Abstract Summary
Sara Goering (University of Washington, Seattle), Michelle Pham (University of Washington, Seattle) - For the past six years, Goering has led the ethics thrust in an NSF-funded engineering research center focused on neural engineering (the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering or CSNE), and Pham has served as a neuroethics fellow for three years. Our group has worked closely with an interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists, electrical engineers, neurosurgeons and rehabilitation clinicians to explore the ethical implications of innovative neural engineering research and development. Our version of field philosophy is based on multiple levels of ethics and broader philosophical engagement with scientists and engineers, from a fully-embedded, full-time philosophy RA who has a desk in the biorobotics lab, helps to run experiments, and is a co-author on most papers from that lab, to part-time ethics fellows who meet with lab groups, develop collaborative projects, and generally work to provide a liaison between the ethics group and the scientists. We have found that increased exposure – even if not always targeted specifically at ethical dialogue or problem-solving – allows for the development of trust and mutual respect, a crucial foundation for any successful transdisciplinary collaboration. Our projects have ranged from more theoretical conceptual and ethical work on issues such as privacy, narrative identity, and agency to more practical policy-oriented work on informed consent and ethical guidelines for BCI development and neurotechnologies. We have also done our own empirical research, using focus groups, interviews, and surveys to consult with important neural engineering stakeholders, including BCI researchers, end-users of the devices, and disabled individuals who are prospective end-users (see, e.g., Goering et al. 2017, Klein et al. 2015, Yuste et al. 2017, Specker Sullivan et al. 2017, Klein et al. 2016, Brown et al. 2016). Our experience has emphasized the importance of becoming part of the neural engineering team as collaborators rather than the “ethics police,” curious humanist outsiders, or IRB helpers. Doing so has demanded flexibility, persistence, openness to learning, humility, and the ability to translate matters of ethical significance into plain language. Even in a context where scientists recognized the need for input on ethical issues (vs. getting a top-down mandate from a funder or institution), we had to work to show the value of philosophical content, figure out ways to integrate it into the ongoing science and engineering work without sacrificing the rigors of our discipline, work to make our “products” intelligible in the world of engineered devices and electrodes, and remain nimble enough to shift directions when funders demanded restructuring or a new scientific focus. In presenting our group’s efforts at the annual site visits required by the funders, we went from being the odd group out (“and now for something completely different”) to having a fully integrated vision, where other teams referenced ethics group efforts, and we could demonstrate significant connections to every other research “thrust” of the center.
