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The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas (P.S.)

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Brain-Based Values

Patricia S. Churchland
Originally appeared in The American Scientist, July 2005.

Envision this scene: Socrates sits in prison, calmly awaiting execution, passing the time in philosophical discussions with students and friends, taking the occasion to inquire into the fundamentals of ethics: Where do moral laws come from? What is the root of moral motivation? What is the relation between power and morality? What is good? What is just?

Ever modest, Socrates confesses ignorance of the answers. The pattern of questioning strongly hints, however, that whatever it is that makes something good or just is rooted in the nature of humans and the society we make, not in the nature of the gods we invent. This does not make moral rules mere conventions, like using a fork or covering one's breasts. There is something about the facts concerning human needs that entails that some laws are better than others.

From the time of Socrates to the present, people have sought to give a natural basis for morals-that is, to understand how a moral statement about what ought to be done can rest on hard facts, albeit facts about conditions for civility and peace in social groups. How can ethical claims be more than mere conventions? How can such claims be rooted in facts about human nature but have the logical force of a command?

Developments in evolutionary biology have helped to explain the appearance of moral motivation in humans and in other eusocial animals-animals that display behavior involving cooperation, sharing, division of labor, reciprocation and deception. In these species, various forms of punishment (shunning, biting, banishing, scolding) are visited on those who threaten the social norms. Ethological studies help us appreciate that, at a basic level, human social behavior has much in common with that of other species.

Developments in neuroscience hold out the promise of extending the naturalistic perspective to aid in the understanding of how the brain and its circuitry underlie the capacity to learn social norms and to behave in accordance with them. Many of us ponder the possibility that discoveries about brain function and organization will challenge the conventional wisdom on which our system of justice relies and will allow us to see more deeply into the biology of social behavior, including moral behavior. In his new book, The Ethical Brain, Michael S. Gazzaniga takes an unflinching look at the interface between neuroscience and ethics, and offers his own thoughtful perspective on some of the tough questions.

As a graduate student at Caltech, Gazzaniga studied under one of the towering figures of neuroscience, Roger Sperry, whose lab pioneered research into the cognitive effects of cutting the fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres (a procedure used to treat intractable epilepsy). Ingenious testing of these so-called "split brain" patients revealed that their two brain hemispheres operated independently, each hemisphere acting almost like a distinct person. These were profoundly important results, both for philosophy and for neuroscience. Gazzaniga went on to explore the neurobiology of higher mental functions-attention, memory, choice, consciousness-more generally, always with a philosophical question biting his heels. He currently serves on the President's Council on Bioethics. Thus it is especially fitting that he should now pen his thoughts on neuroethics.

The most fundamental neuroethical issue concerns free will and responsibility. The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is a causal machine. Consequently, deliberations, beliefs, decisions and ensuing behavior are the outcome of causal processes. Typically, the causal processes leading to awareness of a decision are nonconscious. The "user illusion," nevertheless, is that a decision is created independently of neuronal causes, by one's very own "act of will." Some philosophers-usually called libertarians-resolutely believe that voluntary decisions actually are created by the will, free of causal antecedents. Like flat-earthers and creationists, libertarians glorify their scientific naiveté by labeling it transcendental insight.

Gazzaniga, like many a philosopher, realizes that it would make a mockery of the criminal justice system if the accused could escape punishment simply by pleading that the brain is a causal machine and hence he or she lacked free will. So when and how ought we to hold people responsible for their behavior?

Gazzaniga's answer has two components: First, he claims that we hold a person responsible, causality notwithstanding, so long as his or her behavior was unconstrained-so long as the person could have done otherwise. Second, Gazzaniga identifies responsibility as a social, not a neurobiological, property. His point is that our institutions for assigning responsibility derive from the need to maintain and protect civil society, which must figure out suitable criteria for when and how to punish those who violate the rules.

Gazzaniga sums up his solution to the problem of free will by saying that "the brain is determined, but the person is free." The logic of this brain/person duality is not particularly compelling, or even coherent, yet as Gazzaniga's writing implies, it may be in our collective interest to live by this dualistic legal fiction.

The obvious test of the "let's pretend" solution is to see whether it can specify relevant criteria for distinguishing between those who could have done otherwise and those who could not have, and between those cases in which mens rea (literally, a guilty mind) obtains and those in which it does not. (Mens rea is a criminal law concept requiring proof that the mental state of the accused was such that he or she committed the crime purposely, knowingly, recklessly or negligently; strict liability, in which state of mind has no relevance, is fairly rare in criminal law.) Here, however, the wheels fall off Gazzaniga's solution.

