by James Beauregard
I am working on a book about
neuroethics from the perspective of personalism. No, don’t think head on
collision or train wreck. I think personalism has a great deal to offer
neuroethics, starting from its foundations and working through to practice.
The book I’m writing deals with neuroethics from a theoretical
perspective, that is, considering the discipline’s foundations and worldview as
a prelude to getting into specific bioethical issues. I include here some
thoughts from it:
Neuroethics embraces the worldview of
science, and with it the presuppositions, both explicit and tacit, of the
scientific worldview. This creates the very same problems of internal coherence
and contradiction. The regional ontology, the paradigm within which neuroethics
operates is the regional ontology of science, and within that the field of
neuroscience. This theoretical vision is amply evident in the neuroscience
and neuroethics literature. Consider the following examples:
Although some would argue otherwise, the
burden of evidence currently available suggests that the mind is manifested
through ordinary physical processes located within the body. – Hal Blumenfeld.[1]
In principle, and increasingly in practice,
we can understand the human mind as part of the material world. This has
profound implications for how we regard and treat ourselves and each
other. It gives us powerful ways to predict and control human behavior
and a jarringly material view of ourselves. – Martha Farah.[2]
The construction
we call ethics began with the edifice of bioregulation. By bioregulation I
mean the set of automated mechanisms that allows us to balance out metabolism,
maintain life, and achieve well-being, and which also produces delves and
motivations, emotions of diverse kinds, and feelings. – Antonio Damasio.[3]
Perception, memory, decision making, and
many other mental functions have been associated with the activity of specific
sets of localized populations of neurons. At this relatively molar level
of description, the brain’s operations can be linked upwards to psychology as
well as downwards to biology. – Martha Farah.[4]
Where do values come from? How did
brains come to care about others? If my genes organize my brain to attend to my
survival, to reproduce and pass on those genes, how can they organize my brain
to value others? Some, but only some, of the neurobiology of this
is beginning to be understood. First, however, the more fundamental
question: how is it that brains care about anything? What
does it mean for a system of neurons to care about or to value something?
On these questions, we do know quite a lot, and the answers will launch us into
the more complex domain of social caring. – Patricia Churchland.[5]
Of course, these brief quotes do not capture the full range of thought
of any of these authors. They do, however, suggest a commonly held
worldview, and point to the use of biological or organic analogies deployed in
the attempt to understand persons. With this in mind, we can consider the
four areas of philosophy so understood and what they imply for neuroethics:
The metaphysics of
neuroethics embraces the metaphysics of science, which is materialist,
physicalist and determinist in nature. What exists, what populates the
universe, is matter, and the concept of truth means knowledge obtained through
the methods of empirical science.
The epistemology of
neuroethics flows directly from its metaphysical presuppositions. The universe
is physical, and in our case, biological, and knowledge as such is empirical
knowledge, knowledge derived from the senses directly or through senses
augmented by various instruments of measurement that assess some aspect of the
physical world.
The philosophical anthropology of
neuroethics, as is the case in science, moves within a biological paradigm –
The Field of the Organic. Thus, the biological analogy of neuroethics entails
the adoption of a physicalist and biological anthropology which asserts that
everything knowable about persons is biological and, ultimately, physical in
nature, origin, and process. The epistemological resources for reflection on
persons are, then, the resources of physics, chemistry and biology. We are
biological organisms, a specific type of animal, subject to physical forces of
cause and effect, and biological forces of stimulus and response. This, in sum,
is what we are.
The philosophical anthropology of the
neuroethical world view can be summarized in one word: objectivity.
Focused as it is on the physical, the material and the organic, humans are
understood as objective things in the world, measurable things available for
empirical study. This view, if followed to its logical conclusions, has
difficulty dealing with the subjective world of persons, of our conscious
experience of ourselves, of our subjectivity, other than as a function of
neurologic processes. Instead, all subjectivity is reducible to objectivity,
that is, everything about us is ultimately explainable in objective,
physicalist terms.
It is in the domain of the ethics of
neuroethics that the consequences of this worldview become most clear: if the
metaphysics, epistemology and philosophical anthropology of neuroethics remain
with the regional ontology of science and are taken to be true, neuroethics
as it is practiced in research and clinical care cannot exist. Ethics
entails concepts of free will, choice and responsibility. In biological and
physical paradigms of science, these concepts are nonsensical. Any instance of
neuroethical thinking within such a paradigm presents, of necessity, and
incoherence under which the very possibility of neuroethical activity collapses
into contradiction. What then, are we to do?
[1]
H. Blumenfeld, Neuroanatomy Through
Clinical Cases. Sunderland MA: Sinauer, 2010. Blumenfeld acknowledges
these as hypotheses rather than facts: “Note that these first two fundamental
conjectures about where the mind is (in the body) and what the mind is (normal
physical processes) remain hypotheses, perhaps with growing evidence in their
favor, yet remaining hypotheses nonetheless.” (p. 973). Overall, his view
remains solidly within the empirical paradigm.
[3]
Damasio, A. “The Neural Basis of Social
Behavior: Ethical Implications,” in Marcus, S.J. Ed., Neuroethics:
Mapping the Field. New York: The Dana Press, 16. Damasio, in
the same presentation, notes that he believes humans have free will, “though
not for all behaviors, and not for all conditions, and sometimes not to the
full extent in any condition.” He presents this as an observation, and
one that seems underivable from biological models of persons.
[4]
Farah, M. Neuroethics: An
Introduction with Readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. In both
of the sciences Farah cites, biology and psychology, the empirical paradigm is
operative, and along with it, its assumptions about persons. In terms of
what was described in the previous chapter, they take the perspective of the
Field of the Organic.
[5]
Churchland, P. Braintrust:
What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2011. Here we see the Field of the Organic in operation
again, this time as a resource for thinking about our moral lives. Do brains do
all these things, or do persons do them? In an organic model or paradigm,
the answer must be the former.
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