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
1 - Introduction
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
WHAT IS NEUROETHICS?
Neuroethics is a new field. The term itself is commonly, though erroneously, believed to have been coined by William Safire (2002), writing in The New York Times. In fact, as Safire himself acknowledges, the term predates his usage. The very fact that it is so widely believed that the term dates from 2002 is itself significant: it indicates the recency not of the term itself, but of widespread concern with the kinds of issues it embraces. Before 2002 most people saw no need for any such field, but so rapid have been the advances in the sciences of mind since, and so pressing have the ethical issues surrounding them become, that we cannot any longer dispense with the term or the field it names.
Neuroethics has two main branches; the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics (Roskies 2002). The ethics of neuroscience refers to the branch of neuroethics that seeks to develop an ethical framework for regulating the conduct of neuroscientific enquiry and the application of neuroscientific knowledge to human beings; the neuroscience of ethics refers to the impact of neuroscientific knowledge upon our understanding of ethics itself.
One branch of the “ethics of neuroscience” concerns the conduct of neuroscience itself; research protocols for neuroscientists, the ethics of withholding incidental findings, and so on.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- NeuroethicsChallenges for the 21st Century, pp. 1 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007