007-4706-7 978-94-007-4707-4 (eBook) ISBN Bundle 978-94-007-4708-1 (print and electronic bundle) DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4707-4 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London Library of Congress Control Number: 2014946229 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 This work is subject to copyright. 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Violations are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) What Is Neuroethics? Directly and indirectly, neuroscience touches all of our lives, and its influence can be expected to grow. Mental illness is very common, with a lifetime prevalence of at least 12%, perhaps very much higher (Kessler et al. 2007). The incidence of dementia is growing rapidly, due to our aging population and the fact that more than 30% of all people aged over 80 will suffer from it (Peters 2001). These are problems of the brain/mind, and therefore neuroscience seems to hold out the best hope of understanding them, reducing their incidence, and perhaps even of a cure. Other major health and social problems centrally involve dysfunctions of the brain/mind: think of the enormous problems caused by pathological gambling or drug addiction. Even the worldwide obesity epidemic, which has produced a global population in which there are more obese people than there are undernourished (Macey 2006), might be understood as at least partially a problem that neuroscience can illuminate, insofar as overeating is at least partially to be explained psychologically. Two major research initiatives in neuroscience funded by the US and the EU, respectively, are expected to increase our knowledge about how the brain works, our understanding of diseases and how to cure or at least treat them and thereby accelerate the influence of neuroscientific findings on our lives. The European Human Brain Project (HBP) addresses seven challenges of neuroscience and ultimately aims at computationally simulating the brain (Markram 2013). The US-funded Brain Activity Map (BAM) project seeks “to fill the gap in our knowledge of brain activity at the circuit level, a scale between single neuron and whole brain function” (Alivisatos et al. 2013). Since the brain is embedded in and interacts with a body, and humans act in relation to other human beings, the neuro-essentialist notion that the brain defines who we are might seem a bit far-fetched. However, there is no doubt that the brain is the biological substrate of central human characteristics like consciousness and morality. Indeed, all human behavior must be understood as the behavior of creatures with minds; there is no aspect of our lives that neuroscience cannot, in principle, help to illuminate. Neuroscience promises to cure disease and perhaps to help us to achieve our goals at a lower cost, but it also promises to help us to understand the kind of creatures we are. By shedding light on the brain, it illumi- nates our prized rationality, our creativity, our capacity to produce and appreciate art, even our capacity for awe and transcendence. Some people find the prospect tantalizing and attractive; others are fearful that in explaining we might explain v vi What Is Neuroethics? away. Perhaps we will reveal ourselves to be mere automatons, they worry, rather than beings with a dignity. Neuroscience also holds out the promise of using its techniques to improve ourselves. The pharmaceuticals developed for the treatment of disease may be used by people who are not ill, to make them “better than well” (Elliot 2003). This, too, is a prospect that excites and appeals to people in equal measures. Some see the promise of an exciting future of broader horizons and a technological utopia, others recall the warnings of Brave New World and other dystopias. To raise these questions is already to be doing neuroethics. Neuroethics is systematic and informed reflection on and interpretation of neuroscience, and related sciences of the mind (psychology in all its many forms, psychiatry, artificial intelligence, and so on), in order to understand its implications for human self- understanding and the perils and prospects of its applications. Neuroethics has developed as a response to the increasing power and pervasive- ness of the sciences of the mind. It has been known for centuries that mental function and dysfunction are closely related to neural function and dysfunction (even Rene Descartes, the 17th century philosopher who is now much derided by neuroscientists for his theory that mind was immaterial, made the connection between brain and mind a central part of his theory). Our knowledge of the nature of the relationship came largely from post-mortem studies of the brains of people known to have particular cognitive problems: Thus, areas responsible for linguistic processing were identified in the 19th century. But it is only recently, with the advent of non-invasive means of studying the living human brain (and especially with the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging, which enables the real-time study of the brain as the person engages in particular tasks), that our knowledge has really begun to expand rapidly. Today the Society for Neuroscience has nearly 42,000 members, all of whom actively working in neuroscience, and holds an annual conference attended by more than 30,000 delegates. There are more than 220 journals dedicated to neuroscience; around 25,000 papers on the brain are published annually. Our knowledge of the brain, and therefore of ourselves, grows rapidly, and with it our powers to intervene in the mind. Neuroethics is at once fascinating and urgent. Neuroethics is commonly held to have two branches, the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics (Roskies 2002). Under the first heading, neuroethics is concerned not only with ethical issues in the practice of neuroscience (ethical issues in subject recruitment, in the conduct of neurosurgery, in the reporting of neuroscientific findings in academic journals and the popular press, and so on), but also with ethical issues in the application of neuroscience and the technologies and techniques it helps to develop, inside and outside the clinic. Under this heading, therefore, fall concerns about the use of psychopharmaceuticals, or other techniques (direct current stimulation or implantable electrodes, say) to treat mental illness or to enhance the capacities of those without a diagnosable illness. By the neurosci- ence of ethics Roskies meant, principally, the ways in which neuroscience might help us to understand morality itself: the principles by which we reason, the relative contribution of emotional and non-emotional processes to moral thought, and What Is Neuroethics? vii perhaps even the extent to which moral thought sometimes goes wrong. Above, we suggested that neuroethics should not be identified with reflection on neuroscience alone, but be expanded to include reflection on the other sciences of the mind. Correlatively, we suggest that the neuroscience of ethics should also be understood broadly, encompassing not only the ways in which the science of the mind can help us to understand moral reasoning, but also the ways in which it might help us to understand other perennial philosophical issues (the nature of knowledge, the ways in which self-control is exercised and how it may be lost, free will and the mind/ brain, and so on). This is, in practice, how neuroethics has been conducted in the past, and it is this broad range of issues that are canvassed in this handbook. If neuroethics is not to be overwhelmed by the hype that characterizes too much of the popular coverage of neuroscience, it must have a strong and realistic grasp on what is actually possible, on the nature of the brain and its relationship to the mind, and on how best to understand neuroscientific work. The volume therefore begins by canvassing the philosophical foundations of neuroscience, while another section covers the powers and limitations of neuroimaging, our major source of evidence concerning the brain.