ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the development of neuroethics as a discipline in Japan and its interaction with Japanese conceptualizations of ethics as one particular example of the diversity of neuroethics worldwide. It also focuses on the activities of neuroethics research in the Strategic Research Program for Brain Sciences (SRPBS) as well as the brain–machine interfaces Network Project funded by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The SRPBS is a collaborative research project launched in 2008 as a program of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to develop neuroscience that benefits society. The specific initiatives of the bioethics-related groups in the SRPBS framework can be divided into three categories: support for researchers, ethics education, and research on research ethics. The neuroethics movement in Japan brought quite rich opportunities for funding to bioethicists and philosophers in a new area of ethical inquiry and certainly affected the communities of neuroscientists, bioethicists, philosophers of mind, and science studies.
