“All Ethics Is Global: New Neuroethics in a Multipolar and Multicultural World”

In their contribution to Re-Globalization: New Frontiers of Political, Economic, and Social Globalization, Dr. James Giordano and Dr. John R. Shook explore the issues that the globalization process poses on neuroethics. Novel neurotechnologies are being developed and are reaching various markets for use around the world. The relationship between translational research and innovative applications could largely reflect a nation’s social, economic, and in these ways, arguably ethico-legal priorities. The current retreat of neoliberalism opens the field for neuro-nationalism. However, it also opens the field for a wider, more interrogative approach which asserts that neuroethics should be a discursive component of neuroscientific research itself, and not merely a trailing field only disciplined to ask its questions long after neuroscience and neurotechnology (neuroS/T) reaches application. The benefits, burdens, risks, and potential harms of neuroS/T to persons – regarded both as individually separable and as communally integrable – require honest assessment prior to any evaluative or prescriptive stage. That broader and forward-looking approach in turn is far more conducive to developing and sustaining a cosmopolitan neuroethics.