The treatment of pain and scientific pursuits to understand the mechanisms underlying pain raise many ethical, legal, and social issues. For the first time, this edited volume brings together content experts in the fields of pain, pediatrics, neuroscience, brain imaging, bioethics, health humanities, and the law to provide insight into the timely topic of pain neuroethics. This landmark volume of the state of the art exploration of pain neuroethics will be a must read for those interested in the ethical issues in pain research, treatment, and management. - Provides the authority and expertise of leading contributors from an international board of authors - Represents the first release in the Developments in Neuroethics and Bioethics series - The content includes representatives from a diversity of disciplines
This edited volume represents a unique addition to the available literature on animal ethics, animal studies, and neuroethics. Its goal is to expand discussions on animal ethics and neuroethics by weaving together different threads: philosophy of mind and animal minds, neuroscientific study of animal minds, and animal ethics. Neuroethical questions concerning animals’ moral status, animal minds and consciousness, animal pain, and the adequacy of animal models for neuropsychiatric disease have long been topics of debate in philosophy and ethics, and more recently also in neuroscientific research. The book presents a transdisciplinary blend of voices, underscoring different perspectives on the broad questions of how neuroscience can contribute to our understanding of nonhuman minds, and on debates over the moral status of nonhuman animals. All chapters were written by outstanding scholars in philosophy, neuroscience, animal behavior, biology, neuroethics, and bioethics, and cover a range of issues and species/taxa. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scientists and students interested in the debate on animal ethics, while also offering an important resource for future researchers. Chapter 13 is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.
The past two decades have seen unparalleled developments in our knowledge of the brain and mind. However, these advances have forced us to confront head-on some significant ethical issues regarding our application of this information in the real world- whether using brain images to establish guilt within a court of law, or developing drugs to enhance cognition. Historically, any consideration of the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies in science and medicine has lagged behind the discovery of the technology itself. These delays have caused problems in the acceptability and potential applications of biomedical advances and posed significant problems for the scientific community and the public alike - for example in the case of genetic screening and human cloning. The field of Neuroethics aims to proactively anticipate ethical, legal and social issues at the intersection of neuroscience and ethics, raising questions about what the brain tells us about ourselves, whether the information is what people want or ought to know, and how best to communicate it. A landmark in the academic literature, the Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics presents a pioneering review of a topic central to the sciences and humanities. It presents a range of chapters considering key issues, discussion, and debate at the intersection of brain and ethics. The handbook contains more than 50 chapters by leaders from around the world and a broad range of sectors of academia and clinical practice spanning the neurosciences, medical sciences and humanities and law. The book focuses on and provides a platform for dialogue of what neuroscience can do, what we might expect neuroscience will do, and what neuroscience ought to do. The major themes include: consciousness and intention; responsibility and determinism; mind and body; neurotechnology; ageing and dementia; law and public policy; and science, society and international perspectives. Tackling some of the most significant ethical issues that face us now and will continue to do so over the coming decades, The Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics will be an essential resource for the field of neuroethics for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, basic scientists in the neurosciences and psychology, scholars in humanities and law, as well as physicians practising in the areas of primary care in neurological medicine.
While neuroscience has provided insights into the structure and function of nervous systems, hard questions remain about the nature of consciousness, mind, and self. Perhaps the most difficult questions involve the meaning of neuroscientific information, and how to pursue and utilize neuroscientific knowledge in ways that are consistent with some construal of social 'good'. Written for researchers and graduate students in neuroscience and bioethics, Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives in Neuroethics explores important developments in neuroscience and neurotechnology, and addresses the philosophical, ethical, and social issues and problems that such advancements generate. It examines three core questions. First, what is the scope and direction of neuroscientific inquiry? Second, how has progress to date affected scientific and philosophical ideas, and finally, what ethical issues and problems does this progress and knowledge incur, both now and in the future?
