Just in case you thought I’ve turned into a completely silly blogger I’ve got a brainy and serious Brain Parade for you:

We seem to be awash in technological/scientific issues that raise serious ethical questions nowadays. Of these which concern/interest you the most?

MT: I’m staying out of this one my first choice of answer has already been covered and my second choice (user’s rights and DRM) has been so extensively covered that I can’t add anything that we didn’t cover better in our User’s Right’s podcast featuring Dan Lockton, Cory Doctorow and the Open Rights Group.

Dietram A. Scheufele:
Based on the public opinion surveys we did when I was still at Cornell and now at Wisconsin, the potential loss of privacy because of tiny surveillance devices and new communication tools is one of the predominant concerns among the U.S. public. As a communication researcher, of course, these concerns are also of great interest to me from a research perspective. But those data were from 2004. We are about to finish data collection on a new national survey as part of the NSF-funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University. We are expecting to release initial findings from this new survey fairly soon.

Dietram A. Scheufele, Professor Department of Life Sciences Communication, UW-Madison

Timothy Sandefur:
I’m deeply concerned not so much with particular ethical issues, like stem cell research or assisted suicide, as I am with the fact that our society continues to approach these issues from an irrational perspective. With all the scientific advances at hand, we still use religion and emotionalism and political correctness instead of reason and logic, and unfortunately, our political leaders are all too willing to enforce their dictates through law. The president’s bioethics council is probably the most egregious example of this. The council includes people whose views are fundamentally anti-science, such as Leon Kass. The fact that such people are taken seriously in the policymaking arena is one of the greatest problems that our civilization faces.

The question isn’t one of ethics, in fact, it’s one of epistemology. Religion is, at bottom, a series of ipse dixit formulations: this is good or evil because God says so. That, of course, is exactly the opposite of science’s foundation; science demands to know why, and to support its observations with proof. Religion doesn’t appeal to proof; it claims not to be susceptible of proof. Well, if people don’t rely on reason, logic, and proof, then they simply can never come to a meeting of the minds; they can only make unprovable, fundamentally arbitrary assertions about this or that being God’s will, and then force those views on other people. Faith, like force, overcomes the will without convincing the judgment. And the problem we face as a society is that people accept faith and force as being on an equal plane with reason, logic, and evidence.

What’s particularly frustrating to me is that, while on one side, wehave people who come at the world from this perspective, the other side is too afraid to attack it directly. Even many in the scientific community are willing to compromise on the issue of faith versus reason. They say, well, you can believe some things on faith and other things on reason. But that’s nonsense. The choice between naturalism and supernaturalism isn’t an arbitrary one; one is a reliable path to knowing—and therefore to ethics, politics, and everything else—and the other is emotionalistic nonsense. In the area of science that I most often write about—the controversy over the teaching of evolution—this is very obvious. On one side, we have people like Francis Beckwith, who attack science because it insists on non-supernatural explanations for natural phenomena, and on the other side, we find people saying, “Oh, no, you can have your science and eat it too.” Many of them are afraid to come out and say, “No, naturalism is the only proper method of knowledge, and the only proper way to discuss ethical or political issues.” Yet this is a vastly more important issue than whether or not people know about some scientific phenomenon or other. Who cares whether high school children know the current theories about the extinction of Homo neandertalensis? But whether high school children learn skepticism, and logic, and learn to distinguish faith-based assertions from a rational, logical argument—well, the entire fate of our civilization rests on that, ultimately. As Carl Sagan said,

If we teach only the findings and products of science—no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be—without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience? Both then are presented as unsupported assertion. In Russia and China, it used to be easy. Authoritative science was what the authorities taught. The distinction between science and pseudoscience was made for you. No perplexities needed to be muddled through. But when profound political changes occurred and strictures on free thought were loosened, a host of confident or charismatic claims—especially those that told us what we wanted to hear—gained a vast following. Every notion, however improbable, became authoritative.

It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its practitioners to change course. Many, perhaps most, science textbooks for budding scientists tread lightly here. It is enormously easier to present in an appealing way the wisdom distilled from centuries of patient and collective interrogation of Nature than to detail the messy distillation apparatus. The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

Timothy Sandefur is an attorney who contributes to Positive Liberty and Panda’s Thumb

Jonah Lehrer:
I’d have to go with the definition of life. Biological reductionism has neatly dismantled many of our illusions about what life is and how it begins. A hundred years ago, life still smacked of holiness. Now life is just proteins plus nucleic acid. Of course, as the current debates over stem cells and abortion demonstrates, our philosophical intuitions diverge from the data. We still think life is special (and infused with some kind of spirit), and this leads us to protest whenever biology deigns to insult or manipulate or engineer that specialness.

