Free Will and Empathy: Two Revealing Topics in Neuroethics

LIBET’S EXPERIMENTS AND MIRROR neurons are “tags” that immediately evoke two fundamental topics: free will and empathy. These are topics which have long been investigated by philosophers are today addressed by psychology and neuroscience, which can rely on experimental data. However, this interdisciplinarity is not what makes these topics so relevant, nor is it the reason why they were chosen as the two thematic sections that make up this issue of the Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia. The motivation is rather that, in neuroethics, understood as a discipline with its own thematic core, the impact of research on free will and empathy exceeds the scope of all these disciplines, involving society, politics and the public in general. New discoveries or theories, for instance, the theory of relativity, are of general interest, not because, they have immediate applications to everyday life, but because of their important cultural impacts. But new findings as to the existence or non-existence of human freedom or the alleged identification of the natural mechanisms underpinning empathy seem to raise dilemmas and have immediate consequences both in terms of interpretation and in terms of changes in state policies, social choice and personal conduct. Studies that suggest free will may be an illusion need to establish the scientific reliability and theoretical consistency of the concepts they aim to test, but this immediately opens the door to new interpretations, new experiments and possible political and social extrapolations. In particular, if we admit that conscious control has no role in our decisionmaking, we have to consider whether basic notions such as personal responsibility, which assume individual freedom, might cease to be meaningful (although not in all moral systems, as is known). The idea that freedom is an illusion can lead to major consequences. Scientific research has investigated the effects of not believing in the existence of freedom of choice as it is commonly understood. The results seem to indicate that those who do not believe in freedom are more inclined to ignore the rules of the group, to cheat and to be less altruistic. At the same time, the slogan “freeEditoriale