Neuroethics Q& A with Steven Hyman: What is Neuroethics?

by Aalok Mehta

October 7, 2008

Ahead of the inaugural meeting of the Neuroethics Society, on Nov. 13 and 14 in Washington, D.C., Dana Press writer Aalok Mehta quizzed some of the experts in the field about the implications of neuroscience and its relevance to everyday life. Steven Hyman is provost of Harvard University and a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School. Hyman, the society’s president, will speak at the meeting on how to treat mental illness in children.

What is neuroethics?


Steven Hyman 2007 Photo - Thumbnail
Steven Hyman

It’s a field that studies the implications of neuroscience for human self-understanding, ethics and policy.

What are some of the differences between neuroethics and traditional bioethics?

There are a lot of general issues related to research in the nervous system that are contained within bioethics—informed consent and people with cognitive impairments are traditional kinds of bioethical issues.

But if instead you want to ask about the essence of personal responsibility and how we should think about personal responsibility in light of neuroscience, and in light of our criminal justice system, that is something that is well beyond bioethics. It involves neuroscience, philosophy and the law.

If you want to ask about brain privacy—since we have more sophisticated imaging devices that can in a crude way begin to give clues to observers about what you’re thinking or feeling—some of that might be dealt with in legal or philosophical writings about privacy, but again you want to incorporate with it a deep understanding of the technologies.

It applies even if you want to talk about the fundamental basis of ethical thought itself. Traditionally, people have appealed to principles that might be transcendent or outside of the human brain, but at the same time increasingly we’re aware that the way our brains have been shaped by evolution and the way they function has an enormous impact on our own moral understanding and how we think about ethics.

How do we think about interventions, drugs or devices that change cognition or change personality? If your spouse only really likes you when you’re on antidepressants, well, which person did they marry? These kinds of issues are not really core issues for existing bioethics and seem to require a new kind of forum.

What do you think are some of the most interesting topics in neuroscience right now?

I think issues of cognitive enhancement, drugs and interventions that affect a person’s identity; brain privacy; and the neural basis of morality, or what’s called moral cognition, are among the really interesting areas. Another is understanding the neurobiology of decision making; that itself is not per se neuroethics, but as it gets applied to areas such as marketing, it begins to touch on ethical concerns.

To what extent would you say neuroethics is relevant to the daily life of most people?

It is quite relevant, in areas from the widespread use of psychopharmacology to treat children to our sense of responsibility and justice in the courtroom to the moral status we confer on people with mental illnesses or addictive disorders. Much that we have not been reflective about or have handled with pop psychology can be thought about more deeply in the context of advances in neuroscience.

Why form a neuroethics society?

A group of neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, bioethicists and lawyers—who knew each other and who had all been involved in the Dana Foundation–sponsored Neuroethics: Mapping the Field conference that was held [in 2002] in San Francisco—got together a second time at a seminar and discussed whether this would make sense.

We decided to form a society because we feel that there are issues related to the nervous system that are not neatly contained within traditional bioethics. In particular, there are issues that relate to the functioning of the brain—after all, the brain, being the seat of thought and emotion and behavioral control, has a special resonance for, among other things, being itself the seat of ethics.

We wanted to create bridges between advances in neuroscience and the world of policy and ethics.

What do you hope to achieve as president of the Neuroethics Society? What do you hope to achieve specifically at this meeting?

At the meeting, there are two sets of goals. One is to create—and this the program committee has done—an exciting and engaging meeting that brings people from neuroscience and other diverse disciplines together in a process of mutual learning and exploration.

But at the same time—and that’s why things have to be interesting—we want to institutionalize a basis for interaction, so that we facilitate these discussions again with neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, lawyers and other people in other disciplines who are interested.

What do you think the prospects for neuroethics are? Will the field grow, and how rapidly?

Neuroethics will grow. I don’t think it’s going to be the largest field in the world, but I think it’s going to grow because of the advances in neuroscience, the growth in technology and the curiosity and concern of many people about what those portend for our future.


More information:

The Neuroethics Society 

Dana section on Neuroethics 

Q&A with Hank Greely: The Ethics of Forensic Neuroscience

Q&A with Judy Illes: Incidental Findings 

Q&A with Martha Farah: The Business of Neurotech