Worried that ever-cunning defense attorneys will try to extract more exculpatory mileage out of neuroscience than the facts can support, Gazzaniga magnifies the incompatibility of responsibility as applied to persons and the causality that governs functions of a person's brain. He says, "The issue of responsibility . . . is a social choice. In neuroscientific terms, no person is more or less responsible than any other for actions." This implies that there are no relevant factual differences between someone with, say, obsessive-compulsive disorder and someone who can resist impulses. Can this conclusion be right? As the British neuroscientist Steve Rose has pointed out, badness, just as much as madness, involves the brain.

The flaw in Gazzaniga's argument is that although responsibility is assessed in a social context, the capacity to learn social norms and the capacity to act in accordance with them are matters of individual brain function. It is precisely because an important difference exists between a normal brain and the brain of someone who is seriously demented or unreachably deluded that such people are not considered responsible for crimes they might commit. Moreover, judicial institutions rely on threat of punishment to deter. The late maturation of the prefrontal cortex (with reference to neuronal density, synaptic density, dendritic length and myelination) means that the brains of mature adults are critically different from those of young children-which almost certainly accounts for the child's more modest ability to appreciate the consequences of his or her choices and to resist temptation.

Satisfied that the brain/person duality is workable, Gazzaniga pushes the hypothesis further. He says that because assignment of responsibility is a social matter, not a matter of fact about the brain, neuroscience cannot possibly "settle" whether a person is responsible. Granted, determining legal responsibility is complicated, and neuroscientific knowledge cannot be substituted for knowledge of the law and of community standards. What kicks up sand, however, is the unfortunate choice of the word settle. Neuroscientific evidence can surely be relevant, even if the disposition of the case is settled by members of a jury whose brains follow some form of constraint-satisfaction algorithm. Yet Gazzaniga resolutely insists upon the stronger point: Neuroscientific data are not even relevant.

Why not? His reasoning goes like this: As a group, schizophrenics, for example, are no more prone to violence than individuals in the general population. Ditto, he says, for people with prefrontal lesions. If a given schizophrenic, Mr. Jones, kills someone, it is mere theater to display his brain scans in court, picking out some abnormality or other as "the cause" of his homicidal behavior. There are no relevant differences that neuroscience knows about that can explain why Jones killed, but Smith (also schizophrenic) did not. Not everyone with low glucose levels engages in violence; not all citizens raised in an inner-city hell become drug dealers; not all premenstrual women beat their children. We can assume there are differences in the brain, but whatever these differences happen to be, they are not, he believes, relevant to determination of responsibility. Why? Because there is no "responsibility" area whose functionality can be examined through a scanner or with electrodes-not now, not ever. Responsibility is a social construct, not a brain function. This point, he believes, holds generally-for schizophrenics, for patients with prefrontal cortex lesions, and so forth. And for good measure, he suggests that the insanity defense itself is too imprecise and problematic to be of practical value.

It is widely expected that neuroscience has, or soon will have, something to say about competence to stand trial, about whether the mens rea condition has been met and about appropriate sentencing. Thus Gazzaniga's bold thesis raises important concerns. I share his worry that defense attorneys and hired experts from neuroscience may get out in front of what current science can honestly say-it's bad enough that venal psychiatrists have sown wholesale distrust of their discipline by selling their "expertise" to the highest bidder. On the other hand, perhaps Gazzaniga overstates the case.

Consider the Virginia man who at around age 40 became obsessed with child pornography and eventually molested his eight-year-old stepdaughter. He had no previous history of pedophilic inclinations, and his interest in child pornography completely disappeared with the surgical removal of a tumor of the frontolimbic system, which had invaded the hypothalamic area of his brain. Along with other appetites, sexual drive is regulated in the hypothalamus. Some months later, when the tumor grew back, his preoccupation with pornography returned, only to vanish again with repeat surgery. Because the waxing and waning of his sexual compulsions corresponded to the waxing and waning of the tumor, his was not a standard molestation case. So long as his limbic structures are tumor-free, it seems rather pointless to punish him for a pornographic pursuit that was alien to his character. Punishment would not make sense either as deterrence or as retribution.

