BRAIN matters
New Directions in Neuroethics
September 24-26, 2009, Halifax hosted Canada's first international conference in neuroethics. It was a resounding success.
With over 100 participants from 10 countries and four continents, the registrants represented a diverse range of scholars and clinicians with expertise in ethics, philosophy of mind, medicine, science, law and health policy. Graduate and post-graduate students represented over 20% of the attendees.
Participant evaluation forms gave the conference a very high approval rating, accompanied by statements complimenting the size of the conference and diversity of participants as key component for encouraging networking and collaboration.
Click here to view podcasts of the featured six plenary speakers; James L. Bernat, Walter Glannon, David Healy, Neil Levy, Jonathan H. Marks and Caroline Tait. As well, two of the plenary speakers gave extensive interviews to the regional public broacaster.
James Bernat - The changing definition of death
Maritime Noon, CBC Radio One
David Healy - The need for transparency on adverse effects in drug trials
Maritime Noon, CBC Radio One
View photos from the conference.
Selected conference papers will be published in special issues of Journal of Ethics in Mental Health, Neuroethics and The American Journal of Bioethics – Neuroscience.
Three reports on the conference have been published;
Syd M. Johnson, Training a Skeptical Eye on Neuroscience, Dana.org, November 3, 2009;
T. Krahn, Brain Matters: A conference report, Neuroethics Society newsletter - November 2009;
S.M. Outram, Meeting Report -Brain Matters, Biotechnology Journal 4(11) 1511-12, DOI 10.1002/biot.200900245 ; and
Emma Zimmerman, a PhD student at the Neuroethics Research Unit at McGill University, provides a partial summary of the conference in the neuroethics newsletter Brainstorm Vol. 2, No. 14, at p. 2:
In a departure from frameworks based on autonomy and personal identity, Caroline Tait’s (Indigenous Peoples’ Health Research Center, Canada) plenary talk drew our attention to the ethical needs of vulnerable populations that occupy a fragile space outside Western views on medical ethics. While Tait made a compelling case for the distinct and critical needs of indigenous peoples captured in the notion of "local worlds", she left us to consider invoking an ethical framework to catalyze change at the level of health care policy with regards to the indigenous peoples of Canada and beyond.
A panel on cognitive enhancement explored the tricky moral space in which neuropharmaceuticals reside in light of complex social pressures and medical ambiguity. Martha Farah (University of Pennsylvania, USA)addressed our limited understanding of the actual effectiveness (both medically and phenomenologically) of cognitive enhancers as well as important areas that call for evidence and further research. Eric Racine and Cynthia Forlini (Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montreal, Canada) discussed stakeholder perspectives on the use of cognitive enhancers by college students. They highlighted a false sense of safety associated with prescription drugs as well as the overall forms of coercion underlying social pressures for performance. In conclusion, Eric Parens (Hastings Institute, USA) reconciled enhancement cautionaries with enthusiasts with a broad view of where the mind ends and environment begins. Parens called for recognition of the values that underlie different approaches to enhancement and the common search for true enhancement, self-fulfillment, and authenticity.
Finally, Neil Levy (University of Melbourne, Australia, and Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, UK) closed the conference with an insightful talk on the nature of neuroethics and the neuroscience of ethics. He indicated how experimental philosophy partnering with reflective equilibrium can challenge our intuitions, for instance, with regards to neuroenhancement. He called for an interesting approach to neuroethics that is informed by neuroscience, and more broadly, the mind sciences.
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