Neuro-Imaging and Privacy Concerns Sample Clauses

Neuro-Imaging and Privacy Concerns. Some non-clinical uses of neurotechnology raise unique moral challenges. At present neuro-imaging combined with complex statistical analysis allows a more detailed decoding of people’s mental states. It is not unreasonable to think that Big Science projects such as HBP will move the technology beyond its current state. If so, there is the fear that some brain-imaging based neuroscientific studies will pose a novel threat, in so far as they might provide insights into other people’s thoughts, perceptions, and emotions in the absence of outwardly observable behaviour or speech. In the process, they could significantly restrict people a domain that has always seemed private. What would this mean from an ethical standpoint? Would this be a problem? And how to address it? In a forthcoming article, Xxxxxx XXXXXX discusses the issue of mental privacy insofar as functional neuroimaging can reveal information about people’s mental states and psychological traits [13]. SALLES highlights some efforts to approach the issue of functional neuroimaging and its possible threat to privacy in the neuroethics literature. She identifies two main strategies usually used in the discussion: the first consists in a description and discussion of what neuroimaging can and cannot do with a focus on the technical and methodological problems that bedevil the technology. The second focuses on the metaphysical assumptions about the mind underlying concerns on the subject of neuroimaging and mental privacy. Sometimes these two strategies are used jointly. There is a third strategy, less common in the neuroethics literature, that brackets technical, methodological, and metaphysical issues to put the focus on the discussion of normative questions. The questions raised are: why would neuroimaging’s impinging on privacy be problematic? What is valuable about mental privacy? Would it be morally undesirable to have less of it? SALLES outlines the first two strategies clarifying their implications for the privacy debate, and then proposes to expand the normative discussion to incorporate some of the issues raised by a recent account of privacy as contextual integrity.