Personal Identity: Challenges of Ethics and Neurosciences

A Project of the Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) at Johns Hopkins University
Supported by a grant from the Greenwall Foundation

The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences is currently focusing on the first of three concepts that are critical to understanding the moral dimensions of scientific advances in the clinical management of disease and injury to the brain—personal identity, moral responsibility and free will, and the meaning of the neural basis of morality. This exploration of personal identity includes the consideration of questions such as: At what point has a person changed so drastically that they can no longer be considered the same person? Are treatments that cause such drastic personality changes ethical? If the treatment is temporary and/or reversible, which self is the "real self"--the medicated person or the non-medicated person?

The regularly scheduled PEBS faculty meetings have been organized to facilitate discussion about the above questions, as well as about emerging technologies that might affect personal identity, such as deep brain stimulation or electrode implantation. Additionally, the faculty is preparing three case studies that are intended to illustrate the challenge that brain injuries, diseases, and treatments, and their resultant effects, might pose to varying conceptions of personal identity.

The culminating event in our consideration of personal identity will be a Symposium on Personal Identity, which will be held in November 2004. This symposium will be organized around the three aforementioned case studies. This one day invite-only event will feature three distinguished philosophers who have very different theories of personal identity: John Perry, Marya Schechtman, and Carol Rovane. These three philosophers will present original papers that explore how the case studies constructed by the PEBS faculty challenge, or fail to challenge, their concept of personal identity. Following these presentations, there will be time for a response from two eminent neuroscientists, Michael Gazzaniga and Samuel Barondes. At the conclusion of the symposium, the Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences will publish a book containing the case studies, the papers written by the philosophers, and the responses from the neuroscientists.