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Basic Bioethics
Neuroethics: An Introduction with Readings
Explores the ethical, legal, and societal issues arising from brain imaging, psychopharmacology, and other new developments in neuroscience.
400 pages, Paperback
First published August 30, 2010
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233 people want to read
About the author
Martha J. Farah
15 books8 followersMartha J. Farah, PhD. is a cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked on a wide range of subjects such as semantic memory, mental imagery, reading, face recognition and attention, and the effects of childhood poverty on brain development.
She has undergraduate degrees in Metallurgy and Philosophy from MIT, a doctorate in Psychology from Harvard University and has taught at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is now Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences and Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society.
She has undergraduate degrees in Metallurgy and Philosophy from MIT, a doctorate in Psychology from Harvard University and has taught at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is now Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences and Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 3, 2024
Farah attempts, with this work, to establish the common questions in the new field of Neuroethics. Neuroethics, according to Farah, distinguishes itself from Bioethics by dealing with controversial questions specific with the new developments of cognitive neuroscience. Neuroethics consists of a number of collected essays that discuss these common issues, all of them of high quality. Although I find some absolutely stunning, others I find perplexing. What has particularly interested me in this collection are the legal ramifications of our understanding of neuroscience and the way we perceive others as possessing free will or responsibility. One of these essays for sure has been read by Robert Sapolsky, no doubt about it. How can one blame another person for the acts they have taken if their entire environment and temperament has shaped them into the kind of person to take those rash decisions?
Neuroscience, or even science as a whole, functioning on a materialistic or physicalist lens, cannot depart itself from the consequences of seeing collections of neurons as products of the interaction between the genes that coded them and the environment that has shaped their development.
There are other relevant questions as well that have been touched upon by the essayists of Farah. Those include the overprescription of mood-improving or concentration-improving medications, or in an even larger sense neurotransmitter-modulation and their long term consequences on wellbeing, perception of the self and on a collective sense the distinction between abnormal and normal. If a person does not suffer from any pathological problem, would it still be ethical to prescribe them medication for curbing sluggishness, fatigue, concentration problems or improving mood, which in turns would improve their life?
Is it wrong on an individual level to prescribe those medications? What about on a collective level? What would be the repercussions of prescribing those medications to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who do not present a psychiatric or even psychological disorder per se? Would our definition of normal productiveness change? What would maximize full wellbeing?
These are the kinds of questions Neuroethics attempts to answer.
But Neuroethics also tries to deal with more philosophically complex topics, including the way we perceive ourselves as being wholes, the nature of the human mind in a holistic sense, life and death and the nature of human personality.
Neuroscience, or even science as a whole, functioning on a materialistic or physicalist lens, cannot depart itself from the consequences of seeing collections of neurons as products of the interaction between the genes that coded them and the environment that has shaped their development.
There are other relevant questions as well that have been touched upon by the essayists of Farah. Those include the overprescription of mood-improving or concentration-improving medications, or in an even larger sense neurotransmitter-modulation and their long term consequences on wellbeing, perception of the self and on a collective sense the distinction between abnormal and normal. If a person does not suffer from any pathological problem, would it still be ethical to prescribe them medication for curbing sluggishness, fatigue, concentration problems or improving mood, which in turns would improve their life?
Is it wrong on an individual level to prescribe those medications? What about on a collective level? What would be the repercussions of prescribing those medications to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who do not present a psychiatric or even psychological disorder per se? Would our definition of normal productiveness change? What would maximize full wellbeing?
These are the kinds of questions Neuroethics attempts to answer.
But Neuroethics also tries to deal with more philosophically complex topics, including the way we perceive ourselves as being wholes, the nature of the human mind in a holistic sense, life and death and the nature of human personality.
June 27, 2023
Textbook.
November 23, 2023
definitely a good read, only 3 because some parts were hard to get through, but i also only really read fiction. Very interesting overall would recommend
March 31, 2022
Took me a year to get through. A compendium of early 2000s journal articles.
From Kartik
From Kartik
June 5, 2013
Interesting subject matter that will receive more attention in the future. Psychotropic drug use, brain scans, memory blunting, brain/computer interfaces, strange new technologies seem nearer to the horizon than some might believe. In particular, ethical issues concerning privacy or human dignity have especially important consequences.
When confronted with the possibility of mapping brain images or behavioral manipulation, the abuse of Neuroscience is up there with military weapons in terms of hazards to the individual. True, talk about “sci-fi” tech-stuff saturates popular culture to a degree that is sometimes nauseating. However, innovations in the field of Neuroscience will inevitably have to receive more attention, that is, unless science is undeterred in the pursuit of unbridled technological “progress”. Often, the more important developments are kept under wraps by the government for good reason, (cloning, bio-engineering, etc.), I think.
When confronted with the possibility of mapping brain images or behavioral manipulation, the abuse of Neuroscience is up there with military weapons in terms of hazards to the individual. True, talk about “sci-fi” tech-stuff saturates popular culture to a degree that is sometimes nauseating. However, innovations in the field of Neuroscience will inevitably have to receive more attention, that is, unless science is undeterred in the pursuit of unbridled technological “progress”. Often, the more important developments are kept under wraps by the government for good reason, (cloning, bio-engineering, etc.), I think.
May 22, 2014
Fascinating. Required reading for a philosophy class i am taking (ethics in neural engineering). All of this is going to become more and more relevant in years to come.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews