Part I:  Foundational Issues

William Safire, Visions for a New Field of Neuroethics

Adina Roskies, Neuroethics for the New Millenium

Martha J. Farah, Emerging Ethical Issues

Martha J. Farah and Paul Root Wolpe, Monitoring and Manipulating Brain Function: New Technologies

Donald Kennedy, Neuroscience and Neuroethics

Part II:  Professional Obligation and Public Understanding

Colin Blakemore, From the Public Understanding of Science to

Scientists Understanding of the Public

Alan Leshner, Taking Neuroscience Research from Bench to Bedside

John Timpane, Models for the Neuroethical Debate in the Community

Part III: Neuroimaging

Judy Illes, Neuroethics in a New Era of Neuroimaging

Judy Illes, et al., Managing Incidental Findings

Jennifer Kulynych, Human Subjects Protection, Medical Privacy, and the Public Communication of Research Results

Alen Mamourian, Incidental Findings

July Illes and Eric Racine, A Challenge Informed by Genetics

Lynette Reid and Francoise Baylis, Brains, Genes, and the Making of the

Self

Part IV:  Free Will, Moral Reasoning, and Responsibility

Antonio Damasio, The Neural Basis of Social Behavior

Patricia Smith Churchland, Reflections on the Neural

Basis of Morality

Michael Gazzaniga, My Brain Made Me Do It

Stephen J.Morse, New Neuroscience, Old Problems: Legal Implications

W. D. Casebeer, Moral Cognition and Its Neural Constituents

J. D. Greene, From Neural Is to Moral Ought

Part V:  Psychopharmacology

President’s Council on Bioethics, Better Memories?

Walter Glannon, ³Psychopharmacology and Memory²

Arthur Caplan and Paul McHugh, Shall We Enhance? A Debate

Martha J. Farah, et al., Neurocognitive Enhancement

Anjan Chatterjee, ³The Promise and Predicament of Cosmetic Neurology²

Part VI. Brain Injury and Brain Death

Guy McKhann, ³Brain Death in an Age of Heroic Medicine²

Joseph J. Fins, An Ethical Stereotaxy for Severe Brain Injury

N.D. Schiff and J. J. Fins, Hope for Comatose Patients

Joseph J. Fins, ³Rethinking Disorders of Consciousness

Epilogue: Steven Rose, Ethics in a Neurocentric World

Index

"The ethical implications of neuroscience are truly novel, since the ability to intervene in the brain in many ways is a recent phenomenon."

-From the Introduction by Walter Glannon, Ph.D.

From Part I: Foundational Issues

“Emerging Ethical Issues in Neuroscience” by Martha J. Farah

If drugs and other forms of central nervous system intervention can be used to improve the mood, cognition or behavior of people with problems in these areas, what might they do for normal individuals? Some treatments can be viewed as ‘normalizers,’ which have little or no effect on systems that are already normal (for instance, the mood stabilizer lithium) and will not therefore figure in debates over enhancement. Other treatments can indeed make normal people ‘better than normal.’ Pharmacological enhancement is arguably being practiced now in several psychological domains: enhancement of mood, cognition and vegetative functions, including sleep, appetite, and sex…

What changes might healthy individuals hope to experience through the use of antidepressant medication? Mood enhancement belongs on the docket of new and imminent bioethical issues in neuroscience only if current and foreseeable medications can deliver pleasing results to healthy people…

Pharmacological manipulations of other neurotransmitter systems can alter cognitive abilities, including attention and memory. Attention, in the sense of sustained effort and resistance to distraction, is primarily modulated by dopamine and norepinephrine. Stimulant medication, such as methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamines (Adderol) affect both systems and are effective in treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In normal individuals, these drugs induce reliable changes in vigilance, response time and higher cognitive functions, such as novel problem-solving and planning. As it turns out, thousands of normal healthy children and adults have discovered similar effects on their own…

In sum, enhancement is not just a theoretical possibility. Enhancement of mood, cognition and vegetative functions in healthy people is now a fact of life, and the only uncertainties concern the speed with which new and more appealing enhancement methods will become available and attract more users.

From Part IV: Free Will, Moral Reasoning, and Responsiility

“The Neural Basis of Social Behavior: Ethical Implications” by Antonio R. Damasio

Ethical behaviors are a subset of social behaviors; it’s not possible to conceive of ethics outside the concept of society. And because there are nonhuman societies, the essence of ethical behavior does not begin with humans. There is evidence from primates and other species—from vampire bats to wolves—of conduct that appears, to our cultivated eyes, as moral conduct. Altruism, censure, recompense for certain actions, and compassion are evident examples in nonhuman and even nonprimate species…

This realization—it is a fact, not a hypothesis—may come as a shock for those who believe that ethical behavior is a distinctive human trait. As if it we re not enough to have Copernicus tell us we are not at the center of the universe, Darwin tell us that we have humble origins, and Freud tell us that we are not masters of our own house, now we are being told that even in the realm of ethics there is forerunner behavior…

So ethics is not just about evolution, even if I am suggesting that it starts with evolution. And it is not just about the brain. Culture does the rest, and the rest may be most of it…

The upshot is that ethics is a wonderful byproduct. We could not have it if we did not have a capacity to learn, if we did not have a capacity to recall, if we did not have a capacity to imagine, reason, and create. But I doubt that there is a dedicated moral system in the brain, and certainly no moral center…

So I would like to close by posing a question. Just imagine that by a quirk of fate, evolution had gone in a different way and humanity had come into being with the kind of losses that the Gage-type patients have sustained, and that we would not have the possibility of expressing the social emotions. What would the world have been like? Would ethics have ever developed? Would we be here to tell?