CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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ISBN-13 978-0-511-34272-1
© N. Levy 2007
2007
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Contents
Preface page ix
Acknowledgements xiv
1 Introduction 1
What is neuroethics? 1
Neuroethics: some case studies 3
The mind and the brain 8
Peering into the mind 17
The extended mind 29
The debate over the extended mind 44
2 Changing our minds 69
Authenticity 73
Self-knowledge and personal growth 76
Mechanization of the self 78
Treating symptoms and not causes 81
3 The presumption against direct manipulation 88
The treatment/enhancement distinction 88
Enhancements as cheating 89
Inequality 92
Probing the distinction 94
Assessing the criticisms 103
Conclusion 129
4 Reading minds/controlling minds 133
Mind reading and mind controlling 133
Mind control 145
Mind reading, mind controlling and the parity principle 147
Conclusion 154
5 The neuroethics of memory 157
Total recall 159
Memory manipulation 171
Moderating traumatic memories 182
Moral judgment and the somatic marker hypothesis 187
Conclusion 195
6 The ‘‘self’’ of self-control 197
The development of self-control 203
Ego-depletion and self-control 206
Successful resistance 215
Addiction and responsibility 219
7 The neuroscience of free will 222
Consciousness and freedom 225
Who decides when I decide? 226
Consciousness and moral responsibility 231
Moral responsibility without the decision constraint 239
Lessons from neuroscience 243
Neuroscience and the cognitive test 246
Neuroscience and the volitional test 250
8 Self-deception: the normal and the pathological 258
Theories of self-deception 259
Anosognosia and self-deception 263
Anosognosia as self-deception 276
Conclusion: illuminating the mind 278
9 The neuroscience of ethics 281
Ethics and intuitions 282
The neuroscientific challenge to morality 288
contentsvi
Responding to the deflationary challenge 293
Moral constructivism 300
Moral dumbfounding and distributed cognition 307
Distributed cognition: extending the moral mind 308
References 317
Index 337
contents vii
Preface
In the late 1960s, a new field of philosophical and moral enquiry
came into existence. Bioethics, as it soon came to be called, quickly
mushroomed: it developed its own journals, its own professional
associations, its own conferences, degree programs and experts.
It developed very rapidly for many reasons, but no doubt the main
impetus was that it was needed. The problems and puzzles that
bioethics treats were, and are, urgent. Bioethics developed at a
time when medical technology, a kind of technology in which we are
all – quite literally – vitally interested, was undergoing significant
growth and developing unprecedented powers; powers that urgently
needed to be regulated. The growth in life-saving ability, the
development of means of artificial reproduction, the rapid
accumulation of specialist knowledge, required new approaches,
concentrated attention, new focuses and sustained development;
in short, a new discipline. Bioethics was born out of new technical
possibilities – new reproductive technologies, new abilities to
intervene in the genetic substrate of traits, new means of extending
life – and the pressing need to understand, to control and to channel
these possibilities.
Predicting the future is a dangerous business. Nevertheless, it
seems safe to predict that the relatively new field dubbed neuroethics
will undergo a similarly explosive growth. Neuroethics seems a safe
bet, for three reasons: first because the sciences of the mind are
experiencing a growth spurt that is even more spectacular than the
growth seen in medicine over the decades preceding the birth of
bioethics. Second, because these sciences deal with issues which are
every bit as personally gripping as the life sciences: our minds are, in
some quite direct sense, us, so that understanding our mind, and
increasing its power, gives us an unprecedented degree of control over
ourselves. Third because, as Zeman (2003) points out, the
neurosciences straddle a major fault line in our self-conception: they
promise to link mind to brain, the private and subjective world of
experience, feeling and thought with the public and objective
world of hard physical data. Neuroscience (and the related sciences of
the mind) does not simply hold out the promise, one day soon, of
forestalling dementia or enhancing our cognition, and thereby raise
urgent questions concerning our identities and the self; beyond this
it offers us a window into what it means to be human. Our
continuing existence as conscious beings depends upon our minds,
and the medical technologies that can sustain or improve our minds
are therefore vital to us, but we are also gripped by the deep
philosophical questions raised by the possibility of finally
coordinating dimensions of experience that so often seem
incommensurable.
For these reasons, I suggest it is a safe bet that neuroethics will
take off as a field; that it will take its place alongside bioethics as
a semi-independent discipline, sheltering philosophers and
scientists, legal scholars and policy analysts, and spawning
specialists of its own. Hence, too, the need for this book. This book is
not the very first to reflect upon the ethical issues raised by the
neurosciences and by the technologies for intervening in the mind
they offer us, though it is among the first.