Consider a more complicated discovery. In a landmark longitudinal study in New Zealand that followed the lives of about 500 men from infancy to about age 26, a significant subpopulation showed a strong and unmodifiable disposition to engage in antisocial behavior, including irrational and self-destructive violence. Genetic analysis revealed that most of the men in that subpopulation carried a mutation for a particular enzyme, monoamine oxydase A (MAOA). The enzyme metabolizes three neuromodulators (serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, all of which are relatively concentrated in prefrontal areas of cortex), thereby inactivating them. Environment was also a factor: In the group with the MAOA mutation, the criteria for adolescent conduct disorder (a measure of antisocial behavior) were met in about 85 percent of those who had been severely maltreated as children, in about 38 percent of those who had probably been maltreated and in only about 22 percent of those who had not been maltreated. Among those who did not carry the MAOA mutation but had been severely maltreated, only about 42 percent had the conduct disorder.

These findings are preliminary, and further research is needed on the exact nature of the effect of early maltreatment on the circuitry affected by low MAOA levels. Still, on the face of it, the capacity of maltreated children with the MAOA mutation to acquire and act on social norms appears to be diminished. If Gazzaniga is right, however, these data are irrelevant to determining responsibility. The fact that the men are irrationally violent means that society needs protection from them-fair enough. Even so, it is important to distinguish between custody and punishment. Why? For the sake of the integrity of the institution of justice, because as a social institution, the criminal sanction depends on broad social support to keep functioning properly. When the criminal sanction is applied to cases that violate common beliefs about fairness-to young children, for example-support is replaced by resistance and reform. In order to be broadly accepted, the legal fiction that the brain is determined but the person is free will have to make peace with the widespread conviction that because of brain abnormalities, we are not all equally masters of our fate.

On other bioethical issues, Gazzaniga is just as forthright. The book begins with a discussion of the medical use of embryonic tissue and the debate over whether a blastocyst (which is a ball of a few hundred cells) is a person. This section is thoughtful, clearheaded and informed by developmental neuroscience. One fallacy Gazzaniga exposes depends on the common idea that graded differences block principled legal distinctions. In the version referred to as the fallacy of the beard, the logic goes like this: If we cannot say how long a man's whiskers must be to qualify as a beard, we cannot distinguish between a bearded man and a clean-shaven one. Although this form of argument fools nobody on the topic of beards, it has been seductively employed elsewhere, especially regarding embryos. Criticizing the blastocyst-as-baby argument, Gazzaniga sensibly points out that we can draw a reasonable, if imperfect, line. When a distinction is needed, we devise laws that draw one, typically erring on the side of caution, given prevailing community attitudes. There is no precise moment at which a child becomes an adult, or a blastocyst becomes a sentient person, but reasonable humans unencumbered by superstition can nonetheless come together to "draw a line," and we can redraw the line when the facts merit a revision. Eighteen as the age of majority is not the perfect line for all adolescents, but on the whole it works well enough.

Gazzaniga also presents an eloquent defense of personal choice in end-of-life matters, while recognizing that there are bound to be fundamental differences across people regarding euthanasia. Most people understand the concept of brain death and see the wisdom in equating death with brain death. In large part, this acceptability may be owed to personal experiences concerning the remarkable benefits conferred by organ harvesting.

Other topics covered, if not fully, then sufficiently well to provoke thought, concern the neurobiological and evolutionary explanations of religious beliefs, in all their amazing variety and conflicting manifestations. Gazzaniga discusses also the remarkable nature of autobiographical memory, and the susceptibility of memory to suggestions, reconstruction, invention and wholesale confabulation. Because it is brief, compelling and free of technical jargon, the whole book can be easily read during a transcontinental flight.

At a time when intellectuals may feel cowed by the heavy hand of the fervently religious, it is a relief to see that Gazzaniga neither shies away from controversial opinions nor waters them down so as to offend nobody. At the same time, he is respectful of moral convictions that do not line up with his own. His opinions are delivered not as dogma but as part of an ongoing reflection and conversation, in which seeing all sides of a moral problem is itself regarded as a moral achievement.

Reviewer Information

Patricia Smith Churchland is University of California President's Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author most recently of Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy (2002).

Michael Gazzaniga is one of the most renowned neuroscientists of our time, and rightfully so; his experiments regarding the role of the corpus callosum in connecting left- and right-brain functions really changed the way that we understand the brain. It should come as little surprise, then, that he was eventually rewarded with a seat on the President's Council on Bioethics.

