Neuroethics

There is increasing interest in using neuro-stimulation devices to achieve an ergogenic effect in elite athletes. Although the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA) does not currently prohibit neuro-stimulation techniques, a number of researchers have called on WADA to consider its position on this issue. Focusing on trans-cranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a case study of an imminent so-called 'neuro-doping' intervention, we argue that the emerging evidence suggests that tDCS may meet WADA's own criteria (pertaining to safety, performance-enhancing effect, and incompatibility with the 'spirit of sport') for a method's inclusion on its list of prohibited substances and methods...

Motivational enhancement in sport - a form of 'neuro-doping' - can help athletes attain greater achievements in sport. A key question is whether or not that athlete deserves that achievement. We distinguish three concepts - praiseworthiness (whether the athlete deserves praise), prizeworthiness (whether the athlete deserves the prize), and admiration (pure admiration at the performance) - which are closely related. However, in sport, they can come apart. The most praiseworthy athlete may not be the most prizeworthy, and so on...

Gilbert et al. have raised important questions about the empirical grounding of neuroethical analyses of the apparent phenomenon of Deep Brain Stimulation 'causing' personality changes. In this paper, we consider how to make neuroethical claims appropriately calibrated to existing evidence, and the role that philosophical neuroethics has to play in this enterprise of 'evidence-based neuroethics'. In the first half of the paper, we begin by highlighting the challenges we face in investigating changes to PIAAAS following DBS, explaining how different trial designs may be of different degrees of utility, depending on how changes to PIAAAS following DBS are manifested...

This article provides a conceptual and normative framework through which we may understand the potentially ethically significant roles that information generated by neurotechnologies about our brains and minds may play in our construction of our identities. Neuroethics debates currently focus disproportionately on the ways that third parties may (ab)use these kinds of information. These debates occlude interests we may have in whether and how we ourselves encounter information about our own brains and minds...

Advancements in novel neurotechnologies, such as brain computer interfaces (BCI) and neuromodulatory devices such as deep brain stimulators (DBS), will have profound implications for society and human rights. While these technologies are improving the diagnosis and treatment of mental and neurological diseases, they can also alter individual agency and estrange those using neurotechnologies from their sense of self, challenging basic notions of what it means to be human. As an international coalition of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners, we examine these challenges and make recommendations to mitigate negative consequences that could arise from the unregulated development or application of novel neurotechnologies...

Objectives: To understand the ethical principles guiding college students' abstention from pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE), and to determine the correlates associated with endorsing different principles. Design: One-stage cluster sampling was used to implement a paper-based survey among undergraduate students attending one university in the U.S. Thematic analysis was used to explore the ethical principles guiding PCE abstention. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to examine sociodemographic correlates associated with endorsed ethical principles...

Gilbert and colleagues (2018) point out the discrepancy between the limited empirical data illustrating changes in personality (and related concepts of identity, agency, authenticity, autonomy, and self, i.e., PIAAAS) following implantation of deep brain stimulating (DBS) electrodes and the vast number of conceptual neuroethics papers implying that these changes are widespread, deleterious, and clinically significant. Their findings are reminiscent of C. P. Snow's essay on the divide between the two cultures of the humanities (representing the conceptual publications) and the sciences (representing the empirical work)...

Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome is a disorder of consciousness wherein a patient is awake, but completely non-responsive at the bedside. However, research has shown that a minority of these patients remain aware, and can demonstrate their awareness via functional neuroimaging; these patients are referred to as having 'cognitive motor dissociation' (CMD). Unfortunately, we have little insight into the subjective experiences of these patients, making it difficult to determine how best to promote their well-being...

In the theoretical literature on moral responsibility, one sometimes comes across cases of manipulated agents. In cases of this type, the agent is a victim of wholesale manipulation, involving the implantation of various pro-attitudes (desires, values, etc.) along with the deletion of competing pro-attitudes. As a result of this manipulation, the agent ends up performing some action unlike any that she would have performed were it not for the manipulation. These sorts of cases are sometimes thought to motivate historical views of responsibility, on which the agent's past is relevant to whether she is responsible for a specific action...

