Neuroenhancement and the world of independent Value: impersonalist ethics
Creators: name: Larrivee, Denis
name: Farisco, Michele
Publisher: name: F1000Research
Year: 2015

description: Neuroethical statements constitute specific and pragmatic applications that reflect broader normative formulae, designated meta-neuroethical principles. Recent efforts to identify such norms have explored the novel question of whether value is itself an independent and intrinsic property of ethical systems, analogous to state variables in physical systems, or whether it is always conditioned by its relationship to an ‘evaluator’. Derek Parfit’s attempt to bridge these positions has yielded a hybrid principle, the impersonalistic ethic, in which the notion of value distributes broadly amongst a group of individuals, i.e., collective, rather than to the individual per se (Parfit, 1984). This principle has spawned secondary metaethical principles, e.g., Increased Procreative Beneficence, in which purported beneficial traits are favored for selection (Savulescu, 2001). According to this view beneficial cognitive features, such as memory and empathy, accrue to the collective, thereby maximally improving the overall qualitative composition of its membership. The designation of the collective as the beneficiary thus structures second order ethical statements that create value-flow away from individuals, who no longer constitute its focal emphasis, toward the collective. The value of the collective thus relates proportionally to the summated value of its beneficial features; as a corollary individual value is contingent on the collective, in proportion to his sharing in its beneficial features. Since social cohesion is related directly to the value accorded the individual or collective, however, the primary forces promoting cohesion are those directed between the two. Philosophically, this is described by impersonalistic theory (Bengtsson, 2010) where constituent distinctions are opaque and individual boundaries lack delineation. By contrast, social neuroscience and social network theory posit that social cohesion is maximized by intracomponent bonding, which provides for stability in large communities. At the level of individuals bonding is established via affect circuits, and higher valence value is accorded the individual than the community/social group. Multiple networks are implicated, including those of parental bonding, gender relations, and empathic circuits, for example. Reciprocal interdependence, moreover, on which social contract theory is premised, would be replaced by an egalitarian distribution of cognitive benefits, according to an impersonalistic ethic, that would fail to foster interrelationality. Historially, this may be seen in the instability of collective entities, that have either disintegrated or metamorphosed into systems emphasizing relationality and the value of the individual, e.g., United Nations Charter of Human Rights and the Person. We propose that ethical statements derived from value independence or an impersonalistic neuroethic are likely to be socially fragmentary and to result in the weakening of individual contribution to community structure.