Framing Neuroethical Praxis: Wojtyła’s Metaphysical Subject and its Modernist Cartesian Variants

Numerous neuroethical quandaries today mark concerns over the normative propriety of corporal intervention in the nervous system. At the center of the debates is the question of how the human subject is understood. Accounts influenced by Cartesian metaphysics separate the subject into his immaterial and material manifestations, yielding ethical approaches that devalue the body and neural architecture. Contemporary neuroscience, on the one hand, proposes that the subject is purely a physiological creation, whereas posthumanism privileges the isolated ego on the other; both, thereby, validate an arbitrary neuroethical praxis. By anchoring neuroethics in the metaphysical subject Wojtyła proposes a fundamental corrective to these metaethical approaches, and the promise of a new praxis for corporal intervention in the brain.