Short literature notices

The rapid progress in neuroscience has posed new and stimulating challenges to current ethical decision-making, anthropological constructs and normative criteria. These challenges are now articulated and commented on in a sweeping, popularly written overview by Michael S. Gazzaniga, who seems to bring the best expertise for such an overview as a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College (USA) and member of the US President s Council on Bioethics. Beginning with ‘‘lifespan neuroethics’’, he considers how knowledge about brain development might help to define human life and thus shed new light on the controversy about conferring moral status on an embryo. He finally opts for the eighth week as the beginning of human life, although without giving any ethical argumentation for this, rather grounding it on a ‘‘gut reaction’’ (page 8) which is in self-admitted contradiction even to neuroscientific knowledge. This chapter is closed with a discussion on the ethical challenges that emerge as the brain ages. Gazzaniga proposes that society should provide mechanisms for personal choice regarding the option of euthanasia, yet once again does not support this thesis with any ethical arguments. In the chapters about enhancement, Gazzaniga opens up a distinction between physical enhancement (enhancement of the body) and mental enhancement (enhancement of the brain and mind), rejecting the former, but welcoming the latter in a naively optimistic way. A clear justification for why this distinction should hold either in descriptive or in normative terms – is missing. In chapters on free will, personal responsibility, and the law Gazzaniga argues that the issue of responsibility is a social choice to which neuroscience cannot contribute (pages 101–102). This thesis is based on the assumption that neuroscience would only study brains, which are ‘‘automatic, rule-governed, determined devices’’, but not people, who are ‘‘personally responsible agents, free to make their own decisions’’(page 90). Such an argumentation reveals (i) a problematic dualism between the brain and the person, and (ii) a striking dichotomy between determinism and free will. The large amount of current literature about naturalist perspectives on personhood and free will is completely ignored. The final chapters of the book claim that there was a universal nature of moral beliefs. The universality would result from ‘‘common subconscious mechanisms that are activated in all members of our species in response to moral challenges’’ (page 172). Based on the fact that such an intrinsic universal ethics was allegedly implemented in our brains, it would be guaranteed that the whole human endeavour will come to a good end: ‘‘In the end, we humans are good at adapting to what works, what is good and beneficial, and, in the end, jettisoning the unwise, the intemperate, the silly and self-aggrandizing behaviours’’ (page 53). To sum up, the issues raised in this book are indeed of major importance for science, ethics and society and they do deserve explicit interdisciplinary ethical investigations. But this challenging task can certainly not be achieved so simply. Gazzaniga neglects not only the ethical research on the issues he discusses, but even the most basic ethical distinctions such as between ‘‘is’’ and ‘‘should’’ or between descriptive and normative ethics.