Abstract
Gilbert and colleagues are to be commended for drawing our attention to the need for a sounder empirical basis, and for more careful reasoning, in the context of the neuroethics debate on Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and its potential impact on the dimensions of personality, identity, agency, authenticity, autonomy and self (PIAAAS). While acknowledging this, this extended commentary critically examines their claim that the real-world relevance of the conclusions drawn in the neuroethics literature is threatened by the fact that the concepts at the center of the discussion have “weak empirical grounding”. First, I show that while some possible understandings of multifaceted concepts like identity, authenticity and autonomy may indeed be unsuitable for a purely empirical inquiry, this is not the case of all of them. Secondly, I call into question the authors’ apparent suggestion that reliance on constructs involving an irreducibly normative dimension makes for a suboptimal state of affairs, and that they should ideally be replaced with substitutes taken from the language of neuroscience or social science in order to ensure an adequate empirical grounding for the debate. Such a suggestion, I argue, commits the authors to a controversial reductionist view in metaethics that the valid empirical concerns they raise in the rest of their article do not presuppose, and which could potentially us lead to lose sight of important ethical considerations.
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Notes
And possibly “agency” as well: see [1], p. 10.
For instance, Schechtman’s account of narrative identity would again seem to require the incorporation of third-party testimony, since it states that a person’s inner story has to be consistent with those other people tell about her if it is to constitute her identity [2].
To be precise, I would differ from those authors by drawing a further distinction between “first-person” and “third-person” subjective authenticity, with the former referring to the subject’s own perception, and the latter, to the perception by others of whether she is truly being “herself” or not. For the sake of the present discussion, however, I shall ignore this further distinction, and will speak of subjective authenticity to refer solely to the first-person variant.
This is compatible with there being adults with underdeveloped moral capacities (e.g. psychopaths, perhaps) who would indeed obtain better moral guidance overall by systematically following the majority view rather than striving to make up their own minds. Still, these people will be using a “crutch” to navigate the moral space, and will not count as engaging in genuine ethical reflection.
Which is not to say that, if this is the case, the properties these concepts refer to must exist in some Platonic realm separate from the natural world. A supporter of this view can certainly recognize that ethical properties are strongly dependent for their existence upon natural ones (perhaps “supervening” on them), as long as they are not reducible to the latter.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for his/her helpful suggestions on how to clarify some of the points made in this paper.
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Erler, A. Discussions of DBS in Neuroethics: Can We Deflate the Bubble Without Deflating Ethics?. Neuroethics 14 (Suppl 1), 75–81 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-019-09412-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-019-09412-9