The broad spectrum revolution brought greater dependence on skill and knowledge, and more demanding, often social, choices. We adopt Sterelny's account of how cooperative foraging paid the costs associated with longer dependency, and transformed the problem of skill learning. Scaffolded learning can facilitate cognitive control including suppression, whereas scaffolded exchange and trade, including inter-temporal exchange, can help develop resolve.

Research into cognitive enhancement is highly controversial, and arguments for and against it have failed to identify the logical fallacy underlying this debate: the fallacy of composition. The fallacy of composition is a lesser-known fallacy of ambiguity, but it has been explored and applied extensively to other fields, including economics. The fallacy of composition, which occurs when the characteristics of the parts of the whole are incorrectly extended to apply to the whole itself, and the conclusion is false, should be (...) addressed in the debate on cognitive enhancement and within education. Within cognitive enhancement, the premise that individual distinct cognitive processes can be enhanced by cognitive enhancers leads to the conclusion that they must enhance cognition overall, and this idea is pervasive in the literature. If the goal of cognitive enhancement is to enhance cognition or learning, and not merely individual cognitive processes, then this is a clear example of the fallacy of composition. The ambiguity of “cognitive,” “cognition,” and “enhancement” only perpetuates this fallacy and creates more confusion surrounding the purposes and goals of enhancement. Identifying this fallacy does not threaten the existing body of research; however, it provides a novel framework to explore new avenues for research, education, and enhancement, particularly through education reform initiatives. Education enhances and facilitates learning, and improvements to education could be considered cognitive enhancements. Furthermore, the same fallacy is ubiquitous in education; educators commit it by “teaching to the test” and prioritizing memorization over generalizable skills such as critical thinking and problem solving. We will explore these new avenues for research and highlight principles of learning success from other disciplines to create a clearer understanding of the means and ends of cognitive enhancement. Recognizing the pervasiveness of composition fallacy in cognitive enhancement and education will lead to greater clarity of normative positions and insights into student learning that steer away from fallacious reasoning. (shrink)

Willpower has ramifications for autonomy and mental time-travel. Autonomy presupposes mature powers of volition and the capacity to anticipate future events and consequences of one's actions. Ainslie's study is useful to clarify basic autonomy in addiction and dementia. Furthermore, we show how our study on coping with stress can be applied to suppression and resolve.

Supernumerary robotic limbs are innovative devices in the field of wearable robotics which can provide humans with unprecedented sensorimotor abilities. However, scholars have raised awareness of the ethical issues that would arise from the large adoption of technologies for human augmentation in society. Most negative attitudes towards such technologies seem to rely on an allegedly clear distinction between therapy and enhancement in the use of technological devices. Based on such distinction, people tend to accept technologies when used for therapeutic purposes (...) (e.g., prostheses), but tend to raise issues when similar devices are used for upgrading a physical or cognitive ability (e.g., supernumerary robotics limbs). However, as many scholars have pointed out, the distinction between therapy and enhancement might be theoretically flawed. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to the ethics of supernumerary limbs which is based on two related claims. First, we propose to conceive supernumerary limbs as tools that necessarily modify our psychological and bodily identity. At the same time, we stress that such a modification is not ethically bad in itself; on the contrary, it drives human interaction with the environment. Second, by comparing our view with the extended mind thesis, we claim that the mediation through tools is crucial for the formation of novel meanings and skills that constitute human interaction with the world. We will relate the latter claim to enactivism as a helpful theoretical perspective to frame issues related to artificial limbs and, more in general, to technologies for augmentation. Based on this approach, we finally sketch some suggestions for future directions in the ethics of supernumerary limbs. (shrink)

In the article “The Socio-Political Roles of Neuroethics and the Case of Klotho,” we proposed a socio-political approach to neuroethics, inspired by John Rawls’s roles for political philosophy. In...

An increasing amount of very diverse scholarship self-identifies as belonging to the field of neuroethics, illuminating a need to provide some reference points for what that field actually entails. We argue that neuroethics is a single field with distinct perspectives, roles, and subspecialties. We propose that—in addition to the three traditional perspectives delineated by Eric Racine—a fourth, socio-political perspective, must be recognized in neuroethics. The socio-political perspective in neuroethics focuses on the interplay between the behavioral as well as the brain (...) sciences and the socio-political system; this interplay includes social regulation in addition to all other realistic elements of social and political neurodiscourses. Thus, defining what—if any—roles the socio-political perspective in neuroethics might have is a pressing issue. Doing so could provide guidance for defining the criteria for prospective ethical evaluations in neuroethics. A promising approach to doing this could be by describing the roles of neuroethics in terms of the more concrete examples of the roles of political philosophy in general, as in the tradition of John Rawls. We take klotho, the supposed “longevity protein,” as a modern neuroethics case to exemplify the obstacles faced in securing neuroethics’ legitimacy and how the Rawlsian framework we propose may be applied to handle cases such as this. Ultimately, the socio-political perspective in neuroethics should not be swayed by the media hype and ought to offer useful ethical guidance and articulation of genuine ethical concerns to policy makers and the public alike. (shrink)

Fabi and Goldberg investigate how funding availability influences the landscape of bioethics as a field, and perpetuates forms of social and epistemic injustice while limitin...