Special Section: Philosophical Issues in Neuroethics Guest Editorial: Introduction to Philosophical Issues in Neuroethics TUIJA TAKALA Neuroethics studies the ethical, social, and legal issues raised by actual or expected advances in neuroscience. The relevant fields in neuroscience include, but are not limited to, neuroimaging, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychophar- macology, neurogenetics, and neuropsychiatry. For many, neuroethics is best understood as a subcategory of bioethics, and although not all agree, for the purposes of the present collection of articles, this definition is assumed. Although bioethics as a field of study started in the early 1970s as a normative enterprise, mainly practiced by philosophers and theologians, it has since become truly inter- and multidisciplinary, comprising also law, sociology, psychology, gender studies, disability studies, anthropology, history, and many other approaches. What we particularly wanted to do in this issue, however, was to find the most pertinent questions of neuroethics from the viewpoint of philosophy, and the call for papers was drafted accordingly. In the call, contributors were asked to address philosophical issues in neuro- ethics or to analyze neuroethical problems philosophically. Very quickly it be- came obvious that most authors found the issue of moral responsibility and related problems as both the most challenging and the most important for philo- sophical neuroethics. The questions of moral responsibility in the light of bio- medical findings are not new to bioethics—they have been discussed widely in relation to, for instance, genetic testing—but the possibilities of understanding how the brain works seem to take the challenge a step further. Problems of the philosophy of mind can no longer be avoided, and wherever one looks the issue of free will seems to surface. Four of the articles address these issues. Another ethically and philosophically relevant aspect that neurosciences share with genetics is the often uncertain and, for the most part, only statistically relevant nature of the data that are acquired by the various imaging and testing techniques (at least in the light of current scientific understanding). This is especially significant when discussing the normative questions of what to do with such findings. In relation to moral responsibility, the questions encountered are frequently linked with unwelcome behavior, or the risk of it, and whether individuals who appear to show dispositions of such behavior should be treated differently. In addition to the difficult normative dilemmas, the study of these The editorial work for this special issue was supported by my project Neuroscience and Norms: Ethical and Legal Aspects of Norms in Neuroimaging (NeuroSCAN) / Ethical Concepts and Norms funded by the Academy of Finland (SA 1124638). Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics (2010), 19, 161–163. Ó Cambridge University Press 2010 0963-1801/10 $20.00 doi:10.1017/S0963180109990429 161 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core . IP address: 34.228.24.229, on 21 May 2020 at 14:43:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms . https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963180109990429