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Book review |
Rights, wrongs and neurons
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In recent years we have seen the arrival of various species, or subdivisions, of ethics: for example, bioethics, medical ethics, professional ethics, research ethics and genethics. Now there is a new addition: neuroethics. Neuroethics, it would seem, has something to do with the brain. The brain is one organ amongst many, and there is already a well-established literature that deals with issues that arise in biomedicine with regard to diagnosis, therapeutic treatment, research, and so on. For example, a few years ago there was a volume in medical ethics entitled Ethics and the Kidney edited by Norman Levinsky (2001)
. The brain, like the kidney, is an organ. So, is neuroethics in the same vein as renal ethics? Is it just a simple part of bioethics? These two recently published books suggest not, albeit in different ways. The Neuroethics volume edited by Judy Illes is a collection of papers
Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy Lancaster University United Kingdom