It should also warn potential readers of the fact that a good neuroscientist does not make a very good ethicist -- or indeed, much of an ethicist at all. Each chapter of this book (except the last, about which more below) basically has the same format: there is a well-written survey of the developments in brain science that implicate a particular ethical issue, and then a couple of pages of Gazzaniga's "Perspectives."

But these Perspectives shed virtually no light on any of the issues. If anything, they show how little science can tell us about them. In the essay on "My Brain Made Me Do It," Gazzaniga canvasses the literature on what we can know about mental states from the neuroscience, and then concludes that mental state or guilt for legal purposes is not a scientific question because scientists investigate brains, not minds. True enough; and something that anyone with the most cursory knowledge of the field could have told him beforehand.

Often he just seems to make assumptions about things without making it clear. He favors drugs that enhance our intelligence or cognitive capabilities because you can't stop them and in any event, most people won't use them. But he is outraged at athletes using performance-altering drugs because in some sense that violates the "social contract" that we all accept. The obvious question is why using intelligence-enhancing drugs would not also violate the social contact is completely lost on him. Maybe wealthy families will be able to afford these drugs to do better on the SAT, and thus create a more plutocratic base for college admissions (a problem that's bad enough already). Why isn't that a violation of the social contract? What does he mean by a social contract, anyway? Gazzaniga cannot answer this question because he never asks it.

I was really looking forward to the final chapter, in which Gazzaniga claims to set forth a theory of universal ethics not bound by time or culture. A fascinating and crucial topic -- and one that deserves a whole lot more than he gives it, especially because his evidentiary base is essentially one short journal article, and a quarter-century old book by James Q. Wilson (who is neither a scientist nor an ethicist). There is an awful lot of work that has been done on comparative responses to ethical dilemmas, ways in which cultures differ and don't differ, etc. Gazzaniga never mentions them.

The chief value of this book -- indeed, the ONLY value of this book -- is the review of the neuroscience findings. That is genuinely helpful to someone like me who is not a scientist. But I admit that I began to worry after the last chapter, where I have read a little (just a little) on the issues surrounding the universality of ethics, and found that Gazzaniga didn't seem to be aware of them. Uh oh.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. But that's because I was really looking forward to reading this book. Gazzaniga is a great neuroscientist, and thought he would have something interesting and provocative to say. He just doesn't.

What can the study of the brain tell us about how we should live our lives? Quite a lot, argues Michael Gazzaniga in his new book The Ethical Brain. Gazzaniga is a professor of cognitive neuroscience (the study of the relationship between brain and behavior) at Dartmouth College and a highly respected researcher in his field. Thus, he was an obvious choice for inclusion in the President's Council on Bioethics, on which he has served since 2001. As a member of that council, he has witnessed "how the fear of science can stifle rather than further research" (pp. xv-xvi). In response, Gazzaniga argues for neuroethics, which he defines as "the philosophy of living informed by our understanding of underlying brain mechanisms" (p. xv, italics in original). Gazzaniga's bottom line, in most cases, is that we should allow science to advance without trepidation, trusting to an innate sense of morality that will guide us sensibly through the ethical issues raised by scientific advancements.

Beginning and end of life issues are at the forefront of current bioethical discussion. Defining the beginning of human life impinges on the important issues of abortion and stem-cell research. Under the traditional religious view that human life begins at conception, abortion is rightly viewed as equivalent to murder, and stem-cell research, which depends on the tissues of aborted fetuses, is morally reprehensible. Those who argue for reproductive freedom need to delay the conferral of humanity to the embryo if they want to maintain that abortion is not morally wrong, but there is no clear milestone during development where an obvious shift from non-humanity to humanity occurs. Likewise, the potential medical benefits from stem-cell research need to be weighed against the morality of terminating the life of a potential human being; deciding that an embryo is not human until some stage after which the researcher is no longer interested in the embryonic tissue tips the balance in favor of pursuing the research.

Gazzaniga proposes that the way we define the end of human life can inform us on our decision about when human life begins. Brain death is now generally accepted as the definition of the end of human life, even if the exact criteria for determining brain death have not been completely decided. Thus, if the brain is no longer able ever again to produce conscious awareness, human life has ended even though basic bodily functions can still be maintained. If the cessation of sentience marks the end of human life, argues Gazzaniga, then the initiation of sentience should mark the beginning of human life. A necessary condition for consciousness is the existence of a nervous system, which starts developing in the human embryo by the sixth week. However, this nervous system must be sufficiently complex for the fetus to respond to environmental stimuli (an important benchmark of awareness), and this does not occur until around week 23, when the fetus is also capable of surviving outside of the womb. This is also the age at which the fetus gains legal protection from abortion.