In this issue, Elizabeth Shaw and Gulzaar Barn offer a number of replies to my arguments in 'Criminal Rehabilitation Through Medical Intervention: Moral Liability and the Right to Bodily Integrity', Journal of Ethics (2014). In this article I respond to some of their criticisms.

'Moral bioenhancement' refers to the use of pharmaceuticals and other direct brain interventions to enhance 'moral' traits such as 'empathy,' and alter any 'morally problematic' dispositions, such as 'aggression.' This is believed to result in improved moral responses. In a recent paper, Tom Douglas considers whether medical interventions of this sort could be "provided as part of the criminal justice system's response to the commission of crime, and for the purposes of facilitating rehabilitation (Douglas in Journal of Ethics 18(2): 101-122, 2014)...

While philosophers are often concerned with the conditions for moral knowledge or justification, in practice something arguably less demanding is just as, if not more, important - reliably making correct moral judgments. Judges and juries should hand down fair sentences, government officials should decide on just laws, members of ethics committees should make sound recommendations, and so on. We want such agents, more often than not and as often as possible, to make the right decisions. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of enhancing the moral reliability of such agents...

To make behavioral choices that are in line with our goals and our moral beliefs, we need to gather and consider information about our current situation. Most information present in our environment is not relevant to the choices we need or would want to make and thus could interfere with our ability to behave in ways that reflect our underlying values. Certain sources of information could even lead us to make choices we later regret, and thus it would be beneficial to be able to ignore that information. Our ability to exert successful self-governance depends on our ability to attend to sources of information that we deem important to our decision-making processes...

Moral judgment has typically been characterized as a conflict between emotion and reason. In recent years, a central concern has been determining which process is the chief contributor to moral behavior. While classic moral theorists claimed that moral evaluations stem from consciously controlled cognitive processes, recent research indicates that affective processes may be driving moral behavior. Here, we propose a new way of thinking about emotion within the context of moral judgment, one in which affect is generated and transformed by both automatic and controlled processes, and moral evaluations are shifted accordingly...

This is a reply to Jesse Prinz and Paul Bloom's skepticism about the moral importance of empathy. It concedes that empathy is spontaneously biased to individuals who are spatio-temporally close, as well as discriminatory in other ways, and incapable of accommodating large numbers of individuals. But it is argued that we could partly correct these shortcomings of empathy by a guidance of reason because empathy for others consists in imagining what they feel, and, importantly, such acts of imagination can be voluntary - and, thus, under the influence of reflection - as well as automatic ...

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents in the ten countries and the United States...

In their article in this journal, Sabine Müller, Merlin Bittlinger, and Henrik Walter launch a sweeping attack against what they call the "personal identity debate" as it relates to patients treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS). In this critique offered by Müller et al., the personal identity debate is said to: (a) be metaphysical in a problematic way, (b) constitute a threat to patients, and (c) use "vague" and "contradictory" statements from patients and their families as direct evidence for metaphysical theories...

This paper discusses J.S. Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures, and suggests that recent neuroscientific evidence counts against it.

Introduction: Tourette Syndrome (TS) is a childhood onset disorder characterized by vocal and motor tics and often remits spontaneously during adolescence. For treatment refractory patients, Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) may be considered. Methods and Results: We discuss ethical problems encountered in two adolescent TS patients treated with DBS and systematically review the literature on the topic. Following surgery one patient experienced side effects without sufficient therapeutic effects and the stimulator was turned off...

Should the development of pharmacological cognitive enhancers raise worries about doping in cognitively demanding activities? In this paper, we argue against using current evidence relating to enhancement to justify a ban on cognitive enhancers using the example of chess. It is a mistake to assume that enhanced cognitive functioning on psychometric testing is transferable to chess performance because cognitive expertise is highly complex and in large part not merely a function of the sum specific sub-processes...