Elitism is a Threat to Science

Science is highly exclusive: the vast majority of people cannot participate in research, access research articles, influence what gets researched, or influence science-related policy-making. This exclusivity is worrisome, not only because it is unfair (and that unfairness is not evenly distributed across different groups of people), but also because it is a threat to science […]

The Ethics of Cognitive Enhancement: Part 2

Go back to Part 1. In Part 1 of this series on the ethics of cognitive enhancement, I pointed out that it is not logical to deny people access to new methods of cognitive enhancement as they become available, because such methods would not be categorically different from methods of cognitive enhancement that are currently legal and […]

The Ethics of Cognitive Enhancement: Part 1

“Smart drugs” like Adderall and Modafinil are just the beginning of the cognitive enhancement revolution. Though they were initially developed to alleviate the symptoms of cognitive disorders, these and similar drugs are increasingly being used by the cognitively healthy to boost memory, focus, and wakefulness over long periods of work. With the commercial use of […]

The Ethics of Animal Research

Most of what we know about the brain comes from experiments on animals. Even when we do fMRI experiments on humans, we’re usually testing a hypothesis that is based on findings from animal experiments. Considering how important animal experimentation has been for the development of the field – and for the development of science and […]