Brave Neuro World: The Ethics of the New Brain Science

Kathryn Schulz

Scientists have developed minimally invasive and comparatively benign techniques for exploring--and altering--the brain. Like advances in genetics (another field that investigates the biological substrata of selfhood), these developments raisesignificant philosophical, legal and ethical issues.

Ultimately, neuroscience may raise even more troubling ethical issues, for the simple reason that it is easier to predict and control behavior by manipulating neurons than by manipulating genes. Even if all ethical and practical constraints on altering our DNAvanished tomorrow, we'd have to wait for years (ordecades) to see the outcome of genetic experiments--and all the while environmental factorswould confound our tinkering. Intervening on thebrain, by contrast, can produce startlingly rapid results.