"Consciousness isn't a thing you can poke a stick at. It's not a natural kind, like a bit of quartz, or quarks, or water. Like "life," which can be attributed to many entities, but is not a thing with reality apart from living entities, consciousness can be attributed to conscious entities without being some further thing or fact, some mysterious, mentalizing "force" that can exist without conscious entities. It is manifested in conscious states and creatures, but isn't a thing in and of itself. One of the enduring puzzles about consciousness and conscious states is how they, as apparently mental, nonphysical states, can manifest in a physical entity like a brain. We can point to a physical bit of brain, to a neuron, or a structure like the thalamus, but we can't locate the consciousness within that bit of brain or its neural cells"--
The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics offers the reader an informed view of how the brain sciences are being used to approach, understand, and reinvigorate traditional philosophical questions, as well as how those questions, with the grounding influence of neuroscience, are being revisited beyond clinical and research domains. It also examines how contemporary neuroscience research might ultimately impact our understanding of relationships, flourishing, and human nature. Written by 61 key scholars and fresh voices, the Handbook’s easy-to-follow chapters appear here for the first time in print and represent the wide range of viewpoints in neuroethics. The volume spotlights new technologies and historical articulations of key problems, issues, and concepts and includes cross-referencing between chapters to highlight the complex interactions of concepts and ideas within neuroethics. These features enhance the Handbook’s utility by providing readers with a contextual map for different approaches to issues and a guide to further avenues of interest. Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315708652.ch11
This book brings together a number of essays that are optimistic about the ways certain neuroscientific insights might advance philosophical ethics, and other essays that are more circumspect about the relevance of neuroscience to philosophical ethics. As a whole, the essays form a self-reflective body of work that simultaneously seeks to derive normative ethical implications from neuroscience, and to question whether and how that may be possible at all. In doing so, the collection brings together psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, ethics, and philosophy of science. Neuroscience seeks to understand the biological systems that guide human behavior and cognition. Normative ethics, on the other hand, seeks to understand the system of abstract moral principles dictating how people ought to behave. By studying how the human brain makes moral judgments, can philosophers learn anything about the nature of morality itself? A growing number of researchers believe that neuroscience can, indeed, provide insights into the questions of philosophical ethics. However, even these advocates acknowledge that the path from neuroscientific is to normative ethical ought can be quite fraught.
Neurodivergence and Architecture, Volume Five, the latest release in the Developments in Neuroethics and Bioethics series, focuses on the new and fascinating ethical and legal challenges posed by neurotechnology and its global regulation. Topics in this new release cover STS on architecture, Embodied Rhetoric/ Disability Studies, Autoethnography, Bioethics/Materialist Feminism, Advocacy, Cultural Commentary: Being Autistic Together, An autistic perspective on built spaces, Empty spaces and refrigerator boxes: making autistic spaces, On the Losing Myself Project, Neither Use nor Ornament (NUNO) project, Madness and (Be)coming Out Within and Through Spaces of Confinement, and more. - Novel and original research on the emerging field of the legal regulation of neuroscience - Interdisciplinary approach, chapters by global scholars from several disciplines, including law, philosophy, and medicine - Develops a global approach, useful in jurisdictions along the globe
A survey of the emerging field of neuroethics that calls for a multidisciplinary, pragmatic approach for tackling key issues and improving patient care. Today the measurable health burden of neurological and mental health disorders matches or even surpasses any other cluster of health conditions. At the same time, the clinical applications of recent advances in neuroscience are hardly straightforward. In Pragmatic Neuroethics, Eric Racine argues that the emerging field of neuroethics offers a way to integrate such specialties as neurology, psychiatry, and neurosurgery with the humanities and social sciences, neuroscience research, and related healthcare professions, with the goal of tackling key ethical challenges and improving patient care. Racine provides a survey of the often diverging perspectives within neuroethics, offers a theoretical framework supported by empirical data, and discusses the neuroethical implications of such issues as media coverage of neuroscience innovation and the importance of public concerns and lay opinion; nonmedical use of pharmaceuticals for performance enhancement; and the discord between intuitive notions about consciousness and behavior and the scientific understanding of them. Racine proposes a pragmatic neuroethics that combines pluralistic approaches, bottom-up research perspectives, and a focus on practical issues (in contrast to other more theoretical and single-discipline approaches to the field). [He discusses ethical issues related to powerful neuroscience insights into the mechanisms underlying moral reasoning, cooperative behavior, and such emotional processes as empathy.] In addition, he outlines a pragmatic framework for neuroethics, based on the philosophy of emergentism, which identifies conditions for the meaningful contribution of neuroscience to ethics, and sketches new directions and strategies for meeting future challenges for neuroscience and society. Basic Bioethics series
What should happen when doctors and parents disagree about what would be best for a child? When should courts become involved? Should life support be stopped against parents' wishes? The case of Charlie Gard, reached global attention in 2017. It led to widespread debate about the ethics of disagreements between doctors and parents, about the place of the law in such disputes, and about the variation in approach between different parts of the world. In this book, medical ethicists Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu critically examine the ethical questions at the heart of disputes about medical treatment for children. They use the Gard case as a springboard to a wider discussion about the rights of parents, the harms of treatment, and the vital issue of limited resources. They discuss other prominent UK and international cases of disagreement and conflict. From opposite sides of the debate Wilkinson and Savulescu provocatively outline the strongest arguments in favour of and against treatment. They analyse some of the distinctive and challenging features of treatment disputes in the 21st century and argue that disagreement about controversial ethical questions is both inevitable and desirable. They outline a series of lessons from the Gard case and propose a radical new 'dissensus' framework for future cases of disagreement. - This new book critically examines the core ethical questions at the heart of disputes about medical treatment for children. - The contents review prominent cases of disagreement from the UK and internationally and analyse some of the distinctive and challenging features around treatment disputes in the 21st century. - The book proposes a radical new framework for future cases of disagreement around the care of gravely ill people.
