Cuadernos de bioética : revista oficial de la Asociación Española de Bioética y Ética Médica
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This article tries to assess the potentials and limits of neuroethics. It argues that neuroscience and ethics should collaborate each other with mutual respect and preservation of their respective identities, scientific in the first case and philosophical in the second one ( neuroethics as cooperation). The text develops also a criticism in front of any attempt to replace the philosophical ethics by the neurosciences ( neuroethics as substitution). ⋯ These bases enable our moral behavior without determining it. By studying them our vulnerability as moral agents emerges as evidence. This vulnerability, which is rooted in the very human nature, must be, as it is argued along the last pages of the text, recognized as well as mitigated.
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The neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of Neuroethics. Neurosciences demonstrate which cerebral areas are active and inactive whilst people decide how to act when facing a moral dilemma; in this way we know the correlation between determined cerebral areas and our human acts. ⋯ The outcome of man's natural inclinations is on one hand linked to instinctive systems of animal survival and to basic emotions, and on the other, to the life of each individual human uninhibited by automatism of the biological laws, because he is governed by the laws of freedom. The capacity to formulate an ethical judgement is an innate asset of the human mind.