Does Neuroscience Have Normative Implications?

221 Pages·2020·2.376 MB·English

by  Geoffrey S. Holtzman, Elisabeth Hildt

The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology 22
Geoffrey S. Holtzman
Elisabeth Hildt  Editors
Does Neuroscience
Have Normative
Implications?
The International Library of Ethics,
Law and Technology
Volume 22
Series Editors
Bert Gordijn, Ethics Institute, Dublin City University, Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Sabine Roeser, Philosophy Department, Delft University of Technology, 
Delft, The Netherlands
Editorial Board
Dieter Birnbacher, Institute of Philosophy, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, 
Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Roger Brownsword, Law, Kings College London, London, UK
Ruth Chadwick, ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspe, Cardiff, UK
Paul Stephen Dempsey, University of Montreal, Institute of Air & Space Law, 
Montreal, Canada
Michael Froomkin, Miami Law, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA
Serge Gutwirth, Campus Etterbeek, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Elsene, Belgium
Henk Ten Have, Center for Healthcare Ethics, Duquesne University, 
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Søren Holm, Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, The University of Manchester, 
Manchester, UK
George Khushf, Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, 
Columbia, South Carolina, SC, USA
Justice Michael Kirby, High Court of Australia, Kingston, Australia
Bartha Knoppers, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada
David Krieger, The Waging Peace Foundation, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Graeme Laurie, AHRC Centre for Intellectual Property and Technology Law, 
Edinburgh, UK
René Oosterlinck, European Space Agency, Paris, France
John Weckert, Charles Sturt University, North Wagga Wagga, Australia
Technologies are developing faster and their impact is bigger than ever before.
Synergies emerge between formerly independent technologies that trigger
accelerated and unpredicted effects. Alongside these technological advances new
ethical ideas and powerful moral ideologies have appeared which force us to
consider the application of these emerging technologies. In attempting to navigate
utopian and dystopian visions of the future, it becomes clear that technological
progress and its moral quandaries call for new policies and legislative responses.
Against this backdrop, this book series from Springer provides a forum for
interdisciplinary discussion and normative analysis of emerging technologies that
are likely to have a significant impact on the environment, society and/or humanity.
These will include, but be no means limited to nanotechnology, neurotechnology,
information technology, biotechnology, weapons and security technology, energy
technology, and space-based technologies.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7761
Geoffrey S. Holtzman • Elisabeth Hildt
Editors
Does Neuroscience Have
Normative Implications?
Editors
Geoffrey S. Holtzman Elisabeth Hildt
New York, NY, USA Center for the Study of Ethics in the
Professions
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, IL, USA
ISSN 1875-0044 ISSN 1875-0036 (electronic)
The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology
ISBN 978-3-030-56133-8 ISBN 978-3-030-56134-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56134-5
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Introduction
Neuroscience seeks to understand the biological systems that guide human behavior
and cognition. Normative ethics, on the other hand, seeks to understand the system
of abstract moral principles saying how people ought to behave. Can neuroscience
provide insight into normative ethics and help us better understand which human
actions and judgments are right and which are wrong? What—if anything—can be
learned about normative ethics and philosophical metaethics by studying neurosci-
entific research? These are the central questions of the collected volume at hand.
In recent years, more and more work in ethics and metaethics has assumed that
philosophers can benefit from studying how ordinary people make moral judg-
ments. A growing number of researchers believe that neuroscience can, indeed, pro-
vide insights into the questions of philosophical ethics. But exactly what philosophers
might be able to learn from such empirical work—and specifically what they can
and cannot expect to gain from the neuroscience of moral judgment—is an impor-
tant but understudied foundational question. Even advocates of the view that neuro-
science can provide insights into questions of philosophical ethics acknowledge that
the path from neuroscientific is to normative ought can be quite fraught.
This book consists of a combination of contributions by scholars from disci-
plines such as philosophy, ethics, neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences.
The collected volume presents different views that all circle around the question of
whether neuroscience has normative implications. While some authors in this vol-
ume support and embrace the idea that neuroscience does have normative implica-
tions and are optimistic about the ways certain neuroscientific insights might
advance philosophical ethics, others are more skeptical of the normative signifi-
cance of neuroscience.
The collected volume begins with chapters that reflect on the role of neurosci-
ence for philosophical thinking on decision-making, moral judgment, moral respon-
sibility, moral cognition, moral motivation, pain, punishment, and social life. In
Chap. 1, Jon Leefmann investigates others’ claims that some neuroscientific research
should be taken as normatively or prescriptively relevant. After distinguishing and
discussing an action-theoretic, an epistemological, and a metaphysical reading of
v
vi Introduction
this view, he concludes that overall there is relatively limited leeway for inferring
concrete normative judgments from neuroscientific evidence.
After identifying and evaluating three perceived threats from neuroscience to our
conception of ourselves as free, responsible agents, Myrto Mylopoulos argues that
