Neuroscience and War: Human Enhancement, Soldier Rehabilitation, and the Ethical Limits of Dual-use Frameworks
| Published date | 01 January 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816672930 |
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| Author | Alison Howell |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829816672930
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2017, Vol. 45(2) 133 –150
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816672930
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Neuroscience and War:
Human Enhancement, Soldier
Rehabilitation, and the Ethical
Limits of Dual-use Frameworks
Alison Howell
Rutgers University – Newark, USA
Abstract
Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience have led to increasing concern about its uses in warfare.
This article challenges the primacy of dual-use frameworks for posing ethical questions concerning
the role of neuroscience in national security. It brings together three fields – critical war studies,
bio-ethics, and the history of medicine – to argue that such frameworks too starkly divide ‘good’
and ‘bad’ military uses of neurotechnology, thus focusing on the degradation of human capacities
without sufficiently accounting for human enhancement and soldier rehabilitation. It illustrates this
through the emergence of diagnoses of Traumatic Brain Injury and Polytrauma in the context of
post-9/11 counterinsurgency wars. The article proposes an alternative approach, highlighting the
historical co-production and homology of modern war and medicine so as to grapple with how
war shapes neuroscience, but also how neuroscience shapes war. The article suggests new routes
for thinking through the connections between war, society, science, and technology, proposing
that we cease analysis that assumes any fundamental separation between military and civilian life.
Keywords
critical war studies, science and technology studies, neuroscience
What could once only be imagined in science fiction is now increasingly coming to
fruition: drones can be flown by thought in human brains; pharmaceuticals can help you
forget traumatic experience, or produce feelings of trust to encourage confession in
interrogation. Research funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Corresponding author:
Alison Howell, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University – Newark, 360 Martin Luther King Blvd,
7th Floor, Hill Hall, Newark, NJ 07102, USA.
Email: alison.howell@rutgers.edu
672930MIL0010.1177/0305829816672930Millennium: Journal of International StudiesHowell
research-article2016
Article
134 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45(2)
1. Kelly Lowenberg et al., ‘Misuse Made Plain: Evaluating Concerns about Neuroscience in
National Security’, American Journal of Bioethics AJOB Neuroscience 1, no. 2 (2010); The
Royal Society, Brain Waves Module 3: Neuroscience, Conflict and Security (London: The
Royal Society Science Policy Centre, 2012).
2. Jonathan H. Marks, ‘A Neuroskeptic’s Guide to Neuroethics and National Security’, American
Journal of Bioethics AJOB Neuroscience 1, no. 2 (2010); Lowenberg et al., ‘Misuse Made
Plain’; Suparna Choudhury, Ian Gold, and Laurence J. Kirmayer, ‘From Brain Image to the
Bush Doctrine: Critical Neuroscience and the Political Uses of Neurotechnology’, American
Journal of Bioethics AJOB Neuroscience 1, no. 2 (2010): 17–19.
(DARPA) is working on brain implants to alleviate the effects of traumatic experience in
war. Invisible energy beams can produce the sensation of burning at a remote distance.
What all these techniques and technologies have in common is that they are recent neu-
roscientific breakthroughs propelled by military research within a broader context of
rapid neuroscientific development. While knowledge of brain chemistry is still largely a
mystery, new computational and imaging technologies, particularly functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging devices (fMRIs), are driving what is being understood as a revolu-
tion in neuroscience, and in how we understand the human brain. These developments
have raised significant ethical issues concerning the proper role of neuroscience in
national defence.
The most prominent framework for assessing these ethical dilemmas is the dual-use
framework.1 Such an approach draws attention to the ways in which neuroscience may
be put to dual-use: to either help improve human life or to cause harm. The framework
generally places most aspects of the enhancement of human capacities in the former
camp – doing good, or ‘helping’ (even in cases when the enhancement of human capaci-
ties is put to military uses). The dual-use framework thus focuses primarily on how
neuroscience is, or might be, weaponized by military actors to degrade the capacities of
enemies in war.2 What this framework offers is a clear-cut means by which to construct
guidelines about the acceptable and unacceptable uses of neuroscience by national secu-
rity actors. However, the limitation of this clear-cut approach lies precisely in its commit-
ment to a stark division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. While simple good/bad frameworks
may seem the most immediately (politically) useful, they also come at a cost because
they cannot capture the full ethical terrain of the messy actualities of neuroscientific
practice in warfare or its aftermath.
This article proposes an alternative to the dual-use framework for understanding the
relationship between war and neuroscience. It argues that we must be more historically
minded in order to ascertain how neuroscience is not ‘sullied’ by being put into use for
military purposes, but rather has been inextricably constituted through war. It further
argues that we must be attentive to different modes of warfare since particular military
strategies have shaped medical science and vice-versa. The article offers a novel analysis
of the relationship between neuroscience and war by bringing together several fields of
scholarly inquiry which have otherwise not been considered alongside each other: criti-
cal war studies, bio-ethics, and the history of medicine.
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