Neuroethics beyond genethics

There has been considerable scepticism in many quarters regarding whether neuroethics should be recognized as a subfield of bioethics. Although there are pragmatic reasons for believing that we ought to think twice before officially identifying neuroethics as a distinct field, the overriding reason for positing a new field is that it confronts new questions. Thus, the central issue is whether neuroscience raises ethical questions that differ substantially from those raised by other fields in bioethics. As genethics—the ethics of genetics—precedes neuroethics by several decades and seems to raise very similar ethical questions, I address here whether these two subfields differ substantially.> It would be a mistake for neuroethicists to ignore or discount a rich body of relevant work merely because it treats genes rather than brainsAs these territories largely overlap, neuroethics can and should look to previous work in genethics for guidance and insight (Illes & Racine, 2005). It would be a mistake for neuroethicists to ignore or discount a rich body of relevant work merely because it treats genes rather than brains. Examples of issues that are common to genethics and neuroethics include: the ethics of access and consent, such as who can obtain information about a person's genome or brain, and to what information they can have access; the social implications of the misuses of that information; questions of distributive justice; how to handle probabilistic or statistical information about future health; and the vexing question of how to conceptualize and identify pathology and normality. Although the ethical questions relevant to both genethics and neuroethics are considerable, I highlight questions that I consider unique to neuroethics. And lest the reader think that genethics is therefore best viewed as a subset of neuroethics, I point out that genethics has its own proprietary issues, among which are questions raised by …