Ethics

Many thanks to Adam for inviting me to be a guest here.  I look forward to learning a lot more about neuroethics in the coming months and years from this blog and from other sources in the field.  I?d also welcome any additional thoughts and recommended reading any of you have to offer on what cognitive neuroscience might tell us about individual autonomy, privacy, and freedom of thought and of speech.

I?ll also offer two quick links before leaving, both of them related (at least tenuously) to the debate currently swirling among legal scholars and commentators about President Obama's statement that in choosing a Supreme Court Justice, he would be looking (among other things) for the ?quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles.?

First, Susan Bandes, a law professor who has written extensively on the role of emotion in law, has a terrific post at Balkinization on why empathy inevitably plays some role in judicial reasoning and why ?despite our best intentions, it is always selective, and riddled with blind spots.?  The lesson being, as I understand it, that judicial reasoning not only necessarily draws upon empathy, but that those who choose judges and structure judicial deliberation should take measures that make it less blind and less unfair.  I?m wondering whether any readers of this blog have additional reflections on this subject, and whether studies you know of may have shed any light on the role that empathy likely plays (or doesn?t play) in judicial decision-making.

Second, while I?m on the subject of empathy, I thought I?d also recommend the book Eye in the Sky by the sci-fi author Philip K. Dick.  It?s ostensibly about what can go wrong when a new and super-powerful particle accelerator malfunctions (other than the creation of an earth-devouring black hole).  But it?s also in part about how experiencing the world through someone else?s eyes, or in some cases, even though one?s own eyes, can also be a terrifying and disorienting experience.   Dick was born the same year as the star and creative force in ?The Prisoner? (Patrick McGoohan) (1928) and his book shares with that TV mini-series an interest in how we can be imprisoned not only in jail cells or in coercive social arrangements, but also in our own beliefs and thought patterns.