Clearly, this argument will not convince those who believe the embryo is endowed with a soul at the moment of conception, but again science creates problems for religion. The first couple of weeks after conception are critical. One reason is that some 60 to 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are spontaneously aborted during this time period, generally without the mother's knowledge. Another reason is that twinning generally occurs during this time frame, and in addition it is also possible for twin embryos to recombine into a single embryo during this period. These observations raise important theological issues, seriously weakening the argument that human life begins with an ensoulment at conception.

Toward the end of life, the gradual loss of cognitive functioning through dementia also muddies the boundary between sentience and non-sentience. In recent years, though, new drugs and therapies have been developed to combat dementia. These memory enhancers can provide benefits as well to those within the normal range of cognitive functioning, leveling the playing field and making geniuses of us all. At least, this is the brave new world that Gazzaniga imagines. However, what he does not consider is the possibility that memory-enhancing drugs could set off a mental arms race in which the normal distribution of intelligence is simply shifted upwards, not narrowed.

Gazzaniga discusses three areas where neuroscience can inform criminal justice: the concept of free will, the use of brain imaging devices as lie detectors, and the fallibility of memory and eyewitness testimony. First, Gazzaniga holds the view, common among psychologists, that free will is an illusion; however, he notes that conscious awareness can lead to the inhibition of socially undesirable behaviors, an ability he refers to as a "free won't" (p. 93). Damage to the frontal lobe of the brain, though, can lead to a loss of inhibition of socially unacceptable behaviors, and so the criminal justice system needs to take into account the condition of the brain in determining culpability. Second, Gazzaniga discusses the use of Computerized Knowledge Assessment (CKA), which uses EEG measurements to determine an individual's familiarity with the details of a particular criminal act or terrorist group. Gazzaniga rightly criticizes CKA for going "far beyond what neuroscience knows" (p. 114) and contends that CKA is not likely to ever be any more reliable than polygraph tests. Even more disconcerting, however, is the report that the "CIA is now using this technique, though we do not know to what extent" (p. 111). Finally, Gazzaniga makes a strong case for the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in criminal proceedings. Drawing on his own work in this area as well as that of Elizabeth Loftus and Daniel Schachter, Gazzaniga convincingly demonstrates that memory is highly unreliable and easily modified. This section of the book was by far the best supported, and we can be encouraged by the fact that the criminal justice system is starting to take note of the findings of neuroscience, although it will probably still be a very long time before it completely sheds its outmoded views on human consciousness and memory.

In the final section of the book, Gazzaniga discusses the emerging field of neurotheology, which investigates the role of the brain in religious experience. Three areas of the brain have been identified as playing a role in religious and ecstatic experiences. First, the frontal lobe is found to be active during meditation; however, since the frontal lobe is generally involved in attentional processes, this finding is not surprising. Second, epileptic seizures in the temporal lobe can lead to profound religious and ecstatic sensations. Temporal lobe epileptics do not exhibit the convulsions and loss of consciousness typical of grand mal epilepsy, although they may appear to space out for the duration of the seizure. After the seizure, however, temporal lobe epileptics may report a profound experience, a feeling of oneness with the universe, or communication with a divine entity. Third, it has been found that electrical stimulation of an area of the brain called the right angular gyrus (above and behind the right ear) induces out-of-body and other-worldly experiences. Thus, key experiences of devotional religion are associated with specific brain activity.

Gazzaniga tries to link this discussion of the physiology of religious experience to his assertion that humans possess an innate moral-ethical system that will guide them wisely through the moral issues presented in this book. However, religion is not the same as morality, despite what the Religious Right would have us think, and the brain structures that support religious experience are not necessarily the brain structures that would support an innate moral code. Gazzaniga tries to support his claim by noting that people respond similarly to moral dilemmas across cultures, and furthermore that people have great difficulty articulating their moral choices. Research in evolutionary psychology suggests that certain types of moral reasoning (inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism) may in fact be hard-wired; however, this type of moral reasoning may not be sufficient for dealing with ethical issues in the twenty-first century.

