Lecture 1: Christine Mitchell - Introduction to ethical theory

HBP Curriculum: Interdisciplinary Brain Science | Research, ethics and societal impact | 4th Teaching Cycle

Lecture 1: Introduction to ethical theory
Speaker: Christine Mitchell, Harvard Medical School, USA

Neuroethics has been described as containing at least two components - the neuroscience of ethics, and the ethics of neuroscience. The first involves neuroscientific theories, research, and neuro-imaging focused on how the brain arrives at moral decisions and actions, which challenge existing descriptive theories of how humans develop moral thinking and make ethical decisions. The second, ethics of neuroscience, involves applying normative theories about what is right, good and fair to ethical questions raised by neuroscientific research and new technologies, such as how to balance the public benefit of “big data” neuroscience while protecting individual privacy and norms of informed consent. This lecture explicates selected theories of ethics as applied to questions raised by the Human Brain Project.

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