Neuroimaging, psychosurgery, deep-brain stimulation, and psychopharmacology hold considerable promise for more accurate prediction and diagnosis and more effective treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Some forms of psychopharmacology may even be able to enhance normal cognitive and affective capacities. But the brain remains the most complex and least understood of all the organs in the human body. Mapping the neural correlates of the mind through brain scans, and altering these correlates through surgery, stimulation, or pharmacological interventions can affect us in (...) both positive and negative ways. We need to carefully weigh the potential benefit against the potential harm of such techniques. This paper examines some of these techniques and explores the emerging ethical issues in clinical neuroscience. (shrink)

Walter Freeman, the self styled neurosurgeon, became famous (or infamous) for psychosurgery. The operation of frontal leucotomy swept through the world (with Freeman himself performing something like 18,000 cases) but it has tainted the whole idea of psychosurgery down to the present era. Modes of psychosurgery such as Deep Brain Stimulation and other highly selective neurosurgical procedures for neurological and psychiatric conditions are in ever-increasing use in current practice. The new, more exciting techniques are based in a widely held philosophical (...) position on the relationship between the mind, brain and soul, which is the key to ethical debates in this area. Psychosurgery has always posed questions of responsibility, personality, character, identity, spirit, relationship, integrity, and human flourishing and they do not go away when we enter the brave new world of neuroethics and Deep Brain Stimulation. (shrink)

Two general ethical problems in psychiatry are thrown into sharp relief by long term care. This article discusses each in turn, in the context of two anonymised case studies from actual clinical practice. First, previous mental health legislation soothed doubts about patients' refusal of consent by incorporating time limits on involuntary treatment. When these are absent, as in the provisions for long term care which have recently come into force, the justification for compulsory treatment and supervision becomes more obviously problematic. (...) Second, Anglo-American law does not normally allow the preventive detention of someone who may be dangerous but has not actually committed any crime. The justification for detaining a possibly dangerous user of mental health services without his or her consent can only be based on risk assessment, but this raises issues of moral luck. Is the psychiatrist who decides not to take out a supervision order for a possibly dangerous patient with an initial psychotic diagnosis morally at fault if that person harms someone in the community, or himself? Or is the psychiatrist merely unlucky? (shrink)

In the chapter entitled ‘Philosophy and the Meaning of Life’ in Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations there is an admonitory passage with many applications. ‘It is a puzzle,’ says Nozick, ‘how so many people, including intellectuals and academics devote enormous energy to work in which nothing of themselves or their important goals shines forth, not even in the way their work is presented. If they were struck down, their children upon growing up and examining their work would never know why they (...) had done it, would never know who it was that did it. They work that way and sometimes live that way, too’. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)