Throughout The Ethical Brain, Gazzaniga argues that we should rely on our innate moral-ethical system to guide us through the ethical problems raised by advances in science. Gazzaniga seems to find little need to dwell on the ethical implications of stem-cell research and memory enhancers because he trusts humans to work things out for the best in the end. On the other hand, though, he finds the use of brain-imaging technology to infer mental states to be unethical and dangerous. However, Gazzaniga never explains why we should trust our innate moral codes in some cases but not in others. Unfortunately, The Ethical Brain fails to live up to its promise of showing how recent findings in brain science can inform the ethical choices we need make at the cutting edge of science.

John LeCarre once quipped that "Ethics" was a small county east of London. "Ethics" has long eluded a fixed definition. Gazzaniga takes a more serious view. So serious, in fact, that this book should be required reading in every school and seminary. The author recognizes that our behaviour is rooted in our brain - and the mind is its form of expression of those traits. Findings on how the brain works are drastically changing how we do and should view behaviour - ours and that of others. There is more than neuroscience here, however, unlike most of his previous work. Every chapter touches on the values of our society and the laws enforcing them. His concern over these issues is clear, and readily matched by the clarity of his narrative. He writes to a broad audience with effective prose style.

Each chapter of this book addresses a specific issue. Within the chapters, the organisation is specific. The background is presented based on the latest information. The arguments are given concerning what stances have been taken, what evidence supports them and suggests posssible modifications to them. The future possibilities are outlined with the logic and potential impact of keeping to a current path or breaking away into new ground. He offers choices, chiefly based on what kind of society we wish to have. One thing is abundantly clear - new directions must be taken in an informed environment (awkward). Emotional acceptance or rejection have little place here. Current values must be carefully examined in light of reality. It's especially important to note that "responsibility", the basis for our legal system, lies within a social, not just an individual framework. Values are learned, they are not ingrained nor constant.

Beginning, logically, with the embryo, the author traces the development of the foetus from conception. He shows how the body is organised and when neuronal activity can be detected. That, surprisingly, is well along in the sequence. Those arguing a little human is formed at conception are clearly wrong, since without a functioning brain, the embryo is well short of being a "person". The issue raised, however, has nothing to do with abortion. It is a response to the blanket policy of the US administration on stem cell research. The policy is clearly flawed, he asserts, and should be modified in light of embryonic research. Such research has also raised the issue of "designer babies", another of his concerns. How should our technologically advanced and competitive society use science in "advancing" the species?

During his tenure on that council, Gazzaniga raised the question of what can actually be "tinkered" to produce the desired results. "Genetically engineering" for high intelligence, immediately raises the point that "genes for intelligence" have yet to be identified - if such codon complexes even exist. Further, whether intelligence or other features are to be selected for, what are the downstream effects of dealing with those genes? Evolutionary development, a new field in biology, has demonstrated that the cascade of processes involved in building bodies and brains makes it more than difficult to ensure the end result is likely to be achieved. More to the point, what "side effects" might result from such tampering with the embryo? He laments the tendency of those seeking to establish research policies too often deal with final questions while ignoring the fundamentals.

In conclusion, Gazzaniga speculates on whether "morality" has evolved as an evolutionary trait in the human species. As a social organism, there is an argument to be made that along with our large brains, a sense of "community responsibility" is innate with us. All human societies deem murder and incest unacceptable behaviour [war is neatly avoided as an issue], while family relations and veracity are accepted. "Cheating" of various forms is punished among the large primates, and humans have carried that ideal a step further in their legal systems. Some form of universal ethics, then, can be considered a survival trait. The value our society places on "empathy" is one among many attributes of this development.

In short, Gazzaniga raises a set of valuable questions while dodging the temptation to suggest definite answers. We don't know enough to make decisions in most cases, and for those we do, there are some serious mind-sets to overcome. The questions he poses need thorough examination. Few of the answers we live under today are adequate, and with advances in neuroscience progressing so rapidly, new answers need careful reflection. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This is a great, necessary AND daunting book. Not daunting in how it is written-- Gazzaniga is a clear writer-- but it what it suggests, namely that as right as you think you are is as wrong as you can turn out to be. As much as we humans like to think we aren't governed by reflex, but by reflection this books demonstrates that the circuitry in our brains can be "hard-wired" in such a way as to set up reflexes in our mind and make true objectivity very difficult. Maybe the lesson to take from it is to assume that we all shoot from the hip much of the time and need to pause more and gather as much facts and data as we can before we come to a conclusion. Very thought provoking. I would recommend this book highly.

