Abstract
Michael S. Gazzaniga, a pioneer and world leader in cognitive neuroscience, has made an initial attempt to develop neuroethics into a brain-based philosophy of life that he hopes will replace the irrational religious and political belief-systems that still partly govern modern societies. This article critically examines Gazzaniga’s proposal and shows that his actual moral arguments have little to do with neuroscience. Instead, they are based on unexamined political, cultural and moral conceptions, narratives and values. A more promising way of interpreting the belief-forming system of the brain is to say that we cannot avoid thinking in terms of wider frameworks and narratives that are socially embedded and historically developed; consequently, any moral discussion has to be in terms of these frameworks and narratives.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For a general critique of this sort of “scientism”, see [33].
Jean-Pierre Changeux, a leading French neurobiologist and for several years chair of the National Advisory Committee on Bioethics in France, sees his own work as a continuation of August Comte’s scientistic project, including the idea of a unified science, an identification of truth with science, and ethics as a scientific project. ([2] pp. 67, 242–45, [1] pp. 212f).
Richard Evans, a leading historian of the Third Reich, has written: “The language of social Darwinism helped to remove all restraint from those who directed the terroristic and exterminatory policies of the regime, and it legitimized these policies in the minds of those who practiced them by persuading them that what they were doing was justified by history, science, and nature.” ([8] p. 79).
Pinker thinks it is a serious mistake to believe that one can build ethics on neuroscience (or any science). It is to commit the naturalistic fallacy.
References
Changeux, J.-P. 2004. The physiology of truth: Neuroscience and human knowledge. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Changeux, J.-P., and P. Ricœur. 2000. What makes us think? A neuroscientist and a philosopher argue about ethics, human nature, and the brain. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Clark, L.L. 1984. Social Darwinism in France. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Connolly, W.E. 2002. Neuropolitics: Thinking, culture, speed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Crook, D.P. 1994. Darwinism, war, and history: The debate over the biology of war from the “Origin of species” to the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Damasio, A.R. 1994. Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Putnam.
Degler, C.N. 1991. In search of human nature: The decline and revival of Darwinism in American social thought. New York: Oxford University Press.
Evans, R.J. 1997. In search of German social Darwinism: The history and historiography of a concept. In Medicine and modernity: Public health and medical care in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, eds. M. Berg, and G. Cocks, 55–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Farber, P.L. 1994. The temptations of evolutionary ethics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gazzaniga, M.S. 1998. The mind’s past. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gazzaniga, M.S. 2005. The ethical brain. New York: Dana.
Gray, J. 2003. Straw dogs: Thoughts on humans and other animals. London: Granta Books.
Haidt, J. 2007. The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science 316: 998–1002.
Haidt, J., and J. Graham. 2007. When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research 201: 98–116.
Hauser, M.D. 2006. Moral minds: How nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong. New York: Ecco.
Hawkins, M. 1997. Social Darwinism in European and American thought, 1860–1945: Nature as model and nature as threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hecht, J.M. 2003. The end of the soul: Scientific modernity, atheism, and anthropology in France. New York: Columbia University Press.
Johnson, M. 1993. Moral imagination: Implications of cognitive science for ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jones, G. 1980. Social Darwinism and English thought: The interaction between biological and social theory. Brighton: Harvester.
Lakoff, G. 2006. Whose freedom? The battle over America’s most important idea. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Lakoff, G. 2006. When cognitive science enters politics. Rockridge Institute Archive. http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/whencognitivescienceenterspolitics. Accessed 11 October 2006.
Lakoff, G. 2008. The political mind: Why you can’t understand 21st-century politics with an 18th-century brain. New York: Viking.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic.
de Lubac, H. 1995. The drama of atheist humanism. San Francisco: Ignatius.
Midgley, M. 2003. The myths we live by. London: Routledge.
Nisbett, R.E. 2003. The geography of thought: How Asians and Westerners think differently – and why. New York: Free.
Nisbett, R.E., and D. Cohen. 1996. Culture of honor: The psychology of violence in the South. Boulder: Westview.
Pinker, S. 2002. The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. New York: Viking.
Pinker, S. 2006. Block that metaphor. The New Republic 235(15): 24–29.
Pinker, S. 2007. The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature. New York: Viking.
Sandel, M. 2007. The case against perfection: Ethics in the age of genetic engineering. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Smith, C. 2003. Moral, believing animals: Human personhood and culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stenmark, M. 2001. Scientism: Science, ethics and religion. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Thiele, L.P. 2006. The heart of judgment: Practical wisdom, neuroscience, and narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weikart, R. 2004. From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary ethics, eugenics, and racism in Germany. New York: Macmillan.
Wilson, E.O. 1975. Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Acknowledgements
I thank Benoni Edin, Mats Wahlberg, and Pekka Mellergård for their help with this article. The writing of this article was supported by the Center for the Study of Science and Values, Umeå University, Sweden.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rasmusson, A. Neuroethics as a Brain-Based Philosophy of Life: The Case of Michael S. Gazzaniga. Neuroethics 2, 3–11 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-008-9024-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-008-9024-6