ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two perspectives on the 'neuroscientific turn', sketch a landscape of neuroethics, and scrutinize the current state and development of neuroethics as one of the new fields at the intersection between neuroscience and the humanities. It explores the interactions of neuroscience and ethics in the field of neuroethics are complex and multidirectional. The chapter examines the field's particular role in the neuroscientific turn by describing its formation within the context of developments in neuroscience after the Decade of the Brain. The idea of 'brainhood' as an anthropological outlook—as an outlook that defines the specificity and functionality of the human brain as the essence of a human being—though hardly ever explicitly named, is astonishingly frequent in the serious scientific literature in neuroethics. The existence and development of neuroethics is clearly indicative of a larger cultural turn in philosophy and the sciences that conceptualize the brain as an extremely important structure for understanding what it means to be human.
