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by Neil Levy Neil Levy is professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney and deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics . He is the author of 7 books, including Neuroethics (2007) and Consciousness and Moral Responsibility (2014), and edits the journal Neuroethics . He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience board. A recent study by Rachel Yehuda et al. in Biological Psychiatry provided further evidence for the genetic transmission of acquired characteristics, by showing that Holocaust survivors passed certain acquired genetic markers to their children. The idea that acquired characteristics can be genetically transmitted is (roughly) equivalent to the doctrine of Lamarckism , and was long considered a heresy in biology. [Editor's note: see also Ryan Purcell's 2014  post for this blog on the relationship between Lamarckism and epigenetics .] According to the Darwinian orthodoxy, traits change because randomly occurring mutations confer a relative fitnes...

Julia Haas is a McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on decision-making. Over the past two decades, computational and neurobiological research has had a big impact on the field of economics, bringing into existence a new and prominent interdisciplinary field of inquiry, ‘neuroeconomics.’ The guiding tenet of neuroeconomics has been that by combining both theoretical and empirical tools from neuroscience, psychology and economics, the resulting synthesis could provide valuable insights into all three of its parent disciplines (Glimcher 2009). And although some economists have resisted the influence of neuroscience research (Gul and Psendorfer 2008), neuroeconomics has by all measures thrived as a theoretical endeavor, and proven itself as a discipline capable of marshaling substantial institutional and financial resources. For example, theories from economics and psychology have alre...

In his article Neuroethics: A New Way of Doing Ethics, Neil Levy (2011) argues that “experimental results from the sciences of the mind suggest that appeal to [the Doctrine of Double Effect] might be question-begging.” As Levy frames the Doctrine, the Doctrine is a moral principal that is meant to ground the intuitive moral difference between effects that are brought about intentionally versus those that are merely foreseen. More specifically, the Doctrine is supposed to ground the intuition that, when certain conditions are met, it is morally permissible to bring about a bad outcome that is merely foreseen, but, under these same conditions, it would not be morally permissible to bring about a bad outcome intentionally. Or, another way to put this, the Doctrine claims that it takes more to justify causing harm intentionally than it takes to justify causing harm as a merely foreseen side effect (Sinnott-Armstrong, Mallon, McCoy, & Hull, 2008). The intellectual roots of the Doctrine ...