Neuroethics

Neuroethics is an emerging knowledge domain exploring both the neurocognitive apparatus of morality and ethics as well as ethical considerations and implications of neuroscience in research, technologies, and clinical practice. It is both the neuroscience of ethics and the ethics of neuroscience. The term neuroethics itself is quite new; Anneliese Pontius, a Harvard physician, first introduced the term in 1973 with the publication of “The Neuro-ethics of ‘Walking’ in the Newborn.” The International Neuroethics Society defines neuroethics as the study of “the implications of neuroscience for human self-understanding, ethics, and policy.”

As a field of academic inquiry, neuroethics is rooted in the rapidly developing domain of neuroscience as well as in related fields of theoretical and applied ethics. Although texts of Herodotus, Hippocrates, and Aristotle reveal ...