Delineating the Hurtful, Engaging, Emotive, and Directive (HEED) Dimensions of Pain. Characterization for Clinical Relevance.

Pain is an objective, natural reality among sentient creatures that possess cognition and mobility sufficient for apprehending and acting upon its full significance. Defining pain mostly in mental terms makes sense for self-conscious psychology and vocabulary. Pain as a natural capacity among animals did not evolve merely to be aligned with human semantics and intuitions.

Heeding Pain's Prescription.

Newer definitions of pain remain suggestive of categorization by mainly neurological or psychological bases. All pain recruits cortical interpretation for any sort of directive effects in awareness, attention, and action. That unity of purpose in pain's multi-pathway manifestations can inspire neurophilosophical reflections on the existentiality, subjectivity, and sociality of pain.

Moral Mentation: What Neurocognitive Studies of Psychopathy May Really Offer the Internalism/Externalism Debate.

A persistent debate about moral capacity - and neuroethics - focuses upon the internalism-externalism controversy. Internalism holds that moral judgments necessarily motivate an agent's actions; externalism views moral judgments as not inherently motivating an agent to perform moral actions. Neuroethical discussions of the putative cognitive basis of moral thought and action would be better informed if neurocognitive research would yield data sufficient for validating one side or the other.

A four-part working bibliography of neuroethics: Part 4 - Ethical issues in clinical and social applications of neuroscience.

Background: As a discipline, neuroethics addresses a range of questions and issues generated by basic neuroscientific research (inclusive of studies of putative neurobiological processes involved in moral and ethical cognition and behavior), and its use and meanings in the clinical and social spheres. Here, we present Part 4 of a four-part bibliography of the neuroethics literature focusing on clinical and social applications of neuroscience, to include: the treatment-enhancement discourse; issues arising in neurology, psychiatry, and pain care; neuroethics education and training; neuroethics and the law; neuroethics and policy and political issues; international neuroethics; and discourses addressing "trans-" and "post-" humanity.

Methods: To complete a systematic survey of the literature, 19 databases and 4 individual open-access journals were employed.

Neuroethics beyond Normal.

An integrated and principled neuroethics offers ethical guidelines able to transcend conventional and medical reliance on normality standards. Elsewhere we have proposed four principles for wise guidance on human transformations. Principles like these are already urgently needed, as bio- and cyberenhancements are rapidly emerging.

Cognitive enhancement kept within contexts: neuroethics and informed public policy.

Neurothics has far greater responsibilities than merely noting potential human enhancements arriving from novel brain-centered biotechnologies and tracking their implications for ethics and civic life. Neuroethics must utilize the best cognitive and neuroscientific knowledge to shape incisive discussions about what could possibly count as enhancement in the first place, and what should count as genuinely "cognitive" enhancement. Where cognitive processing and the mental life is concerned, the lived context of psychological performance is paramount.

A principled and cosmopolitan neuroethics: considerations for international relevance.

Neuroethics applies cognitive neuroscience for prescribing alterations to conceptions of self and society, and for prescriptively judging the ethical applications of neurotechnologies. Plentiful normative premises are available to ground such prescriptivity, however prescriptive neuroethics may remain fragmented by social conventions, cultural ideologies, and ethical theories. Herein we offer that an objectively principled neuroethics for international relevance requires a new meta-ethics: understanding how morality works, and how humans manage and improve morality, as objectively based on the brain and social sciences.

Conference on Neuroscience and Pragmatism: Productive Prospects.

The conference "Neuroscience and Pragmatism: Productive Prospects" was held on June 10, 2011 at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Virginia.