The Effect of Theoretical Ethics on Actual Behavior: Implications for Neuroethics
Neil Levy By Neil Levy, PhD Neil Levy is the Deputy Director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics , Head of Neuroethics at Florey Neuroscience Institutes , University of Melbourne, and a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board. His research examines moral responsibility and free will. Might doing ethics be harmful to your moral health? One would expect just the opposite: the deeper you think about ethics, the more you read and the larger the number of cases you consider, the more expertise you acquire. Bioethicists and neuroethicists are moral experts, one might think. That’s why it is appropriate for media organizations to ask us for our opinion, or for hospitals and research institutions to ask us to serve on institutional review boards . In this post, I leave aside the question whether ethicists like me deserve to have their opinions about controversial issues given special weight when we offer them. It is really hard to know what could serve as evidence fo...