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Anthropology and Ethics

Understanding different ethical systems and diverse forms of moral life has been at the core of anthropological enquiry. “Ethics” and “morality” have often been indistinguishable from “culture,” “ideology,” or “discourse,” concepts used in anthropology to represent shared rules, ideas, values, beliefs, opinions, desires, and preferences. This is not surprising as society was equated with morality for a long time in anthropology, ever since Durkheim defined society as a system of moral facts (Laidlaw 2002; Zigon 2008). As a result, anthropologists have documented in their ethnographies of societies the world over the set of ideas, values, preferences, and practices that underpin local ethics. Adding to this rich history, over the past 15 years there has been renewed anthropological interest in ethics as a separate analytical field. The methodological and ontological ground of this new anthropology of ethics is the individual, but this is a relational individual who has undergone substantial socialization. An ethical subject, from this perspective, is “always of intersubjective, social and cultural tissue” (Faubion 2011, p. 120). This recentering of the object of study has allowed anthropological enquiry to move beyond questions of social regularity and control where individual moral behavior is understood as acquiescence or transgression (Laidlaw 2002; Zigon 2008). The anthropology of ethics has in particular started to consider issues having to do with how and where ethical subjectivities form; with reference to which particular set of ideas, values, preferences, and practices are these subjectivities formed; how are they expressed in ordinary, everyday social encounters; to what extent does ethical behavior manifest through the adherence to or creative transcendence of normative action; what is the role of reflexivity and habitus in the expression of ethical behavior; and to what extent individuals inhabit different ethical subjectivities (Laidlaw 2002; Zigon 2008; Lambek 2010).

A distinctively anthropological perspective has therefore much to contribute to neuroethics. An anthropological neuroethics can first and foremost draw upon anthropology’s virtually inexhaustible trove of ethnographic data to test the universality of neuroethical claims; to investigate the local conditions that modulate brain responses associated with the formation of ethical values, behaviors, and predispositions; or to better understand the relationship between context and the neural correlates of ethical behaviors. An anthropological neuroethics can further draw upon anthropology’s increasingly sophisticated understanding of ethical subjects (as intersubjective, as the product of socialization and enculturation, as inhabiting various ethical positions, as reproducing and transcending normative action, etc.) to guide enquiry into the neural bases of moral agency (see also Chap. 9, “The Neurobiology of Moral Cognition: Relation to Theory of Mind, Empathy, and Mind-Wandering”). But at a more fundamental level, an anthropological neuroethics is necessary for the same reason that an anthropological neuroscience is ultimately necessary: because human individuals are not pure individuals; because they cannot be more fully understood either in isolation or as an abstraction; and because they are cultural individuals, intersubjective individuals, individuals who inhabit (and contribute to) a world of meaning shared with others. The neural bases of moral agency, like the neural bases of human activity more broadly, cannot therefore be understood without reference to this anthropological individual.

Neuroanthropology and Ethics

The aforementioned anthropological neuroscience, or neuroanthropology, as a field of study interested in “the experiential and neurobiological aspects of cultural activity” (Domínguez et al. 2010, p. 140) is already in existence. In a great display of foresight, the field was first formulated over three decades ago [by a small group of scholars including Charles Laughlin (D’Aquili et al. 1979), contributor to this section], well before new and powerful technologies (including not only brain imaging but also high performance scientific computing) and analytic approaches brought about the current neuroscientific revolution. Recently, interest in neuroanthropology has been bolstered as a result of these technical innovations and by the picture of the human brain they are starting to draw, which is in better accord with evolving anthropological models of human behavior. Such a brain is plastic, plural, and highly responsive to the environments it is embedded in, including “the human body, the social field, and the longer-term, larger-scale structures that are the product of human brains yoked into cooperative [and competitive, it should be added], cumulative [but also ever changing] systems” (Lende and Downey 2012, p. 2), that is, cultural systems. A striking demonstration of the brain’s responsiveness to these environments is that they account for a large proportion of the brain’s structural variability, as measured by volume variation across the brain (Brun et al. 2009); in other words, these environments literally shape the brain (particularly white matter, the wiring of the brain that allows different brain areas to communicate, and the frontal cortex, which is the seat of higher cognitive functions, including executive control and reasoning). Moreover, cultural neuroscience, a field of study that has overlapping aims with neuroanthropology, has provided extensive evidence of cultural influences on brain function, all the way from perceptual judgments (Hedden et al. 2008), to attentional control (Ketay et al. 2009), emotional responses (Chiao et al. 2008), theory of mind (Kobayashi et al. 2007, 2008), self-knowledge, and self-construal (Zhu et al. 2007; Han et al. 2008; Lewis et al. 2008; Chiao et al. 2010).

