Abstract

The paper is aimed to highlight new ways in which neuroscience and philosophy intertwine. Recent experimental evidences show that specific brain damages can affect moral judgments. And a set of neurological data seem to prove moral internalism false. So researchers are challenging philosophers in the field of ethics, and science threats to make philosophical tools quite obsolete. Smart drugs are now able to change the general mood of persons but new pills are at sight that can give chemical happiness, like the ones Berlin foresaw 50 years ago. Berlin's point was that we have to dismiss such a drug, as life is worth living as far as we can join its values of free and conscious choice. But one can think that in the future happiness pills will give rise to a "bootstrapping effect": when you enter the new dimension of an altered moral framework, neurologically modified, the old philosophical categories will be of no use. Time has come for philosophers to cope with that scenario.