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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

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