Dr. Peter Zuk is a research fellow at the Brain Bioethics Lab at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics. He studies the relationship between conceptions of the mind, values, and the human person across the history of philosophy to address moral objectivity, well-being, meaning, and their role in debates about emerging neurotechnologies. During a visit to NEBA, where he presented alongside Dr. Gabriel Lázaro Muñoz, we asked him two questions.
What is your area of research within neuroethics, and why does it deserve special attention?
I’m interested most fundamentally in the relationship between mind and value. Since this issue runs throughout the history of philosophy, I draw inspiration from accounts offered by philosophers of the past. My approach asks how far we can explain ethical and other forms of value in terms of conscious mental life without explaining value away as the product of merely subjective whims about which rational reflection is pointless or impossible.
I think we can find structure in our mental life that allows us to explain value through affective or emotional responses without concluding that just any response, including deeply harmful ones, determines ethical value.
Neuroethics is a natural field for these questions. Concepts such as autonomy, identity, authenticity, welfare, and mental integrity clearly depend on consciousness, especially sentiments and emotional states. These states are value-involving because they have positive or negative valence. Technologies that influence mental states therefore influence the enabling conditions of some of the most important moral phenomena in individual and communal life.
How is the topic generally discussed, and what is missing?
Some discussions of these concepts in relation to neurotechnologies would benefit from greater attention to foundational questions about the relationship between mind and value, including approaches other than my own. Going deep in this way may help resolve debates or, at minimum, clarify the competing positions.
This emphasis does not exclude empirical neuroethics, in which patients, research participants, caregivers, clinicians, and scientists are asked about neurotechnologies and the ethical questions they raise. I find this work valuable for thinking through normative questions about what ought to be done.
Rawls’ method of wide reflective equilibrium offers a helpful framework. Ethical reflection moves among considered judgments, the principles that organize those judgments, and background views about persons and morality. Empirical neuroethics broadens that process by showing how technologies are developed and used, what impacts they have, and what choices they create. These findings provide new and sometimes unfamiliar cases that can challenge our judgments, principles, and background theories.
Understanding the relationship between empirical and normative neuroethics in this way can clarify both the value of empirical work and the practical relevance of normative analysis. The social-scientific and philosophical wings of neuroethics strengthen one another and, together, help produce a more comprehensive picture of emerging neurotechnologies and their value.