Normative Ethics Does Not Need a Foundation: It Needs More Science

The impact of science on ethics forms since long the subject of intense debate. Although there is a growing consensus that science can describe morality and explain its evolutionary origins, there is less consensus about the ability of science to provide input to the normative domain of ethics. Whereas defenders of a scientific normative ethics appeal to naturalism, its critics either see the naturalistic fallacy committed or argue that the relevance of science to normative ethics remains undemonstrated. In this paper, we argue that current scientific normative ethicists commit no fallacy, that criticisms of scientific ethics contradict each other, and that scientific insights are relevant to normative inquiries by informing ethics about the options open to the ethical debate. Moreover, when conceiving normative ethics as being a nonfoundational ethics, science can be used to evaluate every possible norm. This stands in contrast to foundational ethics in which some norms remain beyond scientific inquiry. Finally, we state that a difference in conception of normative ethics underlies the disagreement between proponents and opponents of a scientific ethics. Our argument is based on and preceded by a reconsideration of the notions naturalistic fallacy and foundational ethics. This argument differs from previous work in scientific ethics: whereas before the philosophical project of naturalizing the normative has been stressed, here we focus on concrete consequences of biological findings for normative decisions or on the day-to-day normative relevance of these scientific insights

Application of MEG in Understanding the Development of Executive and Social Cognitive Functions

Human social and executive functions are complex and known to follow aprolonged developmental course from childhood through to early adulthood.These processes rely on the integrity and maturity of distributed neural regions,which also show protracted maturation. MEG is the ideal modality to determinethe development of these intricate and multifaceted cognitive abilities; itsexquisite temporal and spatial resolution allows investigators to track the agerelatedchanges in both neural timing and location. The challenge for MEG hasbeen twofold: to develop appropriate tasks to capture the neurodevelopmentaltrajectory of these functions and to develop appropriate analysis strategiesthat can capture the subtle, often rapid, cognitive processes, involving frontallobe activity. In this chapter, we review MEG research on executive, social,and cognitive functions in typically developing children and clinical groups.The studies include the examination of working memory, mental flexibility,facial emotional processing and inhibition, and theory of mind. We end with adiscussion on the challenges of testing young children in the MEG environmentand the development of age-appropriate technologies and paradigms.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe