Sex, Lies and Brain Scans

This book is a popular overview of recent fMRI research and its implications in terms of prejudice, lying, free will and morality, neuro-marketing and self-control. There is no doubt that this kind of neuroscientific research will have increasingly extensive implications for our society as a whole but this will raise a host of new ethical issues for wider discussion. The authors make explicit the view that the brain gives rise to consciousness and that 'your mind is just your brain in action: it is not a separate entity. When we observe brain activity, we observe the mind.' This encourages a functional outlook, which itself has philosophical and ethical implications. For instance, in a discussion of brain and morality, the authors state that 'moral decision-making appears to rely on many parallel, cooperating systems and brain areas', which makes neuroscience arguably more central than it actually is in a broader cultural context. The privacy of our thoughts may become a more open book, which has potentially beneficial uses in lie detection, although this has yet to be acknowledged as evidence in court - there are still limits. However, and this is not mentioned, such technology has military and intelligence implications that could potentially be used to control populations. All this suggests that we need to take two steps forward in ethics for everyone in technology, and yet, at present, this situation is reversed.