Neuroethics, Pluralism, and Reviews

It is with great pride and excitement that I am taking up the role of book review editor at the AJOB Neuroscience. As our Editor-in-Chief Veljko Dubljević recently mentioned in an editorial earlier this year, there is an unfortunate trend in bioethics journals to publish less and less book reviews, a state of affairs that AJOB Neuroscience seeks to redress with the goal of publishing one review per issue (Dubljevic 2024). This proves especially crucial when looking at the current state of neuroethics as a field in constant evolution and its growing diversity and inclusivity over the course of the last years. But before diving into why book reviews substantially contribute to reinforcing this diversity, I wish to use the little space I have available here to say a few words about neuroethics, diversity, and pluralism.

Neuroethics has grown quite a bit since Roskies’s account of what the field entails, namely the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics (Roskies 2002). These two dimensions are of course still highly relevant today, as is represented by the two target articles published in this issue. Angioletti et al. explore the complex mechanisms behind moral decision-making through an EEG study of participants’ reactions to fair, neutral, and unfair offers (Fronda, Angioletti, and Balconi 2024), and Levy and colleagues provide an analysis of qualitative interviews to ethically assess the function and benefits of visual cortical prostheses (Levy et al. 2024). This divide of neuroethics between the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics has been notably complexified in Racine’s Pragmatic Neuroethics in which a variety of other perspectives are developed: neuroethics may well be knowledge-driven (as aligned with Roskies’s definition), technology-driven, or healthcare-driven (Racine 2010). Dubljević and colleagues have further refined this diversity by arguing for the inclusion of a socio-political perspective which draws particular attention to the interplay between neuroscience and social as well as political systems (Dubljević, Trettenbach, and Ranisch 2022). These recent developments naturally go hand-in-hand with the interest with regards to introducing the language of rights into neuroethics, particularly through the increasing use of the concept of neurorights; rights that pertain to a person’s cerebral or mental domain (Ienca 2021). As a trained political theorist myself, I cannot help but feel particularly drawn to this political perspective and wish to re-emphasize the importance of acknowledging the crucial links between neuroethics and the political, which is key to ensuring proper diversity and inclusivity in the field.

Let me now highlight a few different meanings of what pluralism in neuroethics ought to entail. After all, while I will contend that acknowledging the political in neuroethics is key to actually fostering and achieving pluralism, the call for pluralism in neuroethics predates the rising interest in political neuroethics. Back in 2008 in this very journal, Racine called for interdisciplinarity in order to promote his view of pragmatic neuroethics and avoid monolithic views of neuroethics (Racine 2008). This interdisciplinarity mainly took the form of engagement with physicians and other healthcare professionals. There are, however, more meanings to pluralism than just interdisciplinarity. While this editorial has no ambition to provide an exhaustive list of the meanings of pluralism in neuroethics, I shall nevertheless highlight two senses of pluralism that are to be brought to the fore by acknowledging the interplay between neuroethics and the political: political pluralism and cultural pluralism. The first of these pertains specifically to the articulation between neuroethics and political theory, insofar as the tools of political theory may yield insights into the problems tackled by neuroethics; and in return how neuroethics may help political theorists rethink and revise their own theories on justice, equality, responsibility and so on. As mentioned above, Dubljević and colleagues have been pioneers in that approach by arguing for the use of a Rawlsian framework in addressing some of the most pressing neuroethical questions. Political pluralism, however, calls for the use of a variety of approaches from the field of political theory in such endeavors. Political theory is not to be considered as a monolith of Rawlsian theory but as a diverse field from which many theoretical frameworks may be applied to, and informed by neuroethics, a claim somewhat aligned with a response from Marcelo de Araujo and Murilo Vilaça to Dubljević et al. in which they express skepticism about their use of Rawlsian theory (De Araujo and Vilaça 2022). This is healthy disagreement and one can hope to see more work from neuroethicists engaging with a variety of theoretical strands such as communitarianism, libertarianism, citizenship theory, postcolonial studies, and so on: this is true political pluralism. The second sense of pluralism that I wish to put forward, cultural pluralism, pertains to the substantial inclusion of a wide array of voices arising from different cultural contexts. This is crucial in avoiding the fatal trap of building a whole discipline that claims universalism but that is in truth deeply embedded in a dominant, westernized cultural context. Some have shown skepticism with regards to such pluralism as it runs the risk of creating a neuroethics fragmented by conventions and cultural differences (Shook and Giordano 2014); this is too simplistic a view of what cultural pluralism entails. Cultural pluralism does not automatically entail ethical relativism but rather, as Herrera-Ferrà and colleagues have argued, a call for inclusion that will help shape the content of rights related to neurotechnology, better inclusion of the diversity of concerns posed by such technologies, and better implementation of normative prescriptions and rights in different cultural contexts (Herrera-Ferrá et al. 2023).

I wish to include and foster all these kinds of pluralism through the newly reopened book review section of the AJOB Neuroscience. Book reviews are an essential, albeit sometimes overlooked, feature of a thriving scientific community. Not only do they help members of the field keep up with recent developments to the literature, but they have also traditionally provided a space for graduate students to try their hand at academic writing and publishing (Gump 2018). Other times a review is written by an expert in the field, discussing the work of another expert in the field, providing us readers with a deeply stimulating take on the work of one of our colleagues. Book reviews, in a way, grant us a tool to take the pulse of our field: after all, isn’t a healthy scientific discipline one which shows great engagement with the works of its leading voices, all the while including younger and newer ones? It is with regards to this latter point that I want to circle back to my short discussion of pluralism in neuroethics. The vision I have for the AJOB Neuroscience’s book review section is not only one of engagement with the major works of our constantly evolving field and of inclusion of reviews written by graduate students. What I wish to cultivate is true pluralism as in all the aforementioned senses. In practice, this implies welcoming reviews from neuroscience and other STEM disciplines that pertain to the issues of neuroethics, reviews that engage with a variety of political and ethical theories beyond liberalism relevant to neuroethics, and reviews that provide culturally diverse takes on neuroethics as well as reviews written by scholars from underrepresented groups in the field. In time, our book review section could even go as far as incorporating pluralism regarding the media that is being reviewed, not limiting itself to just books but also including reviews of films, comics, or other kinds of art production that engage with neuroethics and bring new light to the issues of our field or provide educational material for both students of neuroethics and the public.

Before concluding, let me again reinforce how such pluralism is necessary for a healthy neuroethics, for pluralism runs the risk of being an empty signifier if not backed by solid normative foundations. As one of our associate editors, Gillian Hue, stressed in an earlier editorial of this journal, neuroscience has unfortunately at times historically been used to promote and justify racist and exclusionary ideas (Nyborg 2019). We in neuroethics must make sure never to allow the same mistakes to happen, but also do our part in redressing the historical harms associated with neuroscience. Such is a duty of justice and does not only apply to scholars and researchers, but to editors and reviewers as well (Hue 2020). As such, we should consider pluralism not as just a fashionable term empty of any ethical substance but rather as a key to promoting justice and systematic engagement with all the voices of our field. This constitutes a truly healthy and rich neuroethics: just, rigorous, cutting-edge, and scientifically stimulating. I thus eagerly await your review proposals and look forward to editing this exciting born-again section of the AJOB Neuroscience.

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