Neuroethics: Contemporary Ethical Issues in Neuroscience

In this article, we have explored the different ethical domains related to neuroscientific methodology. The emergence of the term has been traced in the literature of biomedical ethics as an emerging field of an interdisciplinary framework, in the broader context of bioethics. Secondly, various issues in the two major divisions of neuroethics, namely,the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics’have been discussed. While the first mainly deals with methodological issues related to neuroscience, the latter evaluates the role and impact of neuroscientific findings in our ethical conceptions. The methodological concerns of stigma and privacy have been explored, shedding light on how neuroscientific studies negatively or positively affect the privacy of medical data and stigma in patients, in comparison with other areas of biomedical research. Regarding theNeuroscience of ethics, the role of neuroscientific findings in our understanding of free will and moral responsibility have been explored, along with the concept ofneuroessentialism. Other methodological concerns in the domains of global neuroethics and neurotechnology including cognitive wetware have also been evaluated.