Since the publication of Listening to Prozac there have been many debates about how and why Prozac and other similar drugs are prescribed. The articles that follow take up debates about what conditions such drugs can and should address, questions about authenticity in using drugs for psychic well‐being, and concerns about what means we morally endorse in projects of self‐creation. The contributions from Carl Elliott, Peter Kramer, James Edwards, and David Healy derive from a project supported by the Social Sciences (...) and Humanities Research Council of Canada, “Enhancement Technologies and Human Identity.” Psychiatry, like the Prozac it prescribes, aims to enhance the patient's internal psychic well‐being. Yet what ails many may be not an internal state like depression or anxiety, but alienation. And the experts of the self to whom we turn cannot “cure” our collective form of life in which alienation takes root. (shrink)

The extended mind thesis is the claim that mental states extend beyond the skulls of the agents whose states they are. This seemingly obscure and bizarre claim has far-reaching implications for neuroethics, I argue. In the first half of this article, I sketch the extended mind thesis and defend it against criticisms. In the second half, I turn to its neuroethical implications. I argue that the extended mind thesis entails the falsity of the claim that interventions into the brain are (...) especially problematic just because they are internal interventions, but that many objections to such interventions rely, at least in part, on this claim. Further, I argue that the thesis alters the focus of neuroethics, away from the question of whether we ought to allow interventions into the mind, and toward the question of which interventions we ought to allow and under what conditions. The extended mind thesis dramatically expands the scope of neuroethics: because interventions into the environment of agents can count as interventions into their minds, decisions concerning such interventions become questions for neuroethics. (shrink)