worries for moral responsibility based on these perceived threats are ultimately
unfounded. She then suggests ways in which neuroscience, far from serving as a
threat, may actually help us to enrich our understanding of ourselves as moral agents.
In Chap. 3, Jennifer Corns and Robert Cowan identify four ethically relevant
empirical discoveries about the nature of pain. They then discuss how these discov-
eries inform putative normative ethical principles and illuminate metaethical debates
and conclude that this science-based perspective supports the view that pain is less
significant in moral-philosophical contexts than one might have thought.
In “Two Theories of Moral Cognition,” Julia Haas uses Fiery Cushman’s model-
free approach to human cognition as a jumping off point for a novel, multi-system,
reinforcement-learning-based model of moral cognition. She argues that moral cog-
nition depends on three or more decision-making systems, with interactions between
the systems producing its characteristic sociological, psychological, and phenome-
nological features.
Chris Zarpentine reflects in his Chap. 5 on the relation between moral judgment
and motivation. After examining the dispute between motivation internalists and
motivation externalists in light of recent neuroscientific work, he argues that this
relation is best seen as a normative one: moral judgment ought to be accompanied
by the appropriate motivation.
In Chap. 6, Isaac Wiegman deliberates on normative theories of punishment
intended to elucidate why punishment is morally justified. In his Chap. 6, he takes a
neuroscience-influenced perspective on retributive and consequentialist consider-
ations regarding punishment and argues that there is less evidence than traditionally
thought for the claim that punishment has intrinsic value.
In her Chap. 7, Ullica Segerstrale discusses the potential social consequences of
scientific claims about human behavior. Against the background of E.O. Wilson’s
work, she stresses that neuroscience is vulnerable to the same criticism as sociobiol-
ogy: the danger of normative interpretations of statements intended to be factual.
She particularly criticizes the way the term “tribe” is used and the way in which
ingroup-outgroup conflict is presented by some moral psychologists as normal and
necessary.
The next three chapters focus on normative implications of neuroscientific find-
ings in medical contexts. Building on KWM Fulford’s work, Matthew Ruble argues
in Chap. 8 that medical ethics, psychiatric ethics, and neuroethics commit a mistake
when attempting to adopt a “facts first then values” approach. He states that a meth-
odology of arguing from allegedly undisputed facts to disputed values is a method-
ology doomed to moral and epistemic failure.
Christian Ineichen and Markus Christen then discuss the normative implications
of neuromodulation technologies used with the aim of pursuing normative goals.
After sketching the “standard model” justification of such interventions, which rely
on a clear separation between normative considerations and empirical assessments,
Introduction vii
they challenge this model and provide bridges between the empirical and normative
perspective.
In the final Chap. 10, Bongrae Seok explores three different models of interdis-
ciplinary interaction between neuroscience and ethics, focusing on constructive
integration. By analyzing recent neuroscientific studies, he argues that neuroscience
can be integrated with ethics in developing a normative standard for autistic
moral agency.
As a whole, the chapters form a self-reflective body of work that simultaneously
seeks to derive normative ethical implications from neuroscience and to question
whether and how that may be possible at all. In doing so, the collection brings
together psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, ethics, and philosophy of
science.
We hope that the volume will be a valuable source not only for philosophers and
ethicists interested in philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and neuroethics, but
also for psychologists and neuroscientists working on moral cognition. Furthermore,
the book could play a central role in graduate courses on neuroethics, moral psy-
chology, philosophy of neuroscience, and philosophy of cognitive science.
Acknowledgments
This collected volumes traces back to the symposium “Does Neuroscience Have
Normative Implications?” held in April 2016 at the Illinois Institute of Technology
in Chicago, IL. While some of the authors participated in the symposium, we also
asked additional scholars to provide their perspectives. The symposium was part of
the project “Neuroethics – On the Interplay Between Neuroscience and Ethics.” We
are grateful to the Cogito Foundation for generously funding the research within the
project, the symposium, and the collected volume (Grant 14-108-R). We would also
like to thank Kelly Laas for her help with proofreading.
Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions Elisabeth Hildt
Illinois Institute of Technology,
Chicago, IL, USA
New York, NY, USA Geoffrey S. Holtzman
May 2020
ix
Contents
1 The Neuroscience of Human Morality:
Three Levels of Normative Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Jon Leefmann
2 Moral Responsibility and Perceived Threats
from Neuroscience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Myrto Mylopoulos
3 Lessons for Ethics from the Science of Pain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Jennifer Corns and Robert Cowan
4 Two Theories of Moral Cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Julia Haas
5 Rethinking Moral Motivation: How Neuroscience
Supports an Alternative to Motivation Internalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Chris Zarpentine
6 The Reactive Roots of Retribution: Normative
Implications of the Neuroscience of Punishment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Isaac Wiegman
7 Normative Implications of Neuroscience
and Sociobiology – Intended and Perceived . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Ullica Segerstrale
8 Nervous Norms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Matthew Ruble
xi