Jonah Lehrer is a staff writer with Seed Magazine who blogs at The Frontal Cortex

Matthew C. Nisbet:
The biggest issue, is really a meta-issue: It involves the struggle for cultural authority in society. By what authority do we make collective choices? By Biblical authority? Ideological? Or Scientific? The struggle for cultural authority is wrapped up in a contest over who is an expert in society. On issues like climate change, evolution, and bioethics, the conservative movement has produced a rival “think tank expertise” to challenge mainstream university science. Increasingly, conservatives pair appeals to their rival experts with an attack on the objectivity of university professors, arguing that universities are incredibly liberal places, and therefore you can’t trust peer-reviewed studies on issues like climate change.

Matthew C. Nisbet (Ph.D., Cornell University) is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University

Zoëga Ramsøy:
Since brain science is my game, that’s where I best can see how technological advances raise ethical questions. From this view, studies through the past 20 years have led to an abundance of ethical speculations and problems. First, the understanding of how the brain works is currently moving beyond the mere perceptual systems of the brain and probe deep into areas that have traditionally been reserved the humanities and social sciences. Studies of the genetic and neuronal building blocks of personality, of choice and volition, and of social interaction challenge the traditional views in this area. The scientific exploration of consciousness — what we could say define us as humans — continuously strengthen a naturalistic view. Today, few doubt that consciousness is a sole product of the brain. All these findings challenge our long-held opinions about what it is like to be a human. Consequently, I am of the opinion that we need to redefine “humanity” per se, our understanding of ourself, of our minds, cultures, societies, i.e. human affairs. Today, we read or hear news from brain science available every day. What is amiss is our ability — maybe even our willingness — to review and change our traditional notions.

What is striking is that the findings from neuroscience come through technical advancements. New ways to image the brain have led to new ways of asking questions about its structure and function. Today, we don’t only rely on structural imaging of the brain. We can also probe a subject’s genetic make-up; how neurotransmitters work in his brain; the relative size of a given structure (e.g. the amygdala, an emotion structure) in his brain; how this structure is working during different behavioural tasks; how the blood flows through the brain; even how this area is physically and functionally connected to other regions; or the relative molecular composition of a given structure of the brain.

This may initially seem quite academic and technical, which it is. However, this knowledge and methods can be applied to issues more relevant to our daily life: questions of degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s’ and Parkinson’s; psychological disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and dyssocial personality disorder (i.e. psychopaths); and even psychological variations in a healthy population such as personality traits. Turning the techniques towards these problems, we end up with ethical problems such as “person X show a 70% likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s in 10 years — should we tell him? Should we treat him?”; or “if this memory pill is working on patients with memory deficits, should we allow it to be used by healthy people also?”; or “person Y has the genotype associated with more anxiety traits during stress — should we hire him? Will he make good solider?”; or “We can now image how the brain of consumers respond when they see different ads — should we allow them to do so?”; or “the brain responses of subject H shows a 95% probability that he’s lying (using our methods) — should we convict him on this evidence?”.

In this way, the technological advancements in cognitive neuroscience challenge our understanding of ourself as a species, of moral and ethics. As new technical advances occur — and they take place at an increasing rate — new techniques lead to new questions and answers. My major concern is how we make use of those findings; how they are communicated to the public and decision makers; how it is understood, misunderstood, twisted and even banned. Religion and other strong cultural trends tend to have narrow ways of understanding, use and ignore science. It is only through an open-minded treatment of these findings that we can gain knowledge of ourself and life itself.Thomas

Zoëga Ramsøy is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is working on problems in perception, memory and consciousness, and has a keen interest in neuroethics. He is a co-editor of the blog BrainEthics and a co-editor of Science & Consciousness Review, an online review journal for the scientific study of consciousness.

Evil Monkey:
I have to take issue with an assumption behind the question. The phenomenon of challenging technical and scientific advances based upon ethical grounds has existed throughout history. From lightning rods to stem cells, an ultraconservative segment of the population has always sought to capitalize on people’s fears either by manufacturing alleged moral controversies or by masking actual, constructive dialogue in a sea of diatribe. Contrary to the opinions of these neo-Luddites, the average person is quite responsible and capable of critically analyzing any ethical concerns that accompany new advances. Unfortunately, any attempts at a real conversation are flooded out by a constant stream of alarmist red herrings and false conundrums. My biggest concern, therefore, is to make intelligent, informed, rational discourse a staple of our society, and to consign irrational fearmongering to the history books.

Evil Monkey, Neurotopia

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