Abstract In this paper, we clarify the nature and the scope of the right to concentrate. We argue that a right to concentrate constitutes a right against significant, non-consensual interference with a person’s concentration-requiring task. An agent has a right to concentrate when others have a duty not to intentionally or negligently distract her from her performance of a task that requires concentration when concentrating on the task is in the fundamental interests of the agent in question. We analyse the protection of the right to concentrate through different roles in concentration spaces, environments in which concentration-requiring tasks are protected through the governance of impermissible distractions and through norms regulating the access to and the use of such environments. This analysis helps us understand the relevant rights and duties in situations where an agent’s concentration on a task is in her fundamental interests.

Most of the issues addressed in the last four chapters fall within the ethics of neuroscience.This involves consideration of the benefits and risks of dif fer ent interventions in the brain and whether individuals have the cognitive and emotional capacity to consent to these interventions.It also involves the obligation of clinicians and researchers to protect patients and research subjects from harm regarding neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, or neuromodulation.This obligation consists in not exposing them to undue risk and upholding privacy and confidentiality of information about their brains.This is distinct from the neuroscience of ethics, which involves the neurobiological basis of moral reasoning and decision-making.More specifically, this branch of neuroethics involves the combination of neuroimaging and behavioral observation to assess people's cognitive and emotional capacity to recognize and respond to reasons for or against actions.Morality involves the intersection of ge ne tic, neurobiological, psychological, and social factors (Tancredi, 2005).As noted in chapter 1, the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics can overlap.The discussion of moral enhancement in chapter 5 involved both branches of neuroethics.Still, questions about rational and moral decision-making and be hav ior control require a more extended analy sis of the neurobiological basis of our mental states and actions, and I do that in this chapter.I discuss how theoretical and clinical neuroscientists attempt to explain moral reasoning by examining its neural correlates.I also discuss how they can administer brain-and mind-altering psychotropic drugs or neuromodulating techniques that can alter how we think and act.These may include individuals with neural pathologies resulting in criminal offenses.These

Abstract As neurotechnologies emerge in South Africa's clinical, research, and consumer health landscapes, existing informed consent models, predominantly shaped by Western individualist ethics, prove insufficient. Neural data, uniquely intimate and increasingly commodified, poses profound ethical and legal risks, including mental privacy violations, behavioural profiling, and cultural alienation. This article interrogates these risks through a neuroethical lens grounded in African relational philosophy, particularly Ubuntu, which emphasises communal personhood, collective decision-making, and spiritual interconnectedness. We analyse the limitations of South African and international legal frameworks, arguing that they neither adequately recognise neural data as a distinct category nor accommodate culturally appropriate consent processes. In response, we propose a pluralistic, relational consent framework that incorporates tiered, dynamic, and interactive mechanisms, sensitive to linguistic, educational, and spiritual diversity. By centring cognitive liberty and advocating for sui generis neurorights protections, this paper contributes a decolonial, culturally situated perspective to global neuroethics and informs more inclusive governance models for neural technologies in legally and socially pluralistic societies.

The Data Hazards framework (Zelenka, Di Cara, & Contributors, 2024) is intended to encourage thinking about the ethical implications of data science projects. It takes the form of community-designed data hazard labels, similar to warning labels on chemicals, that can encourage reflection and discussion on what ethical risks are associated with a project and how they can be mitigated. In this article, we explain how the Data Hazards framework can apply to neuroscience. We demonstrate how the hazard labels can be applied to one of our own projects, on the computational modelling of postsynaptic mechanisms.Graphical

Structural brain preservation (SBP) and classical cryonics are techniques aimed at preserving the human brain for potential future applications. Reluctant public discourse around these techniques may be explained with intuitive aversions identified by moral psychology. In the first part of the paper, we conjecture the existence of a self-sustaining cycle of moral condemnation of SBP and classical cryonics due to quick, affect-laden moral intuitions. In the second part, we propose an alternative framing of SBP and classical cryonics through a thought experiment featuring a time machine metaphor called "Schrödinger’s chrono-cat", which might avoid triggering aversive moral intuitions and foster public discourse. We discuss the limitations of this framing and its consequences.