Neuroimaging can be appropriate for some circumstances but not for others. Situations in which neuroimaging serves to benefit society are those in which it is used to develop treatments for diseases associated with the brain that might not have been possible through other means. Because of its non-invasive procedures and its remarkable ability to focus in on single brain structures that are too subtle to be noticed at the behavioral level of analyses with multiple studies, neuroimaging can be said to have more benefits than simple observational studies of patients with major brain damage or retardation. Brain imaging can also be useful in providing preliminary personality profiles of potential employees and/or patients in a psychiatry ward but this process can only be used as a supplement to other methods of personality assessments. Similar to how the combination of psychological therapy with psychotropic medications can produce more favorable outcomes, neuroimaging along with some other additive assessment can also be useful in providing full personality profiles.Â
Maybe the greatest ethical fallback to using neuroimaging lays in its power to predict future psychopathology. A proposed legislation by the Britain’s Mental Health Act diagnosed a certain group of individuals who have not yet committed a crime but would potentially do so with the term “Dangerous Severe Personality Disorder” without any pre-defined or sanctioned legal or medical status. This then begs the questions as to “what extent would it be possible to identify those who will behave violently in the future?” (Canli and Amin) This legislation also assumes that personality is quite unstable whereas psychological studies has asserted numerous times that personality is quite stable over an individual’s lifetime. In a similar vein, another ethical debate arises along the lines of the public’s right to safety versus the individual’s right to freedom or autonomy. This brings up the issue: should we forego an individual’s right to autonomy in order to protect the greater society’s right to safety?
In statistical terms, a major hindrance of neuroimaging is the fact that when one sees images of brain’s activation patterns, he or she can be easily fooled into assuming that the visual image represents absolute truths rather than statistical inferences. This can be further complicated by the notion that even “rest” baseline conditions can be associated with some degree of brain activation essentially skewing the degree of activation present in control versus those in test conditions. Furthermore, another statistical obstacle arises when we discuss how to assess what is considered a standard “normal” brain to compare abnormality against. In deciding whether a given brain structure falls within normative range, one may also question if it will vary from one brain structure to the next so that any given brain may qualify as “normal” in one measure but not by another (Canli and Amin).
Ethical dilemmas raised by neuroimaging revolve around four issues. Firstly, brain structure and function are not equivalent—the brain does not look the same way as it behaves! Therefore, without evidence of functional impairment, the brain may appear to look bad but not necessarily be defective in a certain function. Secondly, using results from brain image to predict long term outcome can lead to considerable bias. This bias could either be in the form of benefits such as more careful treatment options, increased attention and greater access to therapeutic services or it could possibly lead to detriments in the form of assuming inevitable impairment, overprotectiveness and/or imposing unnecessary interventions on an individual who is otherwise “normal.” Thirdly, neuroimaging findings are only as good as the imaging techniques available. Thus, the techniques are to blame for any invalid conclusions not the findings themselves. Lastly, predicting more than is possible and using findings of associated risk factors as causal agents can be more than problematic.
Beyond the scientific and ethical realms, neuroimaging proves to be a heavily debated topic in philosophy as well. This comes in the form of using neuroimaging to test for consciousness (Racine, Bell and Illes). Consciousness is a very complex topic to define both pragmatically and philosophically, therefore assessing for consciousness using neuroimaging can be seen as overstepping the boundaries of certain possibilities. How do we measure consciousness using neuroimaging if we as a society have not yet even derived at a mutually consensual agreement on its definition? Going beyond philosophy into the sociocultural realm, there appears to be a huge challenge in interpreting and using functional neuroimaging within the general public. Neuro-essentialism, neuro-realism, and neuro-policy shed light on these sociocultural complications. These three concepts essentially display how the media can skew the visual format of neuroimages to make it appear as if neuroimaging can reveal deep “secrets” about ourselves (Racine, Bell and Illes).
In essence, ethical concerns arise in using brain images as a means to identify behavior because behavior is difficult to measure and subject to biased interpretation. In addition to having the potential to help confirm diagnosis and to determine who may benefit from certain pharmacological interventions, neuroimaging is a relatively unbiased diagnostic procedure. It is less susceptible to subjective measures such as cultural and socioeconomic influences that come into play in most other cognitive assessments such as standardized exams. Nonetheless, neuroimaging is expensive and although it has potential benefits, they have not all been empirically validated. Therefore, although neuroimaging has its advantages, it raises various concerns, ethically, scientifically and philosophically.