1
It is, however, the first to
offer a comprehensive framework for thinking about neuroethical
issues; a vision of the relationship between mind and the world
which (I claim) will enable us better to appreciate the extent to which
the sciences of the mind present us with unique and unprecedented
challenges. It is also the first to attempt to understand the ways in
which the neurosciences alter or refine our conception of ourselves
as moral agents. Since the neurosciences seem to penetrate deeply
into the self, by offering us the chance of understanding the mind,
subjectivity and consciousness, and because they require that we
seek to understand the relationship between the subjective and the
prefacex
objective, a philosophical approach to neuroethics is necessary. I do
not claim that it is the only approach that is necessary: obviously
neuroscientists must contribute to neuroethics, but so must
specialists in other fields. Neuroethics is, by its very nature,
interdisciplinary. But the kind of approach that only philosophy can
provide is indispensable, and, I believe, fascinating. Moreover, I shall
claim, the broader philosophical perspective offered here will help
illuminate the ethical issues, more narrowly construed. Only when
we understand, philosophically, what the mind is and how it can
be altered can we begin properly to engage in the ethics of
neuroethics. Indeed, I shall claim that understanding the mind
properly plays a significant role in motivating an important
alteration in the way ethics is understood, and in what we come to
see as the bearers of moral values. What might be called an
externalist ethics gradually emerges from the pages that follow, an
ethics in which the boundaries between agents, and between agents
and their context, is taken to be much less significant than is
traditionally thought.
Despite this insistence on the necessity for philosophy, I shall
not assume any philosophical background. Since I believe that
philosophical reflection will illuminate the ethical issues, and that
these ethical issues are the concern of all reflective people, I shall
attempt to provide necessary background, and to explain terminology
and debates, as it becomes relevant. I do not aim here to produce a
work of popular philosophy, which too often means philosophy
over-simplified. Instead, I aim to produce genuine philosophy that is
also accessible to non-philosophers. Since I am constructing a case
for a novel view of neuroethics, I expect that professional
philosophers will find a great deal of interest in what follows.
In this brief preface, I have added, in a small way, to the hype
surrounding neuroscience and neuroethics. I have claimed that the
sciences of the mind have the potential to help us understand the
nature of the self, and of humanity, our very identity. These claims
are, I believe, true. Yet this book defends a somewhat deflationary
preface xi
thesis, so far as the ethics of neuroethics is concerned. I shall argue
for what I call the parity thesis: our new ways of altering the mind
are not, for all that, entirely unprecedented, and ought not to be
regarded, as a class, as qualitatively different in kind from the old.
They are, instead, on a par with older and more familiar ways of
altering the mind. New technologies are often treated with suspicion
simply because they are new; sometimes they are celebrated for
precisely the same reason. Neuroscientific technologies ought not be
celebrated or reviled for being new: in fact, they – typically – raise
much the same kinds of puzzles and problems as older, sometimes
far older, technologies. That is not to say that they do not present
us with genuine ethical dilemmas and with serious challenges; they
do. But, for the most part, these dilemmas and challenges are new
versions of old problems.
If the new sciences of the mind often pose serious challenges,
they also present us with opportunities: since the challenges they
pose are often new versions of old challenges, they present us with
the opportunity to revisit these challenges, and the older
technologies that provoke them, with fresh eyes. Sometimes we
accept older practices simply because they are well established, or
because we have ceased to see their problems; reflecting on the new
neurosciences gives us the opportunity to reassess older ways of
altering minds. I hasten to add, too, that the parity thesis defended
here concerns the new technologies of the mind as a class. Some
particular applications of these technologies do raise new, and
genuinely unprecedented, challenges for us. We must assess each on
its own merits, for the powers and perils it actually possesses and
promises.
I will defend the parity thesis, in large part, by way of reflection
on what it means to be human. Thus while the thesis is deflationary
in one sense – deflating the pretensions of the technologies of the
mind to offer entirely novel and unprecedented possibilities for
altering human beings – it is also exciting in another: it offers us a
perspective upon ourselves, as individuals and as a species that is,
prefacexii
if not entirely novel (for as I shall show the thesis, or something
rather like it, has its philosophical defenders) at least little
appreciated or understood. We are, I shall claim, animals of a peculiar
sort: we are self-creating and self-modifying animals. We alter our
own minds, and use technological means to do so. This is not
something new about us, here and now in the ‘‘postmodern’’ West
(for all that so much about us, here and now, is genuinely new). That
is the kind of animal we human beings are. We are distinctive
inasmuch as we have public and distributed minds: minds that
spread beyond the limits of individuals, but which include and are
built out of other minds and the scaffolding of culture. The sciences
of the mind offer us new opportunities for altering our minds and
increasing their powers, but in doing so they offer us new means of
doing what we have always done; the kind of thing that makes us the
beings that we are.
End note
1. The honor of publishing the very first philosophical monograph on
neuroethics falls to Walter Glannon (Glannon 2006). The first monograph
on neuroethics, appropriately enough, was written by the distinguished
neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga (Gazzaniga 2005). Several important
collections of papers have also been published; see, in particular Illes
(2006) and Garland (2004).
preface xiii
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