[Neuroethics: new quality of medical ethics?].

Abstract

During the last decade there has been a striking growth in interest in ethical issues arising from the development of neurosciences. It was as late as 2002 that the new discipline, called neuroethics, started. It was intended to be a new area of interdisciplinary discourse on moral dilemmas connected with recent advances in, broadly understood, neurosciences. Ten years after its launch neuroethics possesses a distinct body of knowledge and an institutional basis for its further development. As a very young discipline, however, neuroethics is still in a state offlux. Two essential theoretical concepts of how this discipline is to be built on are emerging. Both are discussed in this article. According to the first of them (i.e. ethics of neurosciences), neuroethics is basically understood as a sub--discipline of bioethics. Although there are some reasons for distinguishing several branches or sub-disciplines of bioethics (genethics, neuroethics, nanoethics, etc.), there are sound arguments against such a tendency for the proliferation of biomedical ethics. The second approach to neuroethics (neuroscience of ethics), which aims at studying neuronal correlates of the well-known ethical concepts (e.g. free-will, moral responsibility, etc.), seems to be much more promising. Neuroethics understood in this way (and only in this way) can be considered as a truly new opportunity for collaboration between neuroscientists and ethicists.