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Southern Cross Bioethics Institute
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Neuroethics can be roughly divided along two streams. The first stream is the “ethics of neuroscience” which is concerned with the ethical implications of neuroscience and neurotechnology. It is foreseeable that such knowledge and technology will enable us to restore and significantly enhance neurological function through novel neuro-pharmacological, neuro-stimulation and neurogenetic engineering techniques. For example we may be able to develop novel treatments for depression, post traumatic stress, ADHD and other personality disorders. We may also be able to either dampen or enhance other aspects of cognition depending on what one desires. Brain imaging technology, which is now commonly used in both research and medical practice, raises issues concerning mental privacy, diagnostics and predicting behaviour. An important ethical question that arises from this is whether a patient has the right to know (or not to know) what their brain scans reveal about themselves and their futures. Furthermore if this information were to fall into the wrong hands it could be used to manipulate and discriminate against individuals whose brain scans reveal information about themselves that would otherwise remain private or unknown. Hence this stream of neuroethics can be understood as a part of bioethics, since traditional issues such as privacy, discrimination and therapy vs enhancement are pertinent here.
The second stream of neuroethics can be thought of as the “neuroscience of ethics”. It is not a normative pursuit but rather it fits into the meta-ethics discipline. It seeks to understand the neurological basis of moral judgements and decision making. Some recent neuroscientific data has yielded much insight about the neurological states that correlate with moral judgments. This may pose a genuine challenge to our deeply entrenched ethical perspectives because the evidence, according to some, suggests that we are not so rational or self-reflective in forming ethical judgements and that we tend to make moral judgments in accordance with our emotional inclinations rather than with our carefully thought out rational deliberations . If it turns out that a particular moral belief was not the product of rational contemplation but a post hoc rationalisation of an emotive judgement, an attitude of disapprobation , or a pre-reflective moral intuition , then how can we trust our moral beliefs?
What distinguishes humans from other animals is that we use reason and reflect on our beliefs, values, expectations and experiences, to make important judgments and decisions - we are rational. In the absence of such capacities we cannot be held as being responsible for our decisions and actions - we would no longer be moral agents. It would force us to revise our attributions of responsibility on individuals whose actions turn out not to be a product of rational agency. This clearly has profound implications for our concept of moral/legal responsibility and criminal liability. The legal principle of Mens rae states that a defendant should only be held criminally liable for events or consequences which he/she intended or knowingly risked. Therefore any form of neurological dysfunction, which relates to a defendant’s responsibility for his/her actions, i.e. capacities that are necessary for establishing Mens rae, can form the basis for establishing diminished responsibility (“neuro-mitigation”).
It is foreseeable that brain imaging technologies and brain stimulation technologies can be used to intervene on brain processes to enhance particular functions, for example transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been shown to improve attention and visual focus. Research by Chambers et al, has shown that TMS induced disruption of the right parietal cortex improved the perception of relevant stimuli when subjects were presented with competitive visual displays. Hence brain imaging and brain stimulation techniques can be used to modulate activity in the various cortical and subcortical regions, by either stimulating or suppressing activity in particular brain regions.
Behavioural modification technology will also be important for national security and federal intelligence. The mental function and performance of military, intelligence and homeland security personnel is an important factor and it is foreseeable that brain imaging methods may accurately measure a soldiers level of alertness, therefore providing the possibility to take measures to restore alertness, for example, via attentional queuing or redirection of cognitive resources using auditory, graphic and somatosensory stimuli.
Such technology also has applications for the altering of social behaviour in general. A study by Knoch et al, revealed that a subject’s decisions can be altered using TMS stimulation of a particular region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). In this study subjects were asked to give their response to the “Ultimatum Game” which is a traditional experiment in economics to assess people’s judgements about economic fairness whereby one subject (a) is given a certain amount of money and has the choice of sharing any amount of it with another subject (b). If subject (b) accepts the offer then both will receive the money, however, if that subject refuses it then no-one gets anything. The results have indicated that generally any offers of less that 20% are rejected, likely to be due to retaliation or spite despite the fact that subject (b) has everything to gain and nothing to lose, since anything is better than nothing. However it seems that humans have deeply ingrained intuitions about fairness and punishment. Interestingly the experiment by Knoch et al revealed that upon TMS stimulation of their DLPFC, subjects still judged those offers as unfair but were less willing to reject them.