An inquiry into an emerging field. Research is telling us more and more how the brain works. And as we learn more and more, a lot comes into conflict with what a lot of us want to believe. If evolution presented a crisis between the evolutionists and the creationists, wait until the raft of issues discussed here become more mainstream in the science textbooks.

Starting off with a strong step into when is a fetus alive, he jumps quickly to stem cell research he asks some very interesting questions: "Does the mother of five, hiding from the Gestapo have the moral duty or right to smother the crying baby so the whole family will not be caught and shot?"

The future offers the promise of many more such decisions in the future from "designer babies" to learning more that so called "free will" just may not exist at all.

As we live in a time of growing religions fundamentalism, be it muslim or Christian, the future promises to be a most interesting place. This is a book that will make you think of many things in a different light.

With the rapid demise of the religious worldview and with the deconstruction of the concept of the soul/self in the twenty-first century, it remains to be seen what system of morals and ethics will supplant the traditions and arbitrary legal codes of the past. There are myriads of possible systems that could be constructed, and no doubt many of these will not be scientific in their foundation or pragmatic in their consequences. Many might be terrified by what is ahead for law and morality, just as they were when Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God and the consequent "eclipse" of moral values in the nineteenth century. His pronouncement was prophetic, if delayed somewhat, and definitely not one that was scientific.

This book, written by one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience, gives a proposal for one of these systems, and bases it on what is known from research in neuroscience. It is of course this research that has contributed to the dissolution of the concept of the soul referred to above. It has also called into question the sacred axiom without which ethical systems were held to be impossible: free will.

The author though exudes a confidence and calmness of spirit in his deliberations. He is cautious without being anxious, and gives the reader information about what is known in neuroscience, omitting speculation but at the same time anticipating future developments. Several highly interesting issues are discussed, including what moral status is to be conferred to the human embryo, the origin (and end) of consciousness, the enhancement of the human brain via genetic engineering and various drugs, the idea of free will and the neuroscience of determinism (and its legal consequences), the concept of personal responsibility (and its correlation, if any, with the brain), the use of brain fingerprinting, and misattribution and its consequences for the justice system.

There are several questions that one could ask after reading this book, depending on the background and interests of the reader. For example, are ethical aphasias possible? Does lying result in permanent disruption of cognitive faculties? Can genetic engineering, in the form of real-time gene therapies, be used to enhance the ethical capabilities of the human brain? What advantages does neuroethics have over ethical systems based on religion? Will humans find neuroethics sufficiently motivating to sustain them throughout the generations ahead? At least to this reviewer, the answers to these questions are of great interest. Neuroethics not only sounds sensible, even given the body of evidence now currently available in the field of neuroscience, but also highly motivating.

I enjoyed this book. I had expected The Ethical Brain to be a discussion of how the human brain developed a sense of ethics, what evolutionary benefits such concepts provided, and even perhaps a discussion of "where" in the brain the basics of ethical thinking possibly arises. In no way does the author really touch on this. What he does do is discuss what is coming up by way of genetic manipulation of human neurological systems, and how this has given rise to a new field of philosophy: neuroethics.

While it did not have a great deal to offer by way of anatomy-phys beyond the stages of fetal development and a brief discussion of end of life issues (How We Die is probably a better source for information on the latter), The Ethical Brain does cover the emerging ethical issues that are on the horizon as mankind becomes technologically capable of altering the genetics of its own species and of others. The book is very simple and direct, pointing out opposing points of view and why the discussions are so heated, and does so without bogging the general reader down with more philosophy than most of us are prepared to deal. Essentially the author takes a position that viewed from a logical, intellectual perspective many of the issues are easily solved; however, most people-including the author himself-bring cultural viewpoints into decision making without even realizing that we do. He points out that while some of these are relative to the philosophy of a culture or even an individual, some seem to be innate to the human as species, and it is this that makes decision making more of an emotional rather than a rational process. It is just this emotion bound decision making that hampers medical research that might bring relief to some truely devistating neurological disorders, the cases most widely known being stem cell research in the treatment of Parkinsonism and brain and spinal cord injury.

