Just Finished Reading: The Ethical Brain – The Science of our Moral Dilemmas by Michael S Gazzaniga

This sounded really good when I spotted it on Amazon. Actually it was pretty interesting just not what I was expecting. What I was expecting was a discussion of how our brains make us moral creatures – in effect how we are wired (by evolutionary processes) to act in moral ways. Dr Gazzaniga touches on this subject but largely concentrates his time and attention elsewhere.

The main focus of the book is actually about bioethics – fascinating in itself but not exactly where my interests lie at the moment. He discusses stem-cell research and human cloning, the moral status of an embryo and the ethical implications of diseases like Alzheimer’s. He then goes on to discuss brain and memory enhancement and so on. There follows a few fairly interesting chapters on the legal use of memory – and at this point I started to get a little bored to be honest. Only at the very end of the book did the author briefly touch on what I had assumed the whole book would be about – the origins of morality & ethics in the human brain. Unfortunately he didn’t really have anything particularly illuminating to say of the subject and things seemed to just fizzle out. Maybe I had just turned off at that point, I’m not sure. Anyway, for whatever reason I found the book readable though rather disappointing.