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Neuroethics as a Brain-Based Philosophy of Life: The Case of Michael S. Gazzaniga

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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.

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Notes

  1. For a general critique of this sort of “scientism”, see [33].

  2. 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).

  3. 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).

  4. 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.

  5. Similarly, it is instructive to see how Changeux’s scientific ethics is so much framed and informed by French history and the French political traditions since the Revolution. [2] Cf. also [17].

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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.

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Correspondence to Arne Rasmusson.

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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

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