What Can We Do for You? The Role of Ethics Experts in Neuroscience

摘要

As one conclusion of their study, Moses and Illes (2017) suggest that members of ethics committees of neuroscientific organizations should receive appropriate training, turning them into ethics experts with a focus on neuroscience. While this conclusion is certainly justified, given the complexity of neuroscience themselves and the ethical issues raised by them, it also invokes the conceptually problematic notions of “ethics experts” and, implicitly, “ethical expertise.” This position seems to be debatable because, without further elaboration, it suggests that it is more or less clear how ethical expertise is constituted and that it could be accessed and acquired like any other expertise in any other domain. However, as we show here, there is a wide variety of abilities that contribute to ethical expertise and that are remarkably diverse.