Stanford Law School, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, CA 94302-8610, USA.
Sci Eng Ethics. 2012 Sep;18(3):439-46. doi: 10.1007/s11948-012-9391-6. Epub 2012 Aug 25.
Neuroscience is clearly making enormous progress toward understanding how human brains work. The implications of this progress for ethics, law, society, and culture are much less clear. Some have argued that neuroscience will lead to vast changes, superseding much of law and ethics. The likely limits to the explanatory power of neuroscience argue against that position, as do the limits to the social relevance of what neuroscience will be able to explain. At the same time neuroscience is likely to change societies through increasing their abilities to predict future behavior, to infer subjective mental states by observing physical brain states ("read minds"), to provide evidence in some cases relevant to criminal responsibility, to provide new ways to intervene to "treat antisocial brains," and to enhance healthy brains. Neuroscience should make important cultural changes in our special, and specially negative, views of "mental" versus "physical" illness by showing that mental illness is a dysfunction of a physical organ. It will not likely change our beliefs, implicit or explicit, in free will, or spark a new conflict between science and religion akin to the creationism controversy.
神经科学显然在理解人类大脑如何运作方面取得了巨大的进展。但这一进展对伦理、法律、社会和文化的影响远不那么明确。有人认为，神经科学将带来巨大的变革，取代大部分法律和道德规范。神经科学的解释力可能存在局限，而神经科学能够解释的内容在社会层面上的相关性也可能有限，这两点都反对上述观点。与此同时，神经科学可能会通过提高预测未来行为的能力、通过观察物理大脑状态来推断主观心理状态（“读取思维”）、在某些情况下为刑事责任提供相关证据、提供新的干预方法来“治疗反社会的大脑”以及增强健康大脑，从而改变社会。神经科学应该通过表明精神疾病是身体器官功能障碍，来改变我们对“精神”与“身体”疾病的特殊的、特别负面的看法，从而带来重要的文化变革。神经科学不太可能改变我们在自由意志方面的隐含或明确的信念，也不太可能引发类似创世论争议的科学与宗教之间的新冲突。
