Book Review: Defining Right and Wrong in Brain Science: Essential Readings in Neuroethics

August 20, 2008

There are two aspects of neuroethics, unequally represented in this collection. The first is that of the ethics of neuroscience: When, and how, should we intervene pharmacologically in brain states? If, in neuroimaging for the purposes of research, we discover an abnormality in our volunteer subject’s brain, should we tell them? At what point can a brain-damaged patient be called legally dead? The other aspect is that of the neuroscience of ethics: What are the implications of our understanding of the brain when it comes to our ethical reflection? Does our current understanding of the neural constituents of moral reasoning support Kant, Mill or Aristotle? Or is such an attempt to naturalize ethics mistaken from the very start? (Metapsychology)