95:3 July 2012
Neuroethics

Deadline for Submissions: July 31, 2011
Advisory Editor: Juha Räikkä, University of Turku (jraikka@utu.fi)

New discoveries in the neurosciences are not only helping in the treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders, they are also providing new tools for enhancing people's mental capacities, revealing neural bases of antisocial behaviour, and offering potential neurochemical strategies for counteracting such behavior. At the same time, the neurosciences are beginning to have an impact on our philosophical understanding of ourselves as social and moral beings. This issue of The Monist is devoted to questions of both the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. Do neuroimaging, neurosurgery, or neural nanotechnology present us with new ethical issues? Do neuroscanning devices, for example, pose a potential threat to what might be called neural privacy? What are the ethical limits of neuroscientific research and of the potential new technologies which might be based thereon? Can a deeper understanding of the neurology of altruistic choices throw light on traditional ethical questions? Papers are particularly welcome which address these and other questions at the borderlines of neuroscience and moral philosophy.