The concept of ethics comes from two Greek words: ethos (written with the vowel eta – η), that means customs, usages, and gave birth to the word mores, in Latin. It is the complex, the whole of traditional habits and rules in a society. The other word, ethos, written with the vowel epsilon – ε, means character, natural dispositions, temperament, the sum of a person’s physical and mental predispositions.
Neuroethics is the study of the limits, applications and potential risks on the manipulation of the human brain. Neuroethics deals with brain sciences, our behavior and individuality.
After Aristotle and the Greeks, one of the first philosophers who devoted his life to the study of ethics was Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677), the Dutch-Portuguese Jew. He created an ethics of bioregulation, the ethics of affections. Giles Deleuze said Spinoza was the first ecologist, who constructed a philosophy of action. According to him, Spinoza’s ethics is the idea that “the unit of understanding is not the form or function or organism but the composition of affective relations between individuals, together with the ‘plane of consistency’ on which they interact, that is, their ‘environment’”.
Spinoza says, “The greatest good of those who seek virtue is common to all, and can be enjoyed by all equally”. And also: “Even if we did not know that our mind is eternal, we would still regard as of the first importance morality, religion, and absolutely all the things we have shown to be related to tenacity and nobility”.
Spinoza’s ethics is an ethics of responsibility, which reinforces the meaning of the individual in the whole, within the complexity of social weave, and the importance of relations and affections among all in order to achieve common well-being and the great potency, which is joy. Spinoza’s ethics is an ethics of joy.
In our days, another philosopher who studied ethics was Emmanuel Levinas (1906 – 1995). Levinas' ethics is the ethics of alterity, the infinite, the wholly other, the person we cannot apprehend in our thoughts and desires. He shows ethics as the infinite obligations and responsibilities of social life.
Levinas reaffirms Spinoza’s thoughts when he says: “We never exist in the singular. We are surrounded by beings and things with which we maintain relationships. Through sight, touch, sympathy and cooperative work, we are with others.”.
According to Levinas, the ethics of responsibility is to say hineni, “here I am”, to others’ needs. “Thus an unlimited responsibility would emerge in this fear for the other person, a responsibility with which one is never done, which does not cease with the neighbor’s utmost extremity.”
There are three dimensions of philosophical thought nowadays: the plurality of perspectives, the dialogue with other dimensions of knowledge, and ethics.
The plurality of perspectives means to recognize no perspective as absolute, considering that there are infinite meanings of reality, infinite modes of thinking and feeling the world, infinite senses. Philosophy exists to create senses, marks for orientation, construction of pathways, which none is absolute or complete.
Interdisciplinarity reveals itself on the dialogue between all forms of knowledge. As Martin Buber says, “In the beginning is the relation” and “All actual life is encounter.”
The third dimension of philosophical thought is ethics, which is beyond every great question at the time, and is also their foundation. As Spinoza said: “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself… What is found so rarely must be hard. But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
REFERENCES
Buber, Martin. (1996) I and Thou. New York: Touchstone.
Deleuze, Giles. (2001) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers.
Levinas, Emmanuel. (1985) Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Spinoza, Benedict de. (1996) Ethics. London: Penguin Books.
