H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
Hereth on Shook and Giordano, 'Bioethics and Brains: A Disciplined and Principled Neuroethics' [Review]
Shook, John R.; Giordano, James. Bioethics and Brains: A Disciplined and Principled Neuroethics. : MIT Press, 2025. vi + 240 pp. $60.00 (paper), ISBN 9780262549998.
Reviewed by
Blake Hereth (Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (September, 2025)
Commissioned by
Kathryn D. Lankford (Arizona State University)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61905
Neuroethics is a happening field of inquiry. As a result, it has its share of critics, many of whom decry the “hype” of neuroethics. Indeed, it is readily apparent to anyone with access to a quality search engine that neuroethics is prone to fancy in a way that is often untethered from neuroscience. Perhaps worse, even when neuroethics is predicated on cutting-edge neuroscience, a portion of novel neuroscience is itself prone to exaggeration.
John R. Shook and James Giordano’s latest book, Bioethics and Brains: A Disciplined and Principled Neuroethics, provides a timely and welcome correction to these aforementioned errors. Eschewing idle speculation into the future of neuroscience, Shook and Giordano encourage neuroethicists to allow inventiveness while ensuring that neuroethics is “realistic and responsible” (p. 9). To guide neuroethics into this more disciplined and principled direction, Shook and Giordano articulate at the outset four guiding principles: self-creativity (“the right of persons to re-create themselves for enriching their lives”), non-obsolescence (“the duty to avoid the creation of obsolete or single-use people”), empowerment (“the right of persons to maintain their capabilities to live autonomous and fulfilling lives”), and citizenship (“the duty to promote free, equal, law-abiding, and participatory citizenship”) (pp. 2, 86, 149-50). In addition to offering worthwhile guidance, these four principles offer a succinct encapsulation of dominant moral themes in the broader neuroethics literature.
Organizing their book into six substantive chapters, Shook and Giordano outline their vision for a “Neuroethics 2.0” that ought to be disciplined, integrated, prescriptive, natural, principled, and beyond normal. A short review precludes summarizing each chapter in detail, so brief descriptions must suffice. Neuroethics must be disciplined in that it must be a “unified” field of inquiry, keep pace with current neuroscience and neurotechnology (neuroS/T), and be appropriately skeptical and critical of the aims of novel neuroS/T, deliberative, and interdisciplinary. Neuroethics should be integrated in the sense that it “would promote its own methodology, organon, jurisdiction, and propaedeutic,” avoiding subsumption with other fields of inquiry while achieving intensive, lasting collaboration with them (p. 71). Neuroethics should be prescriptive, critically evaluating “the implications of brain science for better understanding the bases of our moral capacities and moral self-worth,” avoiding the twin pitfalls of culturally biased prescriptions (“neurodogmatism”) or rejecting talk of ethics and moral responsibility in favor of a view of human persons as utterly lacking agency (“neuroessentialism”) (p. 81). Neuroethics should be natural in that it should pursue “forging a new objective metaethics that is based on scientific research into human societies and their moralities,” reflecting the naturalist philosopher’s optimism that natural philosophy is “able (at least in the long run) to reveal the nature of anything accessible by inquiry” (pp. 128, 108). Neuroethics must be principled in that it should set its sights on ethical practice, elucidating ethical principles capable of cross-cultural enaction “while preserving ethical advancements made by cultures around the world” (p. 158). Finally, neuroethics must be beyond normal in addressing issues concerning “normal” human function, dispelling ableist notions of normality, and clarifying the conceptual and moral contours of human “enhancement” technologies.
Each of the six substantive chapters further includes a set of six guiding principles, designed to elaborate on and concretize Shook and Giordano’s Neuroethics 2.0. These combined eighteen principles proffer a more fine-grained sense of what this Neuroethics 2.0 looks like across the aforementioned six domains. Because Bioethics and Brains is centrally focused on regrouping and redirecting praxis for the next generation of neuroethics, I found the authors’ elucidation of these principles helpful in comprehending the shape and scope of their project.
One shortcoming of the book is that it doesn’t much address privately funded, developed, and owned neuroscience and neurotechnology. Yet private industry is the origin of much (if not most) of novel neurotechnologies. This omission seems especially odd, given Shook and Giordano’s emphasis on the regulatory role of neuroethics. Of course, this is not to say that neuroethics should play an exclusively regulatory role—a point on which I am in full agreement with Shook and Giordano—but rather that insofar as neuroethics plays a regulatory role, it ought to, to some extent, regulate private industry, and there are various legal, ethical, and practical challenges associated with doing so. Additionally, it is my considered view that those who have called for neuroethicists to play larger roles in neuroS/T, perhaps even embedding themselves as ethicists within private neurotechnology companies, rightly recognize the importance of ethical influence in the corporate sphere. Fortuitously, Bioethics and Brains offers many insights that could support such efforts. It belongs to Shook and Giordano’s next book to flesh them out.
Bioethics and Brains is not a book on neuroethics designed to satisfy the latest hyped neurotechnologies or philosophical innovations. Readers seeking a philosophical treatise on some novel neuroS/T ought to look elsewhere. This is a mature treatment of neuroethics for mature neuroethicists who take not only their individual research projects but also their field of research seriously. As a field of research, neuroethics stands to gain much from Shook and Giordano’s meditative roadmap for a Neuroethics 2.0.
Citation:
Blake Hereth.
Review of
Shook, John R.; Giordano, James.
Bioethics and Brains: A Disciplined and Principled Neuroethics.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2025.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61905
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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