Stephanie Hare is a first year PhD student in neuroscience at Georgia State University (GSU) and the recipient of the first doctoral Neuroethics (NE) research fellowship. Since coming to GSU, she has been afforded the opportunities to collaborate with both philosophers and psychologists, and to attend fascinating talks by speakers from across the country.

Currently, Steph is leading work on a paper (co-authored with her Ph.D. advisor Dr. Nicole Vincent) about whether the cognitive and behavioral neurosciences (CBN) might have anything useful to tell us about how we might best live a happy life. Might behavioral and imaging data reveal to us things about ourselves that we would otherwise be ignorant of — for instance, that we would be happier if we pursued a different career, or if we chose different life partners? They relate this discussion to a larger, looming normative question: Could the CBN data, at least in principle, tell us something about the lives that we ought to live? An early version of this paper was presented at the International Neuroethics Society Annual Meeting on November 8, 2013 in San Diego. Read the rest of this entry »