ArticleMedicine, health care, and philosophy2014
The value and pitfalls of speculation about science and technology in bioethics: the case of cognitive enhancement.
Article in Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Anticipation and prevention of real risks of virtual environments in psychiatry.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Review
- Integrating neural organoids and AI: increasing the risk of artificial consciousness or medical malpractice?Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2026Article
- An Anticipatory Approach to Ethico-Legal Implications of Future Neurotechnology.Science and engineering ethics · 2024Article
- Modular Ontologies for Genetically Modified People and their Bioethical Implications.Nanoethics · 2024Article
- The relationship between speculation and translation in Bioethics: methods and methodologies.Monash bioethics review · 2023Article
- Researching the future: scenarios to explore the future of human genome editing.BMC medical ethics · 2023Article
- Novel Neurorights: From Nonsense to Substance.Neuroethics · 2022Article
- Brain Computer Interfaces and Communication Disabilities: Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects of Decoding Speech From the Brain.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- How Ethics Can Better Anticipate the Consequences of Emerging Biotechnologies.The American journal of bioethics : AJOB · 2022Article
- Toward Anticipatory Governance of Human Genome Editing: A Critical Review of Scholarly Governance Discourse.Journal of responsible innovation · 2021Article
- A qualitative study exploring the expectations of people living with type 1 diabetes regarding prospective use of a hybrid closed-loop system.Diabetic medicine : a journal of the British Diabetic Association · 2020Article
- Neuroethics for Fantasyland or for the Clinic? The Limitations of Speculative Ethics.Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics committees · 2020Article
- Separating neuroethics from neurohype.Nature biotechnology · 2019Article
- Pragmatism and the Importance of Interdisciplinary Teams in Investigating Personality Changes following DBS.Neuroethics · 2019Article
- Developing expertise, customising sleep, enhancing study practices: exploring the legitimisation of modafinil use within the accounts of UK undergraduate students.Drugs (Abingdon, England) · 2019Article
- Beyond integrating social sciences: Reflecting on the place of life sciences in empirical bioethics methodologies.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2018Review
- tDCS for Memory Enhancement: Analysis of the Speculative Aspects of Ethical Issues.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2016Article
- Enhancement, ethics and society: towards an empirical research agenda for the medical humanities and social sciences.Medical humanities · 2015Article
- The methodological rigor of anticipatory bioethics.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2014Article
- Cognitive enhancement kept within contexts: neuroethics and informed public policy.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In the debate on the ethics of the non-medical use of pharmaceuticals for cognitive performance enhancement in healthy individuals there is a clear division between those who view "cognitive enhancement" as ethically unproblematic and those who see such practices as fraught with ethical problems. Yet another, more subtle issue, relates to the relevance and quality of the contribution of scholarly bioethics to this debate. More specifically, how have various forms of speculation, anticipatory ethics, and methods to predict scientific trends and societal responses augmented or diminished this contribution? In this paper, we use the discussion of the ethics of cognitive enhancement to explore the positive and negative contribution of speculation in bioethics scholarship. First, we review and discuss how speculation has relied on different sets of assumptions regarding the non-medical use of stimulants, namely: (1) terminology and framing; (2) scientific aspects such as efficacy and safety; (3) estimates of prevalence and consequent normalization; and (4) the need for normative reflection and regulatory guidelines. Second, three methodological guideposts are proposed to alleviate some of the pitfalls of speculation: (1) acknowledge assumptions more explicitly and identify the value attributed to assumptions; (2) validate assumptions with interdisciplinary literature; and (3) adopt a broad perspective to promote more comprehensive reflection. We conclude that, through the examination of the controversy about cognitive enhancement, we can employ these methodological guideposts to enhance the value of contributions from bioethics and minimize potential epistemic and practical pitfalls in this case and perhaps in other areas of bioethical debate.
Indexed as
Identifiers
24402841What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.