In addition to cultural influences on brain structure and function, neuroanthropology is interested in questions such as how are socially shared meanings and practices represented in the brain; how does the brain appropriate and act on cultural experiences; what are the neural mechanisms that make culture possible; how did these mechanisms evolve; and how do they interact with genetically mediated neurocognitive processes and behaviors (Domínguez et al. 2010). Examples of neuroanthropological research addressing these questions include functional neuroimaging of role playing (Whitehead et al. 2009); neural encoding of basic types of social relationships (Iacoboni et al. 2004); neural substrates of the disposition to treat someone as a rational agent (Gallagher et al. 2002); sociocultural patterning of neural activity during self-reflection (Ma et al. 2012); social interaction research through simultaneous two-person brain imaging or hyperscanning (Konvalinka and Roepstorff 2012); relational coding as the principle of prefrontal cortex function as well as the basis for the sharing of experience (Domínguez et al. 2009); and differences in resting-state activity between human and chimpanzee brains (Rilling et al. 2007).

An anthropological neuroethics is clearly necessary because, as the above account implies, the neural bases of moral agency are to be found beyond the confines of a single brain, in the coming together and interacting of a community of brains; in the shaping of the moral brain by the social field and by those collective long-term, large-scale systems of ideas, values, models, preferences, and practices known as cultures; and in the workings of a neurocognitive system that evolved to absorb, reproduce, and contribute to shared worlds of meaning (Domínguez et al. 2009; Whitehead 2012).

Another aspect of neuroanthropological research of importance for neuroethics is neuroanthropology’s critical, reflexive, and meta-analytic undertakings, which speak not only to the practice of neuroscience but also to the implications of neuroscientific knowledge for people’s understanding of their own behavior, and to political and social uses of this knowledge (see also Chap. 33, “Historical and Ethical Perspectives of Modern Neuroimaging”, and Chap. 40, “ Neuroimaging Neuroethics: Introduction”) (Domínguez et al. 2010; Domínguez 2012; Lende and Downey 2012). Researchers have, for example, problematized the process that leads to the generation of brain images as scientific “facts” by drawing attention to how experimental design, data gathering strategies, analysis, and interpretation of results incorporate and reinforce cultural assumptions about human nature, normality, brain function, and the relationship between experience and the brain (Dumit 2004); highlighting how components of this process are obscure to most researchers who must accept that subjects are transformed into objective brain images as if by magic, by automated, largely black boxed computerized procedures (Roepstorff 2002); and bringing to light the discursive concealing and marginalization of subjects and subjectivity in brain imaging resulting in the scientific process and its products gaining an inflated appearance of validity (Domínguez 2012). In addition, Turner (2012) has called into question the ontological status of the terminology used to describe mental and cognitive constructs and has recommended that a scientifically more useful ontology may result from ethnographic reports of such constructs across cultures. Dumit (2004) has also critically written on the social history of brain images after they leave the laboratory detailing how these images, rather than illustrative of “textual and quantitative proof” (Dumit 2004, p. 142) as intended in scientific papers, have come to be seen in popular magazines (see also Chap. 92, “Neuroscience, Neuroethics, and the Media”), in the eyes of policy makers, or the courtroom (see also Chap. 84, “Neuroimaging and Criminal Law”), as the proof itself of a normal brain, a depressed brain, or an insane brain; and as straightforward, objective, unmediated photographs of these categories. Lende and Downey (2012) have, on their part, underscored the need for neuroanthropology to study how “laboratories, government institutions, funding bodies, and professional organizations” fashion neuroscience knowledge and practice, to then “examine how the biomedical industry as well as lay people draw on this knowledge to understand and manage issues related to health and well-being” (see also Chap. 69, “Using Neuropharmaceuticals for Cognitive Enhancement: Policy and Regulatory Issues”) (Lende and Downey 2012, p. 7).

