Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Changing our minds
- 3 The presumption against direct manipulation
- 4 Reading minds/controlling minds
- 5 The neuroethics of memory
- 6 The “self” of self-control
- 7 The neuroscience of free will
- 8 Self-deception: the normal and the pathological
- 9 The neuroscience of ethics
- References
- Index
2 - Changing our minds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Changing our minds
- 3 The presumption against direct manipulation
- 4 Reading minds/controlling minds
- 5 The neuroethics of memory
- 6 The “self” of self-control
- 7 The neuroscience of free will
- 8 Self-deception: the normal and the pathological
- 9 The neuroscience of ethics
- References
- Index
Summary
There are two basic ways to go about changing someone's mind. What we might call the traditional way involves the presentation of evidence and argument. This way of going about things raises ethical problems of its own, all of which are familiar: Under what circumstances is it permissible to present false evidence? If it's in the person's own interests to come to have a false belief, must we nevertheless present them with the truth? What if we know that the available evidence is misleading? Can we hide the evidence in the interests of the truth? These questions and others like them constitute a small part of the traditional turf of moral philosophy.
Traditional psychotherapy is, in many ways, an extension of this familiar method of changing minds. The goal of the earliest fully developed method of psychotherapy, Freudian psychoanalysis, is truth, and the concomitant extension of the power of rational thought over libidinal impulse. “Where id was, there ego shall be,” Freud famously wrote: the powerful unconscious drives of the id, the forces that tyrannize the neurotic patient, shall be replaced by the conscious forces of the rational ego, the I. To be sure, psychoanalysis does not take a direct route to truth. It does not seek to change minds by argument, or at least not by argument alone. Freud thought that it was not sufficient for the patient simply to be told the truth regarding his or her neuroses and their origins.
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- Information
- NeuroethicsChallenges for the 21st Century, pp. 69 - 87Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007