The author discusses pharmacological changes to brain/nerve chemistry that may enhance functions. The opposition suggests that the use of such drugs will cause massive social issues, and thus resists subsidy of research into what it considers a dangerous area. The author points out that such drugs will be abused one way or another, but that society in general stands to gain more than to lose by introducing them. He feels that left to the individual, an appropriate use for such medications will be found in each case. I'm not sure I totally agree with this position: ie. that some of the technological changes of the future will be handled sensibly if left to the individual. He supports his contention by noting that we have invented nuclear weaponry but we haven't destroyed ourselves. Instead we have chosen to find better diplomatic solutions to conflicts. To this I would have to point out that existence of nuclear weapons are like waiting for the other shoe to drop: we haven't destroyed ourselves-yet.

I think he ignores the fact that there is a Red Queen (see Matt Ridley) effect in human behavior that is almost programmed into the system-it is in fact the very basis of evolutionary change. Ridley uses several examples of the "arms race" that arises from individual decisions of this sort. The most comparable example in this instance is that of the English commons. The common grazing area of a medieval village was sustainable only if not overgrazed; however the immediate benefit to any given individual of grazing another animal almost guaranteed that at least someone would do so. If one was allowed to so, others soon did likewise in order to achieve parity. The result was that although the known long-term outcome was a destruction of common pasturage for everyone, the extra animals were still pastured. If applied to Gazzaniga's example of human enhancement technology, those who use it will thrive and those who don't will fall behind. My concern, and that of others who study these issues, is that such enhancements will be available only to a certain privileged segment of the world's population, creating an even greater divide between the haves and have-nots of the world than already exists.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is that on free will. I have to admit that the issue of determinism vs free will has fascinated me. I think the author makes the issue much clearer. He points out that while much of what we think and do may be determined by biology, chemistry and physics, the real issue of free will vs determinism has to do with an individual's relationship to society. His proposal that "free will" is a moot point in a society of one, is very cogent. He also notes that an individual may have a genetic predisposition to violence, but that such a person has the option of controlling his behavior or not controlling it with respect to others.

An interesting book.

This book was a major disappointment. The subject area is juicy, but in this particular treatment of it, there's next to no meat on the bones. Gazzaniga proceeds thus: he introduces a topic, gives a perfunctory overview of past debate, then remarks that "It's obvious that X is true," or "I believe Y," and then moves on -- as if the mere use of the word "obvious" or "believe" constitutes a thoughtful exploration of the subject at hand, or as though his conclusions are so self-evident that they require no substantiation. Readers who are looking for empirical data or logical argument in support of conclusions will be sorely disappointed. Assertion is no substitute for evidence or argument, no matter what the domain. The weakness of mere assertion is sharply highlighted in this book, because the validity of the author's conclusions is far from apparent-- indeed, I suspect that millions of Americans and many neuroscience experts disagree with him. That's to be expected, since this is a controversial area and the relevant science is young, but that's all the more reason for an author to be careful in marshaling evidence for his case. This heavy lifting Gazzaniga does not show any willingness to do. In order to dispense with the issue of free will in 10 pages, a writer would have to be endowed with brilliant clarity or the inclination not to delve into the matter too deeply. Unfortunately, Gazzaniga places himself squarely in the second group in this book. This is a slender book, with large margins, which promises much, and delivers very little of substance.

I bought this book in audio format and listened to it on my iPod twice before I came here and bought the physical book which I have read and highlighted.

This work is extremely well-written, fascinating and indeed timely. For those of us who want more than just feelings or religious pronouncements about the ethical issues facing us, this work provides us with insights into the human mind (not the "psyche" but the actual way that human brains function) that are far more valuable as a foundation for rational arguments for or against said issues. What particularly struck me was the section discussing how new discoveries in neuroscience are likely to dramatically affect legal proceedings that involve eye-witness testimony.

I was also mesmerized by the section on Temporary Lobe Epilepsy and Religious belief.

I think this book is important principally because all too often the discussion of what people "ought to do" has left out the very basic question of "why do we think that this is what we ought to do?" More importantly, previous discussions have left out the important question of "what happens if we find out that our brains are wired in a way that your conclusions about moral ethics are in fact contrary to how we as biological creatures function?" Mr. Gazzaniga's book is not a treatise on Science over Religion so much as it is an introduction of the question of how the brain actually works into the discussion of our moral dilemmas. Without such data being introduced into the discussion, we as a species will continue in the vast world of "opinion" without ever finding real solutions. It is clear that history has shown that 10,000 years of addressing moral and ethical issues based on personal opinion and religious pronouncements has not led to a satisfactory conclusion. Perhaps it is time that we used our brains more effectively.

I have recommended this book to dozens of people and am happy to recommend it to you as well.