Contributions in This Section

The aim of the foregoing discussion has been to show that anthropology is doubly relevant for neuroethics: not only has anthropology a solid and evolving corpus of knowledge regarding ethics and morality but also a growing body of understandings having to do with the relationship between culture and the brain. The ingredients are therefore there for a neuroanthropology of ethics. The papers in this section are a first formal contribution in this direction. In the opening paper, “The sense of justice: a neuroanthropological account,” Charles Laughlin critiques the highly abstract, elaborate, hyperational, and ethnocentric view Western philosophers have of justice and proposes instead what he calls a sense of justice [justice, sense of] in order to better capture an attribute that intuitively seems to be shared by people everywhere. According to Laughlin, the sense of justice is inherently relational and emerges from linking a basic intuition for fairness or balance with a capacity for empathy and the experience of positive and negative affect. Laughlin argues that these component elements of the sense of justice are mediated by discrete neurophysiological mechanisms, which have precursors in other big-brained social animals. For Laughlin the sense of justice is universal, but it manifests differently depending on social structural and cultural factors. He offers examples of how the sense of justice plays out in specific contexts using ethnographic cases (including from his own fieldwork) and by showing that the sense of justice fulfills different functions in egalitarian and less stratified band and tribal societies compared to hierarchical, highly differentiated, bureaucratized societies: it is a structuring principle of social institutions among the former but becomes alienated from social procedures and juridical institutions in the latter.

In “Free will, agency, and the cultural, reflexive brain,” Steve Reyna starts, like Laughlin, with a critique of Western philosophical conceptions about the will, concerned, as they have been, with a functional account of this construct but neglecting altogether its underlying substance, its structure, its materiality, and the set of mechanisms that give rise to it. Reyna identifies the brain as the structure of will and the brain’s reflexivity as a key mechanism giving rise to will. By reflexivity Reyna means the brain’s capacity to monitor the outer and inner milieus. Reflexivity thus understood engenders will as it constitutes a resource for finding out what is the state of the world to then figure out what to do about it. However, in the case of the human brain, action is biased by culture, which constitutes a set of understandings about the state of the world and what to do about it that are socially shared. The corollary is that “a culturally reflexive brain performs the functions of will.” Finally, Reyna adopts a critical stance by arguing that free will (see also Chap. 13, “Neuroscience, Free Will, and Responsibility: The Current State of Play,” Chap. 14, “Consciousness and Agency,” Chap. 17, “Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervention,” and Chap. 15, “Determinism and Its Relevance to the Free-Will Question”), understood as “unrestricted action,” is inconsistent with a brain that has a definite structure defined by biology or culture or both. For Reyna, acts of will are a consequence of the brain’s biological and cultural determinants and biases. He further argues that the notion of free will is often deployed as a tool of domination by those in power, who may allocate responsibility for acts of transgression (like theft) entirely on the “free will” of those transgressing without reference to social structures (e.g., of poverty) with a causative role. Instead, Reyna advocates the use of the alternative concept of “agency” as it better incorporates such structures and explicitly articulates issues of power in the expression of will.

In the last contribution to this section, “What is normal? A historical survey and a neuroanthropological perspective,” Paul Mason argues against an objective basis for the concept of normality, tracking down its historical roots, following its development, highlighting its inconsistencies, dissecting its uses and their contexts, and denouncing its abuses. Mason exposes normality as a tool of homogenization and essentialization, as a tool for obscuring the diversity of human phenomena and, as such, as an instrument of control in the hand of powerful, interested actors. Diversity is, according to Mason, not merely obscured but often made out to be degenerate. The concept of degeneracy, Mason shows, has itself been discursively maligned as part of the normalizing drive, its neutral meaning of divergence from a type being co-opted by a morality of deviance and decay. Mason reviews the effect of normality on the neurosciences where diversity in brain structure and function is reduced by transferring individual brains to a standard space; by using standardized, average results as markers of kinds of people; by generalizing the results of brain research focused on a very narrow band of the human population (largely young, university students of contemporary Western industrialized nations); and by reducing to neurobiological explanation complex problems that are in reality product of heterogeneous “intersecting variables that take place along the multistranded life course of each individual.” In light of this, Mason recommends neuroscience to embrace a view of diversity mediated by an alternative, morally neutral, conception of degeneracy whereby variability is a condition of complex systems rather than a sign they are breaking apart (see also Chap. 111, “Neuroethics of Neurodiversity”).

Future Directions

The contributions in this section draw from the vast and well established but ever developing body of anthropological understandings on ethics and consider a variety of problems in this area from a neuroanthropological perspective, unsettling long-held assumptions, providing novel ways of approaching old questions, and identifying new problems. These contributions show the potential depth and breadth of a neuroanthropology of ethics, as well as its distinctiveness. Future neuroanthropological work into ethics may also include, for example, studies investigating the implications of plural rationalities for brain function and ethical reasoning. Significant neuroethical questions in this context would include whether different forms of rationality [e.g., the elementary forms embedded in Douglas’s (1978) and Thompson and colleagues’ (1990) theory of socio-cultural variation or Fiske’s (1991) relational models theory] are rooted in segregated neural mechanisms; under which circumstances are these mechanisms recruited; how do they constrain or bias moral reasoning; and to what extent they compete in guiding ethical reasoning and moral conduct.

