ABSTRACT
We endorse Roland Benedikter’s urging that core aspects of the globalization process – particularly the technological, economic, political, cultural, and religious dimensions of society – feature prominently in a major reassessment and redesign of a truly global neuroethics. Novel neurotechnologies are being developed and are reaching various markets for use around the world. The relationship between translational research and innovative applications could largely reflect a nation’s social, economic, and in these ways, arguably ethico-legal priorities. The current retreat of neoliberalism opens the field for neuro-nationalism. However, it also opens the field for a wider, more interrogative approach which asserts that neuroethics should be a discursive component of neuroscientific research itself, and not merely a trailing field only disciplined to ask its questions long after neuroscience and neurotechnology (neuroS/T) reaches application. The benefits, burdens, risks, and potential harms of neuroS/T to persons – regarded both as individually separable and as communally integrable – require honest assessment prior to any evaluative or prescriptive stage. That broader and forward-looking approach in turn is far more conducive to developing and sustaining a cosmopolitan neuroethics.
