Kurzfassung

This research initiative will focus on the way in which a specific neurotechnology –
pharmacological agents used as “cognitive enhancers” - is currently implemented into culture and social practice. While we want to narrowly focus on this specific class of psychoactive substances, we will investigate the ethical problems raised by the rapid development in this area from a number of different angles:

• Project A will lay the conceptual foundations and rigorously analyze ethical aspects from a...This research initiative will focus on the way in which a specific neurotechnology –
pharmacological agents used as “cognitive enhancers” - is currently implemented into culture and social practice. While we want to narrowly focus on this specific class of psychoactive substances, we will investigate the ethical problems raised by the rapid development in this area from a number of different angles:

• Project A will lay the conceptual foundations and rigorously analyze ethical aspects from a standard philosophical perspective by employing conceptual tools from moral philosophy and applied ethics.

• Project B will analyze cross-cultural attitudes of health professionals towards cognitive enhancement and will determine the ethical principles which they rely upon for their decision-making.

• Project C will operate under a clinical perspective. It will ask how medicine differentiates between normal behavior, deviant behavior and illness, under which circumstances “enhancing normality” may be reasonable, which cognitive enhancers are available and which will be emerging in the next years, which patterns of abuse will arise and how current views of the use of cognitive enhancers are influenced by assumptions concerning the mechanisms of action and health effects of these substances and external influences on the medical decision process– e.g. by the society, the “zeitgeist”, the industry, health care organizations etc.

• Project D will explore specific modes of knowledge production in the neurosciences, based on a reconstructive analysis of the tools, technological platforms and experimental systems in this multidisciplinary field. Here, the goal is to identify effects of standardization and normalization, which in turn pave the road for the current approaches to cognitive enhancement.

The overall objectives are to establish a functioning interdisciplinary research network, which carefully concentrates on one single problem in neuroethics first. If this network is successful, it can serve as a nucleus for a growing scientific cooperation in this field, which could then also be thematically expanded. Capacity building and the training of junior researchers for this new field are further mid-term aims, which we want to pursue with the help of this project. Finally, the proposed research program has as its broad objective to provide policymakers with cogent information, derived from sources independent of the pharmaceutical industry, and to advise with regard to future legislation strategies. To this end, we will also hold at least one public conference at the end of the project, disseminating our research results to the academic community and, in particular, a wider public.
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