An important area of development in the neuroanthropology of ethics involves the embedding of neuroscientific research in ethnographic fieldwork (Domínguez et al. 2010; Domínguez 2012; Immordino-Yang 2013). Neuroethnography, as this amalgamation of ethnography and neuroscience has been called (Domínguez et al. 2010), aims to provide an in-depth understanding of domains of cultural activity to better derive constructs, variables, and hypotheses that can be tested in the neuroscience laboratory; increase the ecological validity of neuroscience research; and shed light onto people’s subjective experience including emotions, sense of self, sense of justice, preferences, and reasoning, which may be correlated with variations in brain activity and structure (cf. Immordino-Yang 2013). Neuroethnography can be a powerful tool in addressing neuroethical problems within the scope of the new anthropology of ethics, recentered as it is in the relational individual. These problems include those quoted at the outset such as how are ethical subjectivities formed, or how are they expressed in ordinary social encounters.

One domain of enquiry arousing an increasing amount of interest to which a neuroanthropology of ethics will be of relevance relates to research in neurorobotics, brain simulation, and neuromorphic computing aiming at artificially reproducing mental and behavioral properties of animals and humans. Research specifically aimed at developing robots with human (or human-like) attributes, simulating the human brain, and building autonomous devices with human-like learning and behavioral capabilities (cf. Glaskin 2012) will require a neuroanthropological understanding of what is to be human. The reason for this is that the human brain is a cultural brain and artificially reproducing mental and behavioral capabilities, which can be called truly human, will require an understanding of the human brain’s mechanisms for acquiring culture and how these mechanisms interact with specific cultural milieus. Key among these capabilities will be those that allow robots, simulations, and devices to operate consistently with ethical codes of conduct.

A final fertile area of future investigation for the neuroanthropology of ethics concerns distributed cognition (see also Chap. 26, “Extended Mind and Identity”). Originally formulated by cognitive anthropologists, distributed cognition holds that “a society, as a group, might have some cognitive properties differing from those of the individual members of the group” (Hutchins 1991). From this perspective, cooperative activities, in which we may include ethical reasoning and decision making, require that a group of people form (to some extent) shared, coherent, and equivalent interpretations (Hutchins 1991). As argued earlier, the neural bases of moral agency are to be found beyond the confines of a single brain. Distributed cognition therefore offers a way of conceptualizing and investigating this central issue for a neuroanthropology of ethics. Levy (2007) has similarly remarked on the importance of distributed cognition for neuroethics as moral knowledge, he notes, is the product of the interaction of many individuals contributing different kinds and levels of expertise. Neuroanthropology can make important contributions to our understanding of the distributed character of moral knowledge, its production, and reproduction by, for example, hyperscanning during joint ethical judgment or reasoning tasks factoring in relevant cultural scripts and conventions; or by exploring the distribution of different types of neural representations pertaining to moral attitudes or conduct across a social group.

Conclusion

The papers in this section highlight the importance of neuroanthropology not only for a neuroscience of ethics (which has as object of study the neural basis of moral agency) but also for an ethics of neuroscience (which deals with the practice of neuroscience and its uses). Across both dimensions, these papers demonstrate the need for neuroethics to be sensitive to context, culture, history, and diversity as well as to the relationship between universalism and particularism, scientific fact and personal experience. Together with the areas of future research outlined above, these papers also offer new ways of approaching ethical phenomena and open up exciting new avenues of enquiry. Neuroanthropology is thus set to make a decisive contribution to our understanding of that which is the guiding light of our conduct.

Cross-References

Consciousness and Agency

Determinism and Its Relevance to the Free-Will Question

Extended Mind and Identity

Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervention

Historical and Ethical Perspectives of Modern Neuroimaging

Neuroethics of Neurodiversity

Neuroimaging and Criminal Law

Neuroimaging Neuroethics: Introduction

Neuroscience, Free Will, and Responsibility: The Current State of Play

Neuroscience, Neuroethics, and the Media

The Neurobiology of Moral Cognition: Relation to Theory of Mind, Empathy, and Mind-Wandering

Using Neuropharmaceuticals for Cognitive Enhancement: Policy and Regulatory Issues