Review of Nada Gligorov: Neuroethics and the Scientific Revision of Common Sense

AbstractThis ambitious book aims to make a substantive contribution to six separate debates within neuroethics — the existence of free will, the impact of cognitive enhancement and (separately) of memory management on personal identity, the nature of mental privacy, the supposed subjectivity of pain, and the proper definition of death — all in the context of a framing argument concerning the relation bet ween common sense psychological concepts and scientific concepts. Gligorov means to rebut skepticism about folk mental states in the face of surprising neuroscientific results by reconceptualizing folk theories as protean, incorporating some of the very results that seem to challenge them. My impres sion is that Gligorov’s arguments on cognitive enhancement, memory modification, and brain death make helpful contributions to the respective literatures on those subjects, but I close with a number of concerns about the book, especially whether its framing argument is successful in its current fo rm.

Source: Neuroethics - February 22, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research