School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, AustraliaCentre for Public Policy Research, King's College LondonDepartment of Sociology and Communications, Brunel University, London.
Sociol Health Illn. 2013 Nov;35(8):1133-48. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12026. Epub 2013 Feb 11.
The ethical issues neuroscience raises are subject to increasing attention, exemplified in the emergence of the discipline neuroethics. While the moral implications of neurotechnological developments are often discussed, less is known about how ethics intersects with everyday work in neuroscience and how scientists themselves perceive the ethics of their research. Drawing on observation and interviews with members of one UK group conducting neuroscience research at both the laboratory bench and in the clinic, this article examines what ethics meant to these researchers and delineates four specific types of ethics that shaped their day-to-day work: regulatory, professional, personal and tangible. While the first three categories are similar to those identified elsewhere in sociological work on scientific and clinical ethics, the notion of 'tangible ethics' emerged by attending to everyday practice, in which these scientists' discursive distinctions between right and wrong were sometimes challenged. The findings shed light on how ethical positions produce and are, in turn, produced by scientific practice. Informing sociological understandings of neuroscience, they also throw the category of neuroscience and its ethical specificity into question, given that members of this group did not experience their work as raising issues that were distinctly neuro-ethical.
神经科学引发的伦理问题越来越受到关注，这体现在神经伦理学这一学科的出现上。虽然经常讨论神经技术发展的道德含义，但人们对伦理如何与神经科学的日常工作交叉以及科学家如何看待自己研究的伦理问题知之甚少。本文通过对英国一个从事实验室和临床神经科学研究的小组的成员进行观察和访谈，考察了这些研究人员对伦理的理解，并描绘了塑造他们日常工作的四种具体类型的伦理：监管伦理、职业伦理、个人伦理和实际伦理。虽然前三种类型与其他地方的科学和临床伦理社会学研究中确定的类型相似，但“实际伦理”的概念是通过关注日常实践而出现的，在这种实践中，这些科学家在正确和错误之间的话语区分有时会受到挑战。研究结果阐明了伦理立场如何产生并反过来被科学实践所产生。这些发现为我们理解神经科学提供了信息，也使神经科学及其伦理特殊性这一范畴受到质疑，因为该小组的成员并不认为他们的工作引发了明显的神经伦理问题。
