Guest Editor’s Preface

Abstract

Neuroethics is a flourishing discipline. It is growing up in this first decade of the XXIth century even faster than bioethics was growing in the early Seventies of the past century, with thousands of research articles, hundreds of books, dozens of journals and a lot of people involved all over the world. There is reason to rejoice in this. And at the same time, to raise questions about the real scope of this kind of enterprise and its contribution both to ethics and the neurosciences, as well as about its impact on the self-understanding of people in an age in which looking at what’s going on in our brains has become somewhat less than a metaphor.