Neuroethics & Law Blog

Post-Doc/VAP in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College

Via this website (where you can get further details):

Amherst College’s Robert E. Keiter 1957 Fund for Postdoctoral Fellows, with matching funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, supports exceptionally promising young scholars for two years of half-time teaching (one course each semester) and half-time research at the College. Fellows will be expected to supervise senior honors projects and participate in the life of the department. As part of the Keiter Fellowship program, Amherst will appoint a postdoctoral fellow as a Visiting Assistant Professor in its Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought for the academic years 2012-2014. This Keiter Postdoctoral Fellowship is a full-time salaried appointment with excellent benefits and research support provided and is open only to recent Ph.D.s who have not already held a regular faculty appointment. A candidate must have completed all requirements for the Ph.D. by September 2012.

We welcome applications from persons with Ph.D.s in the social sciences or humanities and are particularly interested in candidates whose research and teaching is in one or more of the following areas: jurisprudence and modern legal theory, law and literature, law and popular culture, global legality, law and science.

Applicants should submit electronically a cover letter, curriculum vitae, sample of their scholarship, and the names and email addresses of three individuals to whom we may write to solicit recommendations.

Review of applications will begin March 15, 2012, and will continue until the position is filled.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Thorazine will have you walking around like you dropped twenty red devils, Fear and Loathing in Bioethics In The Popular Press: Human Nature and the Neurobiology of Conflict, Wired Science Path Is Found for the Spread of Alzheimer’s, New York Times Willpower and Desires: Turning Up the Volume On What You Want Most, Science Daily Really? The Claim: Never Go to Bed Angry, New York Times Well Blog The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance, Scientific American Brains may be wired for addiction, BBC News Gorillas grin 'to reassure friends', BBC Nature   Computerized Tests For Concussions May Be Unreliable, New Scientist  Testosterone Makes Us Less Cooperative and More Egocentric, Science Daily Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation: Fundamental enhancement for humanity?, Practical Ethics Scientists Decode Brain Waves to Eavesdrop On What We Hear, Science Daily Weak will comes from tired mental muscles, New Scientist Telepathy machine reconstructs speech from brainwaves, New Scientist  From the Academic Literature: Staying responsive to the world: Modality-specific and -nonspecific contributions to speeded auditory, tactile, and visual stimulus detection, Human Brain Mapping Age-related changes to Na+ channel gating contribute to modified intrinsic neuronal excitability, Neurobiology of Aging The Accuracy or Inaccuracy of Affective Forecasts Depends on How Accuracy Is Indexed, Psychological Science Critical Role of Amyloid-like Oligomers of Drosophila Orb2 in the Persistence of Memory, Cell

Subscribe to our mailing list The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

"Machine Ethics"

Machine Ethics (a collection of essays edited by Michael Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson) was published last year by Cambridge University Press.  Here is the book description:

The new field of machine ethics is concerned with giving machines ethical principles, or a procedure for discovering a way to resolve the ethical dilemmas they might encounter, enabling them to function in an ethically responsible manner through their own ethical decision making. Developing ethics for machines, in contrast to developing ethics for human beings who use machines, is by its nature an interdisciplinary endeavor. The essays in this volume represent the first steps by philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers toward explaining why it is necessary to add an ethical dimension to machines that function autonomously, what is required in order to add this dimension, philosophical and practical challenges to the machine ethics project, various approaches that could be considered in attempting to add an ethical dimension to machines, work that has been done to date in implementing these approaches, and visions of the future of machine ethics research.