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Dr. Fins acknowledges the support of the Jerold B. Katz Foundation to Weill Cornell Medical College and the Consortium for the Advanced Study of Brain Injury (CASBI). Dr. Judy Illes is Canada Research Chair in Neuroethics.
Last year neuroethics celebrated its 15th birthday. Although the details of the field’s conception are the subject of some debate,1 the birth is most frequently ascribed to a landmark meeting called “Neuroethics: Mapping the Field” that was held in San Francisco in 2002. Attended by luminaries such as William Safire and Albert Jonsen, this conference became central to a collective birth myth about origins. Indeed the birth certificate that attests to the arrival of neuroethics is the rich anthology of essays published by the Dana Foundation.2 This volume has become a touchstone for our young field.
To celebrate the important milestone marking the 15th anniversary, the leadership of the International Neuroethics Society (INS) convened a panel to assess how the field has evolved as it enters adolescence. The result is the group of derivative articles collected here, entitled “Competing Identities of Neuroethics.” Expertly edited by Jennifer A. Chandler,3 who also authors a typology of emerging scholarship in neurolaw and neuroethics, the collection charts the development of the field over the past decade and a half and considers its future prospects. Chandler is joined by Tom Buller4 and the scholarly teams of Eric Racine and Matthew Sample5 and Gabriela Pavarini and Illina Singh.6
As could be anticipated, all the essayists take as their starting point Adina Roskies’ distinction between the neuroscience of ethics and the ethics of neuroscience.7 This well-worn dichotomy points to the underlying neuroscience of how ethical judgments are made as well as the ethical implications of advances in neuroscience. From the start, her formulation created a complicated bifurcation across the two-culture divide articulated by C.P. Snow.8
Neuroethics sought to reconcile, or at least better apprehend these two ways of knowing. The first way draws on the emerging knowledge of brain science; the second draws on more traditional sources in the humanities. On the one hand, there is an appeal to science and empiricism as a way to understand how we reason about ethical choices and moral quandaries. On the...