Michele FariscoNeuroscience is increasingly raising philosophical, ethical, legal and social problems concerning old issues which are now approached in a new way: consciousness, freedom, responsibility and self are today investigated in a new light by the so called neuroethics.

Neuroethics was conceived as a field deserving its own name at the beginning of the 21st century. Yet philosophy is much older, and its interest in “neuroethical” issues can be traced back to its very origins.

What is “neuroethics”? Is it a new way of doing or a new way of thinking ethics? Is it a sub-field of bioethics? Or does it stand as a discipline in its own? Is it only a practical or even a conceptual discipline?

I would like to suggest that neuroethics – besides the classical division between “ethics of neuroscience” and “neuroscience of ethics” – above all needs to be developed as a conceptual assessment of what neuroscience is telling us about our nature: the progress in neuroscientific investigation has been impressive in the last years, and in the light of huge investments in this field (e.g., the European Human Brain Project and the American BRAIN Initiative) we can bet that new  striking discoveries will be made in the next decades.

For millennia, philosophers were interested in exploring what was generally referred to as human nature, and particularly the mind as one of its essential dimensions. Two avenues have been traditionally developed within the general conception of mind: a non-materialistic and idealistic approach (the mind is made of a special stuff non-reducible to the brain); and a materialistic approach (the mind is no more than a product or a property of the brain).

Both interpretations assume a dualistic theoretical framework: the human being is constituted from two completely different dimensions, which have completely different properties with no interrelations between them, or, at most, a relationship mediated solely by an external element. Such a dualistic approach to human identity is increasingly criticized by contemporary neuroscience, which is showing the plastic and dynamic nature of the human brain and consequently of the human mind.

This example illustrates in my view that neuroethics above all is a philosophical discipline with a peculiar interdisciplinary status: it can be a privileged field where philosophy and science collaborate in order to conceptually cross the wall which has been built between them.

Michele Farisco

We transgress disciplinary borders - the Ethics Blog