Neuroethics Beyond Genethics EMBO/EMBL Nov 3-4, 2006

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Neuroethics Beyond GenethicsEMBO/EMBL Nov 3-4,
2006

• Adina Roskies
• Dartmouth College
• and
• Sydney University

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Neuroethics

• The ethics of neuroscience
• The ethics of practice
• Ethical implications of neuroscience
• The neuroscience of ethics

Ethics of Neuroscience
Neuroscience Of Ethics
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Early thoughts on neuroethics

• The question at issue here is how far the
  knowledge that we have about our brain gives us a
  new conception of ourselves, a different
  representation of our ideas, our thoughts and the
  dispositions that intervene when we make
  judgments. With regard to moral judgments, in
  fact, it is fundamental. The knowledge that we
  are now in the process of piecing together about
  the human brain ought to allow us to have a
  clearer idea -- I am perhaps overly optimistic --
  of the direction in which we wish to see human
  society develop --J.P. Changeux

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Is neuroethics a distinct field?

• Is neuroethics a discipline in its own right?
• Do the problems it raises differ from those in
  genethics?

Ethics of Neuroscience
Neuroscience Of Ethics
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The ethical space
neuroethics
genethics
decision-making and freedom
consciousness
moral cognition
future generations
access
personhood and the self
treatment
consent
normalcy and disease
discrimination
distributive justice
enhancement
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Overlap
neuroethics
genethics
decision-making and freedom
consciousness
moral cognition
future generations
access
personhood and the self
treatment
consent
normalcy and disease
discrimination
distributive justice
enhancement
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Genethics beyond neuroethics
neuroethics
genethics
decision-making and freedom
consciousness
moral cognition
future generations
access
personhood and the self
treatment
consent
normalcy and disease
discrimination
distributive justice
enhancement
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Neuroethics beyond genethics
neuroethics
genethics
decision-making and freedom
consciousness
moral cognition
future generations
access
personhood and the self
treatment
consent
normalcy and disease
discrimination
distributive justice
enhancement
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Finding the neural correlates of consciousness
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MCS and PVS

• MCS minimal awareness of self
• PVS no awareness of self
• Even PVS patients may appear somewhat normal
• MCS112,000-280,000 in USA
• PVS 14,000-35,000
• (Embo reports,2005)

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Schiavo case

• PVS
• Support eventually terminated
• Public focus
• Autopsy revealed massive irreversible damage

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Metabolism in normal and vegetative state
normal
PVS
PVS after recovery
Laureys, 2006
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Preserved brain activity in MCS
Case 1
Case 2
normals
Schiff et al (2005) 2 men in MCS show brain
activity to familiar audio track, but many
differences
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Brain damage and consciousness

• Lots of brain activity activity occurs during
  sleep, without awareness etc.
• Despite this
• The findings show that some people that doctors
  had previously declared to be in a Persistent
  Vegetative State (PVS) are still
  conscious. (commentary on the web)

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More recent studies
Owen et al., 2006
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Ethical implications

• Methods to assess awareness in brain-damaged
  patients
• Methods can be developed to communicate with
  patients physically unable to respond
• May provide patients with more autonomy, but
  leaves us with ethical choices to make,
  nonetheless

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Neuroethics beyond genethics
neuroethics
genethics
decision-making and freedom
consciousness
moral cognition
future generations
access
personhood and the self
treatment
consent
normalcy and disease
discrimination
distributive justice
enhancement
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What is a person?

• Personal identity
• Neuroessentialism (We are our brains)
• Psychological or brain-based criteria seem
  important
• Do alterations in brain function alter personal
  identity?
• The self
• What is the representation of self?
• Is the self an illusion?

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Personhood

• On the basis of philosophical disputes and
  neuroscientific data, Farah and Heberlein (AJOB
  Neurosciences, forthcoming) argue against
  personhood as a natural kind

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Naturalizing personhood

• The real contribution of neuroscience to
  understanding personhood may be in revealing not
  what persons are, but rather why we have the
  intuition that there are persons instead of
  naturalizing the concept of personhood by
  identifying its essential characteristics in the
  natural world, neuroscience may show us that
  personhood is illusory, constructed by our brains
  and projected onto the world (Farah
  Heberlein, AJOB Neurosci, forthcoming)

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Our person-intutions

• 2 different networks
• Person-network (the social brain) Automatic,
  fast, based on simple perceptual features, issues
  in yes/no judgments
• Object-network More abstract, analytical, higher
  cognitive areas issues in graded judgments
• Suggest abandoning the concept of personhood for
  ethics

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What is a person?

