The BBC’s Start theWeek was interesting as ever on Sunday, with Raymond Tallis, Aubrey de Grey, and a lady I had not previously heard of called Barbara Sahakian. A few issues arose in the discussion that I thought worth of comment. Whether the comments are worthy of expression or not is a different matter of course.
Firstly, Raymond Tallis was talking about his new book, titled Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Its thesis, as I interpreted it from the program, is that the nature of humanity cannot be reduced to our organic properties, and more specifically that it cannot be reduced to the properties of our brain. This is a point that is, I think, hard to deny. However, the arguments and examples put forward by Prof. Tallis were against a scientific programme to understand the workings of the human, not humanity. This distinction between human and humanity is an important one I think.
Take as an analogy an anthill – we can study and understand the physiology of an individual ant, but that will not necessarily give us a complete understanding of the organisational system of the anthill as a whole. The person studying the individual ant would not seek to claim that it did, however. What they can provide are the individual-specific factors that shape and limit the higher-order organisation that arises within the anthill as a whole for someone else who’s focus lies with this higher-order question to go on and use.
The idea that neuroscience seeks to explain humanity just doesn’t mesh with reality to me. I’m not aware of any half decent scientist that thinks that is what they are trying to do. Understanding the human organism and its individual actions, certainly, but to suggest that this means that we think we are explaining everything about humanity is just silly. ‘Neuromania’ is not a condition that science in general can really be said to suffer from; humanity as a whole, and especially that part of it known as journalists, may be a different matter however.
In this context, there may have been something of an irony in Prof. Tallis bringing up the question of category errors during the discussion.
Andrew Marr introduced the Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, which Barbara Sahakian had co-edited, as being one case where the prefix ‘neuro’ was justified. Sadly, from Prof. Sahakian’s discussion of it, that statement was entirely wrong.
Aubrey de Grey skewered the issue perfectly when he pointed out that whenever he looks at any of the issues that Prof. Sahakian had put forward as examples of neuroethics in detail, when he begins to understand the medicine and the science, he ends up in a place where it is not immediately clear where the question of ethics comes into things. Andrew Marr was correct to say that even at that point there are ethical considerations, but the key point there is that the considerations are not new ‘neuroethical’ ones – they are exactly the same old ethical issues that we have always been facing.
It must be said that Prof. Sahakian didn’t help her case by coming across as being quite remarkably dull. In all her list of situations that might qualify as this thing neuroethics, which was trotted out a couple of times, there was no glimpse of insight, nor even an idea that there was anything going on in her thought beyond the observation that new things were happening and that someone really should think about them. Of course, that may just be a disciplinary thing – it’s the impression I get whenever I read or listen to professional ethicists.
That the word neuroethics has been appropriated by the same old ethics paradigm to be slapped on to any issue that involves some neurons in order, to be perhaps overly cynical about things, to help people shift some books and carve out an area to apply for funding for is sad. There is interesting work to be done with genuine neuroethics – dealing with problems that are actually arising from our developing understanding of how the brain works and how its limitations shape our behaviours. Prof. Northoff’s work on informed consent that is guided by novel insights into how our brain reacts to such situations springs to mind.
Finally, Aubrey de Grey talked about working to defeat aging. I didn’t have much of a reaction to that beyond having the impression that he seemed like quite a pleasant and interesting man.
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