Contents


Preface

Less than 50 years ago, neuroscientific understanding was in its infancy by millennial standards, with no consensus on such basic cell features as signal transduction, membrane channels, most neurotransmitters, synaptic circuits, and the like. In this early milieu there was little need for an ethical discipline that would be uniquely concerned with the nervous system. By 2013, in contrast, neuroscience has advanced well beyond single neuron functions, often touching on the global properties that emerge from central nervous system operation. This new era has seen, for example, the launching of national and continental initiatives in the BRAIN and Human Brain Projects, respectively, not to mention Asian and Latin American initiatives. These projects intend not only to elucidate disease mechanisms, but also to create wholly new technological approaches for exploring higher order function.

Core ethical concerns, in consequence, now touch on such significant and nervous system specific issues as the global regulation of organismal performance, an evolution in intervention that is breaching therapeutic boundaries, supraphysical notions of systemic and organizational reality, and the ontological and anthropological ground for human nature, among others. A frequent ethical theme raised by evergreater knowledge and technical prowess over organismal regulation, for instance, is the manipulation by and interaction with technological devices, not just in regard to the potential harm that may be incurred by such devices, but also with respect to the very nature of technology and its relation to the human being. New interventional modes, accordingly, need to consider not only traditional ethical principles of medical practice, but also what is meant by health and normality. In this environment, ethical questions related to the nervous system have assumed an immediacy and significance matching the centrality of neural function in biological behavior.

Contributing to this immediacy is the fundamental value of the human being, which lends normative weight to questions, interventions, and practices influencing him or her. Additionally, the value of human well-being—or eudomaia—is of increasing normative significance. In recognition of these twin normative concerns, parallel metaethical principles invoked in such advanced technical fields as artificial intelligence, for example, place primacy on the human being and prioritize the

On the other hand, despite a recognition of the relevance of fundamental human value, the derivation of metaethical principles that underwrite this value is by no means uniformly agreed to and reflects a turbulence in broader metaphysical notions of material reality, among other factors. This dissonance is singularly and uniquely acute in ethical issues related to the nervous system, seen, for example, in the normatively charged issue of death determinations. On the one hand, the human being is regarded as individuated and holistic, with invested value contingent to the human being in his entire corporality. Such a view is adopted in Karol Wojtyla's ethical perspective, and ascribed to in a number of religious traditions. Here the ground for value contingency emerges from the capacity for the performance of the "good," which thereby establishes the personal agent as a value locus,

increase of human flourishing.

validating the wholly referential status of the person:
