Has neuroethics found the ethical crystal ball?

The brain doesn’t know right from wrong

by Louis C. Charland, Ph.D.
Departments of Philosophy and Psychiatry and
Faculty of Health Sciences
University of Western Ontario

The brain doesn’t know right from wrong. Only persons equipped with brains embedded in a social life know right from wrong, but it is interesting to ponder how and at what point the notions of right and wrong enter into neuroethics.

An answer to that question would provide some indication of the scope and nature of neuroethics as an ethical practice—and perhaps its limits.

Where do ethics enter into neural phenomena and its study? It is tempting to think that ultimately it is the brain which contains the secrets of ethics and that it is the responsibility of the newly appointed discipline of neuroethics to read that crystal ball.

In some sense, this response presumes that ethics lies in the brain. But that is a dangerous fallacy.

The distinction between right and wrong as we know it in the West is not universally shared among cultures, but because of assumptions that remain very entrenched in our Western discourse and related modes of reasoning it may be hard to imagine that things could be otherwise.

As a matter of fact though, things are otherwise.

Empirical work in linguistics and anthropology strongly suggests that Western notions of right and wrong are not universally shared across cultures. The neuronal manifestations of ethics in the brain can therefore be expected to vary widely on a variety of levels. There is no single model of the proper wiring of ‘the ethical brain’.

Consider the distinction between fact and value. It underpins our Western conceptions of right and wrong by locating ‘right’ in the realm of value rather than in the realm of fact. This distinction is reflected in the manner in which we organize our curriculum. Medicine is concerned with matters of fact, while law and philosophy deal with matters of value.

The philosopher David Hume is famous for the manner in which he formulated the distinction between ‘matters of value’ and ‘matters of fact’. He argued that it was logically impossible to derive a statement of value from a statement of fact—in other words, that it is impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.

Languages, cultures, and even traditions within a common culture differ when it comes to demarcating facts from values and how they figure in human life and agency. Consider the fact that it is hard to find any satisfactory analogue for the sharp distinction Hume draws between fact and value in traditional Chinese medicine. Even in the West, there are reformers who argue that we cannot distinguish fact and value in the manner Hume maintains.

Psychiatry has much to learn from these debates. A good example is the manner in which fact and value are inextricably intertwined in psychiatric diagnosis.(1) These examples are cited here in order to cast doubt on the manner in which our traditional Western assumptions about fact and value relate to neuroscience and psychiatry, as well as to undermine the idea that there might be a universal or uniform manner in which ethics is manifested in the brain or derived from it.

What then can the brain tell us about right and wrong? It isn’t possible to settle or discuss such a question solely in the language of the brain. The language of G-Proteins, Substance P and synaptic transmission is simply inadequate to express anything very meaningful about current ethical debates in neuroethics or psychiatry.

Neuroscience may give rise to new ethical questions, but the point at issue has to do with the theoretical vocabulary of neuroethics itself. The moral of this story is that the theoretical vocabulary of neuroethics is unlikely to ever be reducible to, or replaceable by, the vocabulary of neuroscience. Neither is ethics derivable from, or reducible to, neuroscience.

So let us not get ahead of ourselves and think that neuroethics will provide a new foundation for ethics as a whole, or even ethics in psychiatry. For that to happen, the brain would have to know right from wrong, perhaps with ‘value’ written on some parts of it and ‘fact’ on others. And then all of this would have to be packaged in the language of neurons and their transmission and organization.

None of this is even remotely possible. Neuroscience is simply the ethics of neural phenomena and their study, and not something that resides in these. No matter what neuroscience may say, ethical debates regarding that domain will continue to take place outside its theoretical vocabulary, but in the wider vocabulary of academic culture and everyday life. And since cultures often differ widely over fundamental terms and distinctions in ethics—including the term ‘ethics’ itself—we can expect a variety of ethical problems regarding the brain and the study of its functioning.

Now there has certainly been a lot of dazzle and promotion of the term ‘neuroethics’.(2) There is much value in the proclamations that a new ethical sub-discipline has been discovered. Yet, despite the appearance of novelty and the promise of new ethical horizons, neuroethics remains what it always was in at least one important respect. It is an adjunct to the study of ethics in medicine and elsewhere, and not some ultimate foundation offering a new crystal ball—the brain—containing the secrets of our moral life. If there are such secrets, they lie outside the brain, and in the wide diversity of social and linguistic practices we call culture.

No doubt, the term ‘neuroethics’ sounds deep and promising because of its association with the brain—the seat of thought, consciousness, emotion and meaning. It is easy to suppose that because of this there may be something more fundamental about neuroethics as an ethical discipline: that it is somehow closer to the truth, to the seat of ethics itself.

But the brain is not the crystal ball of ethics and neuroscience has no Rosetta Stone. We must shatter these tempting illusions for they are philosophical delusions. At the same time, let us most assuredly remain open to what the brain can teach us about fact and value, and right and wrong—even if these are not its own, special proprietary secrets.

References and suggested readings
1. Sadler J.Z. Values and Psychiatric Diagnosis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

2. Illes J., Blakemore C., Hanson M.G., Hensh T.K., Leshner A., Maestre G., Magistretti P., Quirion R. and Strata P. International perspectives on engaging the public in neuroethics. Nature Review: Neuroscience, Vol. 6:977-982, 2005.

3. Fulford K.W.M. The Concept of Disease. In Psychiatric Ethics, S. Bloch and P. Chodoff, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

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