Neuroethics and National Security

This essay considers the potential role of bioethics in disaster response planning and preparedness. Bioethicists can make substantial contributions, by ensuring that decision-making and distribution of resources during crises is carried out in a fair and just manner, as well as by examining the assumptions upon which disaster planning are based. Bioethicists should also be aware of potential pitfalls of overly-hasty engagement with this new field.     

神经伦理学研究述评

神经伦理学自2002年正式在美国学术界提出之后,取得了一些研究成果.但是,神经伦理学的研究还存在内涵不清和学科定位不准,研究领域有待商榷,应用分歧较大等问题.为了解决这些问题,应该将神经伦理学的理论研究和具体问题的探讨有机结合,且重视神经伦理学的平衡发展,神经科学家与伦理学家应携手合作,共同推动神经伦理学的研究与发展.     

Neuroethics: the practical and the philosophical

In comparison with the ethical issues surrounding molecular genetics, there has been little public awareness of the ethical implications of neuroscience. Yet recent progress in cognitive neuroscience raises a host of ethical issues of at least comparable importance. Some are of a practical nature, concerning the applications of neurotechnology and their likely implications for individuals and society. Others are more philosophical, concerning the way we think about ourselves as persons, moral agents and spiritual beings. This article reviews key examples of each type of issue, including the relevant advances in science and technology and their accompanying social and philosophical problems.     

Translating Neuroethics: Reflections from Muslim Ethics

Muslim ethics is cautiously engaging developments in neuroscience. In their encounters with developments in neuroscience such as brain death and functional magnetic resonance imaging procedures, Muslim ethicists might be on the cusp of spirited debates. Science and religion perform different kinds of work and ought not to be conflated. Cultural translation is central to negotiating the complex life worlds of religious communities, Muslims included. Cultural translation involves lived encounters with modernity and its byproduct, modern science. Serious ethical debate requires more than just a mere instrumental encounter with science. A robust Muslim approach to neuroethics might require an emulsion of religion and neuroscience, thought and body, and body and soul. Yet one must anticipate that Muslim debates in neuroethics will be inflected with Muslim values, symbols and the discrete faith perspectives of this tradition with meanings that are specific to people who share this worldview and their concerns.     

Potential for Bias in the Context of Neuroethics

Neuroscience research, like all science, is vulnerable to the influence of extraneous values in the practice of research, whether in research design or the selection, analysis and interpretation of data. This is particularly problematic for research into the biological mechanisms that underlie behavior, and especially the neurobiological underpinnings of moral development and ethical reasoning, decision-making and behavior, and the other elements of what is often called the neuroscience of ethics. The problem arises because neuroscientists, like most everyone, bring to their work assumptions, preconceptions and values and other sources of potentially inappropriate bias of which they may be unaware. It is important that the training of neuroscientists, and research practice itself, include open and in-depth discussion and examination of the assumptions that underlie research. Further, policy makers, journalists, and the general public, that is, the consumers of neuroscience research findings (and by extension, neurotechnologies) should be made aware of the limitations as well as the strengths of the science, the evolving nature of scientific understanding, and the often invisible values inherent in science.     

Team Spirit,Team Chemistry,and Neuroethics

Abstract

This paper examines the phenomenon of team spirit from a neurobiological point of view. It argues that ethical judgment should be involved in understanding and evaluating the idea. Adopting a liberal individualist point of view helps us understand the phenomenology of team spirit, while also helping us to articulate a critique of communitarian approaches that celebrate the sort of de-individuation that occurs in team spirit. The paper recognizes further complexity in terms of cross-cultural issues, as well as the tendency to toward reductionism. It concludes by imagining a thought experiment involving chemically enhanced team spirit, which shows how our larger ethical framework helps us evaluate possible responses.     

功能性便秘

功能性便秘是常见的慢性便秘,罗马III提出了新的诊断标准。功能性便秘的一般治疗包括定期排便、增加活动、增加纤维素摄取,改变生活方式和调整情绪。慢传输型便秘的药物选择膨胀性泻药、渗透性泻剂、促动力剂、氯通道激活剂等。功能性排便障碍型患者可选择生物反馈治疗。治疗成功后应调节剂量,维持疗效。外科治疗应有严格的适应证。进一步研究结肠动力与排便生理,以提高对疾病的认识和提出有效的治疗。     

Happiness is not Well-Being

This paper attempts to explain the conceptual connections between happiness and well-being. It first distinguishes episodic happiness from happiness in the personal attribute sense. It then evaluates two recent proposals about the connection between happiness and well-being: (1) the idea that episodic happiness and well-being both have the same fundamental determinants, so that a person is well-off to a particular degree in virtue of the fact that they are happy to that degree, and (2) the idea that happiness in the personal attribute sense can serve as a “proxy” for well-being, i.e., that a person’s degree of deep or robust happiness approximates their degree of well-being. It is argued that happiness in both these senses is conceptually, metaphysically, and empirically distinct from well-being. A new analysis of welfare, well-being as agential flourishing, can explain welfare’s real connection to happiness in both the episodic and personal attribute senses. It predicts that such happiness is only directly beneficial when it is valued, when it is a form of valuing, or when it underwrites (i.e., serves as the causal basis for) the disposition to realize one’s values. It is therefore a necessary—but not sufficient—condition for especially high levels of well-being. This analysis of welfare integrates many insights from the eudaimonic tradition of welfare and happiness research in psychology, and also addresses common criticisms of these eudaimonic models.     

Perception is not all-purpose

I aim to show that perception depends counterfactually on the action we want to perform. Perception is not all-purpose: what we want to do does influence what we see. After clarifying how this claim is different from the one at stake in the cognitive penetrability debate and what counterfactual dependence means in my claim, I will give a two-step argument: (a) one’s perceptual attention depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action (everything else being equal) and (b) one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s perceptual attention (everything else being equal). If we put these claims together, what we get is that one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action (everything else being equal).