Abstract

Bioethics literature on national security issues is surprisingly sparse and the implications of neuroscience for national security are of increasing public and scholarly interest. This article elaborates one important source of evidence that can be found in reports by US government advisory committees over the past few years. It demonstrates that the growing interest in neuroscience on the part of national security agencies can be discerned in part by reviewing recent reports from the US National Academies. The relationship between national security concerns and neuroscience is complex. Primary questions are discussed in the anthropomorphic terms of concerns and goals, and there is no inference to any particular sort of deliberations within these systems that leads ineluctably to a certain science policy agenda. This article also assesses the cultural underpinnings of neuroscience and ethical implications of evolving neurotechnologic capacity.