Abstract
Neuroscience is clearly making enormous progress toward understanding how human brains work. The implications of this progress for ethics, law, society, and culture are much less clear. Some have argued that neuroscience will lead to vast changes, superseding much of law and ethics. The likely limits to the explanatory power of neuroscience argue against that position, as do the limits to the social relevance of what neuroscience will be able to explain. At the same time neuroscience is likely to change societies through increasing their abilities to predict future behavior, to infer subjective mental states by observing physical brain states (“read minds”), to provide evidence in some cases relevant to criminal responsibility, to provide new ways to intervene to “treat antisocial brains,” and to enhance healthy brains. Neuroscience should make important cultural changes in our special, and specially negative, views of “mental” versus “physical” illness by showing that mental illness is a dysfunction of a physical organ. It will not likely change our beliefs, implicit or explicit, in free will, or spark a new conflict between science and religion akin to the creationism controversy.
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Notes
Cole Porter, “It’s a Chemical Reaction, That’s All” (1955). The song premiered in the Broadway musical of Silk Stockings and was included in the 1957 film version.
Law professor Stephen Morse and others argue, convincingly to me, that conscious choice is the key to responsibility, not, in light of its many and varied problems, “free will.” From a more philosophical perspective, John Martin Fischer’s work is especially powerful (Fischer 2006, 2009; Fischer and Ravizza 1993).
Identifying beginnings is often controversial and this may be no exception, but I date the modern era in neuroethics to May 2002 and a conference, entitled “Neuroethics”, held in San Francisco by Stanford and the University of California at San Francisco and funded by the Dana Foundation (Marcus 2002). It was about the same time that William Safire, columnist for the New York Times and president of the Dana Foundation, independently re-invented the term “neuroethics” and began to popularize it (Greely 2006).
In a chapter on law and neuroscience published in 2011, Anthony Wagner and I cite about 40 published scholarly articles or book chapters devoted to neuroscientific lie-detection. I have no doubt that the total is now substantially higher (Greely and Wagner 2011).
It is fascinating to what lengths people will go to try to find some way in which neural processes are not determined, in the hopes of preserving some mechanism for free will. Some, for example, invoke quantum mechanics, hoping that the subatomic scale may somehow carry over to the molecules of the brain. It almost seems that quantum mechanics is the last refuge not of the scoundrel but of the indeterminist.
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Greely, H.T. What If? The Farther Shores of Neuroethics. Sci Eng Ethics 18, 439–446 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9391-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9391-6