Neurological Correlates

With the bioethics stimulus money in full force, neuroethics/neurophilosophy is front and center. One of the debates is neuro ethics.

It’s the predictive ability of neuro imaging (I guess, particularly) that stops people:   it’s neural profiling.

I say go ahead and neural profile — with plenty of privacy, no police state, etc. Private companies will do this one day.  My guess is that D&O liability insurers will require it at some level, just like a physical for the top 5 people and the requirement that two can’t be on the same plane at once.

Let’s cut to the chase: You can’t force morality on those who are immoral because they don’t want any.  Moreover, they believe morality is a weakness; a character flaw — and thus are extremely reluctant to give up what they seem to perceive as this super-power. (See some of the reader  comments here, under my Anti-Sociopath Activism post).

To me, it’s a physical attribute that determines ones’ ability to function in society. If your moral center is unplugged (see here) you can’t have moral intent.  It’s physical. Missing a leg? Can’t be the one who ran away from the crime scene. Missing white matter? Can’t have a moral intent.

A useful study would be to test people who have white matter integrity soft spots  — get a correlation of white matter integrity and morality (by some acceptable, preferably Doubertable measure).  One recent report showed that the more frayed the white matter, the higher the score on the psychopathy test. It would be interesting to quantify that.

Full disclosure: Your loyal bloggist is pleased (drop dead shocked more like it) to be asked to give a talk on Capital Hill next month involving bioethics and I promise to use your tax dollars to my fullest ability in anti-sociopath activism (within context and it ’s a little off topic — more on biopharma than neuro). You all will get your money’s worth from me. If you see the news, and there’s a  a person with a rainbow hair ‘fro marching with a sandwich board with the antisociopath activism logo back and forth in front of the Dirkson Senate Office building, that will be me. (I kid. On that part)(I always get lost in the tunnels).