Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “Neuroethics: A New Way of Doing Ethics”

I am pleased to have the opportunity to respond to the thoughtful and insightful comments of 11 of my colleagues. I have had only the briefest time to consider their comments; no doubt more prolonged reflection will yield more insights. Already, however, the comments have assisted my thought. Some of the comments reflect a misunderstanding of my arguments on the part of commentators, but these misunderstandings are useful because they point to a lack of clarity onmy part (sometimes a lack of clarity in my expression and sometimes in my thought). Most of the comments focus in one way or another on methodological issues in normative and applied ethics; these comments have been especially useful to me, because they have helped me to become clearer on just what role I think scientific data can and should play in moral enquiry and philosophy more generally. Several of the commentators (e.g., Boddington 2011, Braude 2011, and Rommelfanger and Boshears 2011) take me to be committed to a kind of positivism about science and philosophy—perhaps even a view on which neuroscience should replace philosophical enquiry. I do not advocate any such view. In the target article, and in my book (Levy 2007) I emphasized the interdisciplinary nature of neuroethics. Neuroethics is, or ought to be, a conversation between philosophers (of various kinds), neuroscientists, social and cognitive psychologists, and researchers in other fields. I envisage the tools of neuroscience and the other sciences of mind as supplementing and testing the tools used in philosophy, not simply replacing them. The reductionism that Braude sees in my article, according to which neuroethics “seeks to validate only those intuitions whose rational foundations can be demonstrated through scientific measurement,” is foreign to me. Rather, I advocate a highly interdisciplinary and multilevel approach to philosophical issues. It is important to stress the multilevel nature of the methodology urged here. Several commentators argue that