Dr Cynthia Forlini1
1Deakin University
Stakeholder and community engagement in bioethics are credited with the ability to provide empirical data that identify areas of contention and consensus on issues with social and regulatory implications. In turn, this data is expected to guide appropriate practice and policy. Cognitive enhancement is used as a case study to discuss how stakeholder engagement has advanced our understanding of human enhancement but also contributed blind spots to the ethics debate. The result is a bottleneck in data on the ethics of cognitive enhancement that is hindering implementation of current knowledge. Successes of stakeholder engagement on the ethics of cognitive enhancement include delimiting the boundaries of acceptability, identifying specific areas of contention among stakeholders, and demonstrating ambivalence on some ethical issues. These successes show that the ethics of cognitive enhancement can be independent of data on safety, efficacy, and prevalence. Blind spots are the minimal representation of diverse communities among stakeholders, few options for regulation of enhancement, and lack of consensus on who is responsible for regulation. These blind spots reflect assumptions made as part of early anticipatory ethics scholarship but rarely revisited alongside emerging empirical data about acceptability of cognitive enhancement and evidence of ethical contention. Clearing the bottleneck will require academics, institutions, and communities alike to answer a fundamental question: does cognitive enhancement still pose the same ethical issues? Those researching the ethics of cognitive enhancement ought to consider how to proceed sustainably by re-examining existing scholarship, prioritizing areas of inquiry, and adding novel high-quality data specifically and sparingly.
Biography:
Dr Cynthia Forlini is Lecturer in Health Ethics and Professionalism in the School of Medicine (Faculty of Health) at Deakin University. Her research explores the neuroethical issues that arise as we redefine the boundaries between treatment, maintenance, and enhancement of cognitive performance. She has examined these issues conceptually and empirically as they relate to the use of neurotechnology (e.g. neuropharmaceuticals and non-invasive brain stimulation) in different contexts such as competitive academic environments, research, healthy cognitive ageing, and dementia prevention.