Resilience beyond reductionism: ethical and social dimensions of an emerging concept in the neurosciences
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SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTION
Resilience beyond reductionism: ethical and social dimensions of an emerging concept in the neurosciences Nikolai Münch1 · Hamideh Mahdiani1 · Klaus Lieb2 · Norbert W. Paul1 Accepted: 1 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Since a number of years, popular and scientific interest in resilience is rapidly increasing. More recently, also neuroscientific research in resilience and the associated neurobiological findings is gaining more attention. Some of these neuroscientific findings might open up new measures to foster personal resilience, ranging from magnetic stimulation to pharmaceutical interventions and awareness-based techniques. Therefore, bioethics should also take a closer look at resilience and resilience research, which are today philosophically under-theorized. In this paper, we analyze different conceptualizations of resilience and argue that especially one-sided understandings of resilience which dismiss social and cultural contexts of personal resilience do pose social and ethical problems. On a social level such unbalanced views on resilience could hide and thereby stabilize structural social injustices, and on an individual level it might even lead to an aggravation of stress-related mental health problems by overexerting the individual. Furthermore, some forms of fostering resilience could be a latent form of human enhancement and trigger similar criticisms. Keywords Resilience · Enhancement · Ethics · Neuroethics · Bioethics
Introduction Since a number of years, scientific interest in human resilience is rapidly increasing especially in psychology (for a review see e.g., Fletcher and Sarkar 2013) and even more recently, with a higher appearance, in neurological research (e.g., Chmitorz et al. 2018; Feder et al. 2011, 2019; Kalisch et al. 2015, 2017; Osorio et al. 2017; Russo et al. 2012). Neurosciences have been and still are of major interest to philosophy and ethics and have even brought about the novel field of neuroethics. However, resilience research as well as resilience interventions which aim to promote or foster human resilience have surprisingly attracted little attention so far in philosophy, in general, and in ethics, in particular. This is despite the fact that concepts of resilience are regularly discussed in the light of liminal experiences and * Nikolai Münch nimuench@uni‑mainz.de 1
Institute for History, Theory and Ethics of Medicine, University Medical Center, Am Pulverturm 13, 55131 Mainz, Germany
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Medical Center, Mainz, Germany
2
fundamental challenges in human life. Due to the lack of philosophical and ethical discourse and deliberation regarding resilience research and application, “the notion of resilience has to date been a philosophically under-theorized concept” (Lotz 2016, p. 49), with a few exceptions. For example, Russell (2015) has focused on sport philosophy. Elsewhere, Titus (2011) and Richter (2017) have studied resilience in relation to theological perspectives.
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