Chapter 16: Neuroethics

In this Chapter…

• Personal Responsibility and Punishment
• Diagnosis, Treatment, and Enhancement
• Social Behavior
• Predicting Behavior
• Informed Consent in Research
• Effective and Ethical Science Communication and Commercial Enterprise

Introduction

• Neuroethics: the ethics on diagnoses and treatments of neurological diseases
  • Neuroethics links what we can do what we should do

Personal Responsibility and Punishment

• Neuroscience: a discipline that teaches us about the neural basis of human characteristics and the mechanisms of conditions and disorders that impair behavioral control
• The brain being the control center raises many questions and challenges the concept of free will as the basis for personal responsibility
• Increasing levels of neuroscience knowledge will seriously challenge the fundamental tenets of criminal law

Diagnosis, Treatment, and Enhancement

• Neuroscience has already given rise to drugs & devices developed for the treatment of illness
  • This may permit healthy people to improve their own cognitive performance
  • These treatments may be developed to enhance memory or alter social behavior
• Issues arise when gaps exist between diagnosis and treatment
• These treatments may offer tradeoffs in personality or cognitive changes
  • Drugs or devices that can help unwell patients may be able to boost the performance of non-diseased individuals

Social Behavior

• The major goal of the research is to find treatments for disabling conditions like ALS

Predicting Behavior

• Neuroimaging and genetic screening enables us to predict behavior, personality, and disease with greater accuracy than ever
  • These are also being researched and marketed for lie detection
• Technologies raise more important concerns about privacy and fairness that go beyond those in bioethics
• The detection of lying has the potential to have a major impact on society
  • It will require careful controls and years of further research

Informed Consent in Research

• Special care must be taken when human research must be conducted
  • Especially when potential research subjects have thinking or emotional impairments
• Consent: an ongoing process that should involve education of potential research participants and family members

Effective and Ethical Science: Communication and Commercial Enterprise

• A major concern is the degree to which the media’s and public’s fascination with neuroscience can lead to overstatements and inaccuracies in media communication
• Neurorealism: the idea that anything neuroscientific must be definitive and true
• Neuroethics raises more questions than it answers at this stage
• One hallmark of neuroscience is that it’s driving toward integrating information from different specializations to increase overall knowledge