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Introduction
Over the past few years, a number of major national and international brain projects have been launched.1 The establishment of these projects and their substantial funding gives credence to the view that the search to understand the brain is the dominant scientific inquiry of our time. As these projects move forward, an important question to ask is: What impact, if any, will our increasing knowledge of brain function have on our moral thinking? This question has already prompted considerable discussion in neuroethics, where it has been framed in terms of the purported challenge posed by neuroscience to our legal and moral notions of agency and responsibility. In this article, I will consider two lines of argument that suggest that neuroscience can advance, rather than challenge, morality: first, by revealing the basis of our moral intuitions and thereby revising our moral framework; and second, by enhancing our moral behavior through pharmacological (and other) means. One reason to think that this is an important question to address is that it examines neuroethics itself and, in particular, the relationship between the neuroscience of ethics and the ethics of neuroscience.
“Stretching Ethics to the Breaking Point”
In a well-known and influential article, Holmes Rolston III argued that environmental ethics “stretches classical ethics to the breaking point.”2 “Classical ethics” (CE) is a framework with which we are broadly familiar: one in which the supposedly unique capacities of humans are regarded as having moral priority and there is a clear separation between the human and the natural; in other words, an ethic that privileges rationality and conscious decisionmaking, and that sees the moral agent as an impartial, rational observer disconnected from context and environment. According to Rolston, CE is too narrowly defined and is therefore unable to accommodate a variety of nonhuman objects of duty, such as animals, organisms, species, and ecosystems. This unwarranted exclusion is the result of CE privileging capacities that arguably are unique to humans—“singularity, centeredness, selfhood, and individuality”—over those that are common to both humans and other living entities. A different but related criticism focuses not on the exclusion of nonhuman objects of duty, but on the privileging of rationality, impartiality, and individuality, which reflects a gendered bias. A credible ethics has to...