Cognitive Enhancement Ethical and Policy Implications in International Perspectives

There is a growing literature in neuroethics dealing with cognitive neuro-enhancement for healthy adults. However, discussions on this topic tend to focus on abstract theoretical positions while concrete policy proposals and detailed models are scarce. Furthermore, discussions appear to rely solely on data from the US or UK, while international perspectives are mostly non-existent. This volume fills this gap and addresses issues on cognitive enhancement comprehensively in three important ways: 1) it examines the conceptual implications stemming from competing points of view about the nature and goals of enhancement; 2) it addresses the ethical, social, and legal implications of neuroenhancement from an international and global perspective including contributions from scholars in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America; and 3) it discusses and analyzes concrete legal issues and policy options tailored to specific contexts.

Fabrice Jotterand, PhD, MA, is Associate Professor & Director of the Graduate Program in Bioethics at the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Biomedical Ethics, University of Basel, Switzerland. His scholarship and research interests focus on issues including moral enhancement, neurotechnologies and human identity, the use of neurotechnologies in psychiatry, medical professionalism, and moral and political philosophy. Veljko Dubljevic, PhD, DPhil, is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Neuroethics research unit at IRCM and McGill University in Montreal, and an associate member of the International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities, University of Tübingen. He obtained a PhD in political science (University of Belgrade), and after studying bioethics, philosophy and neuroscience (University of Tübingen), he obtained a doctorate in philosophy (University of Stuttgart). His primary research focuses on ethics of neuroscience and technology, and neuroscience of ethics. He has over 30 publications in moral, legal and political philosophy and in neuroethics.