• An important ethical concept
• Doesnt have to be a natural kind
• Neuroscience can help put it in perspective we
  can choose what criteria we think are more
  important

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Neuroethics beyond genethics
neuroethics
genethics
decision-making and freedom
consciousness
moral cognition
future generations
access
personhood and the self
treatment
consent
normalcy and disease
discrimination
distributive justice
enhancement
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Decision-making in nonhuman primates

• Reward circuitry
• Midbrain dopaminergic system
• VMPFC codes primary reinforcers and reward
  associations in changing circumstances
• Integrative areas in DLPFC and parietal cortex

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Neurobiology of reward
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Similar areas are active in humans in
neuroimaging of decision-making tasks

• Reward/Emotional circuitry
• VMPFC/OFC associating outcomes with reward
  integrate sensory and limbic signals
• Striatum critical component of dopaminergic
  reward system
• Amygdala predictive of bad outcome
• Insula associated with risk, punishment
• ACC conflict monitoring, risk
• Cognitive regions
• DLPFC online manipulation and integration of
  decision-relevant information
• Posterior parietal cortex calculation

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The problem

• Decisions, choices, actions are generally thought
  to be freely willed
• Science reveals them, or threatens to reveal
  them, to be mechanistically or physically
  intelligible.
• This mechanistic view challenges our intuitions
  about freedom and its conceptual partner, moral
  responsibility.

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Free will

• By monitoring the signals produced by
  appropriate neurons, an experimenter can predict
  and even influence what a monkey will
  chooseEthics, not theory, would preclude an
  investigator from obtaining the same relationship
  with a human agent. Can this ability to predict
  and influence be reconciled with a belief in
  freedom and responsibility?
• Schall, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2001

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Rethinking freedom and responsibility

• The old view
• Freedom is
• Ability to do otherwise
• Absence of constraint

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Moral responsibility

• We have intuitive senses of when people are
  appropriate objects of reactive attitudes of
  praise, blame, respect, etc. for their actions.
• The intuitions seem to involve a conception of
  free action

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The regress of being able to do otherwise

• To be free is to be able to
• Act otherwise
• Choose to act otherwise
• Our brains (not our selves) do the choosing
• But
• Our brains are our selves
• We must become comfortable with mind as mechanism

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The neuroscience of ethics

• Recasting freedom as self-governance
• What mechanisms underlie our ability to control
  our actions what failures undercut that ability?
• Can we make sense of freedom as self-regulation?

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The neurobiology of responsibility

• Cognitive demand
• Appropriate representation of moral facts
• Representation of self as rational agent? An
  intentional agent?
• Control demand
• Appropriate motivational structures
• When a person is in control of his actions, his
  actions depend on his motivational states
• Appropriate links between cognitive and
  motivational structures
• Effective mechanisms of inhibition

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Neuroethics beyond genethics
neuroethics
genethics
decision-making and freedom
consciousness
moral cognition
future generations
access
personhood and the self
treatment
consent
normalcy and disease
discrimination
distributive justice
enhancement
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Neuroimaging results
Greene et al., 2001

• Overlap with areas involved with general
  decision making
• Activity in regions implicated in emotion,
  especially in personal moral judgments

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Difficult - easy personal dilemmas
Greene et al., 2004

• High RT(counter-intuitive) - low RT (intuitive)
  personal judgments
• Override emotional bias with more abstract
  thought

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What does this say about the nature of morality?

• Mechanistic?
• Does it correspond to something out in the world?
• Our intuitions dont necessary track
  morally-relevant features of situations
• An artifact of how we are wired up?
• Do blame and punishment make sense? Retributivism
  vs. utilitarianism.

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Is neuroethics a distinct field?

• Do the problems neuroethics raises differ from
  those in genethics?
• Is neuroethics a discipline in its own right?

Ethics of Neuroscience
Neuroscience Of Ethics
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Yes, distinct enough

• Neuroethics raises some novel questions
• Even when questions are similar, they have
  distinctive aspects
• To some extent, disciplines are socially
  constructed
• Neuroethics deals with sophisticated
  methodologies and a complex body of data and
  theory, and requires people trained in both
  neuroscience and ethics to adequately assess the
  evidence
• Nonetheless, we shouldnt overlook the debt
  neuroethics has to bioethical thought that
  precedes it.