Review of Nada Gligorov: Neuroethics and the Scientific Revision of Common Sense
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Review of Nada Gligorov: Neuroethics and the Scientific Revision of Common Sense Dordrecht: Springer, 2016. 169 pp. USD $99.99 (hardcover), $79.99 (ebook) Paul Boswell
Received: 27 January 2017 / Accepted: 31 January 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017
Abstract This ambitious book aims to make a substantive contribution to six separate debates within neuroethics — the existence of free will, the impact of cognitive enhancement and (separately) of memory management on personal identity, the nature of mental privacy, the supposed subjectivity of pain, and the proper definition of death — all in the context of a framing argument concerning the relation between common sense psychological concepts and scientific concepts. Gligorov means to rebut skepticism about folk mental states in the face of surprising neuroscientific results by reconceptualizing folk theories as protean, incorporating some of the very results that seem to challenge them. My impression is that Gligorov’s arguments on cognitive enhancement, memory modification, and brain death make helpful contributions to the respective literatures on those subjects, but I close with a number of concerns about the book, especially whether its framing argument is successful in its current form. Keywords Folk psychology · Eliminativism · Narrative identity · Cognitive enhancement · Death · David Lewis P. Boswell () ´ Universit´e de Montr´eal, Bureau 312 C.P. 6128, GRIN/CRE, succ. Centre-ville, Montr´eal, QC H3C 3J7, Canada e-mail: [email protected]
Research in neuroethics generally presupposes that investigation into the brain and the nature of cognition could usurp our current understanding of moral psychology. The concept of free will, for instance, is arguably the most endangered, with prominent authors arguing that the common sense notion of free will is libertarian [1] or requires our conscious willing to control our behavior [2]. Both attributed theses have proved doubtful for well-known reasons. Certainly there has been much to learn from the flourishing field of neuroethics. But in Neuroethics and the Scientific Revision of Common Sense, Nada Gligorov contends that the moral to draw is not that common sense psychological notions are somehow incompatible with scientific theorizing, for in her view such concepts are malleable. They can adapt to science’s findings. In service of this general point, which she first articulates in Chapter 2, Gligorov investigates six separate debates in neuroethics: free will, the impact of cognitive enhancement on personal identity, the impact of memory management on personal identity, mental privacy, the supposed subjectivity of pain, and the definition of death (Chapters 3–8, respectively). Below I’ll first introduce these last six chapters. Then I’ll make some general remarks about the book, and afterwards swing back to discuss Chapter 2 and the book’s overall thesis. Gligorov’s main targets in Chapter 3 are those who would argue that the famous intention-predicting
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