Recent conversations in the public sphere have begun to flag the startling and profound effects that new neuroscientific technologies and capabilities are likely to have on society, as an array of innovative technoscience – from imaging techniques to new psychopharmaceuticals to dramatic laboratory findings – yields new ways of understanding and acting upon the personal and the social. On front pages and web pages, debates about topics such as willpower and addiction, and biological determinism and freedom, appear to acquire new significance in the face of novel neurotechnologies. Universities as well as private corporations are creating well-funded institutes for neuroscience research, and promote experimentation in a range of fields. We are constantly confronted with broad claims that this research will change our human ‘nature’, offer new ways of treating disease, and open up new (and possibly ‘post-human’) futures. Often in these public debates, either “ethics experts” pronounce truths from a particular moral stance, or journalists offer suggestive, but generally superficial, views. And yet there are alternatives to grand assertions and alarmist rhetoric, such as the close-study approaches favoured by many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists.
Funded by the European Science Foundation, this workshop is intended to bring together scholars whose work addresses ethical and social dimensions of neuroscience, and may help us to better understand why it is so vigorously asserted that we are on the cusp of immense changes in human and social forms. Participants are invited to present grounded, historically contextualized studies as a basis for analyzing contemporary ethos and ethics as they relate to the brain. Presentations will provide a point of departure for thinking about how social scientists and historians approach, apprehend, and assess these technological challenges to self and society that arguably have precedents but not direct precursors. Historically- and ethnographically-based inquiries into the origins and current condition of the new brain sciences and technologies, it is hoped, will provide a means of circumventing both brave-new-world style of boosterism (‘never before have such radical changes been possible’) as well as an equally brave-new-world reactionism or alarmism (‘never before has that which humanity holds dear been so threatened’). If, as it is commonly assumed, the norms and forms by which we live are undergoing alterations the intensity and sheer speed of which have never before been seen, what is needed now more than ever is a balanced assessment of the complex mix of forces that are at work in this transformation.
