Morals and the Mind

Michael Gazzaniga is one of the most venerated experimental neuroscientists of our age. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, president of the American Psychological Society, and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is the author of many highly regarded technical books and studies, but his latest effort is for the non-specialist.

Gazzaniga embarked on The Ethical Brain, a 2005 book published by the Dana Foundation, out of a sense of noblesse oblige: “Those of us who focus on how the nervous system works,” he explains, “must begin to address larger issues even though the ones we are working on are large enough.” These other issues are the kind ordinary citizens might worry about — like whether human embryos are a fit object for experimentation, what to do about grandparents with dementia, and whether it’s OK to select traits in our children or give them drugs to improve their mental performance.

Many before Gazzaniga have pondered these terribly difficult and ethically complex issues, but none to his satisfaction. He impatiently dismisses those who lack his scientific credentials: Of a bioethicist with whom he disagrees, “it is clear that [she] has never walked the neurology wards, has never cared for or studied patients with the disease in question.” Of those who come to these issues from a religious perspective, they are “quite simply out of the loop.” Gazzaniga would like to replace such ignorance and quackery with scientific truth. His aim is to establish a new discipline called “neuroethics” — or a “brain-based philosophy of life.” Unfortunately, instead of a philosophic revolution, rooted in new insights from the cutting-edge of brain science, we get arguments that range from the conventional to the confused to the downright silly.

Gazzaniga turns to the embryo question first. When is it morally acceptable, if ever, to experiment upon human embryos? Are embryos “one of us,” entitled to at least some rights and protections, or are they closer to the moral status of, say, sea slugs? Countless bioethicists, moral philosophers, scientists, and statesmen have wrestled with this question, but, avers Gazzaniga, “the rational world” still awaits an answer, an answer to be found in the facts of neural development.