Introduction to Radical Constructivist Ethics

Abstract

Contemporary neurotechnology—ranging from brain–computer interfaces to neural data analytics —challenges foundational concepts of personhood, agency, responsibility, and moral normativity.Classical ethical frameworks, grounded in objectivist assumptions, struggle to address these transformations. This paper proposes a radical constructivist ethics grounded in the synthesis of radical constructivism, autopoiesis, enactivism, and neurophenomenology.Starting from the premise that knowledge, identity, and conflict are observer-dependent constructions rather than objective givens, the paper reframes ethics as an operational requirement of coherent world-construction. Ethical responsibility emerges not from external moral laws, but from the necessity to maintain viable coexistence among interacting cognitive systems—human, artificial, and hybrid. Using the metaphor of the “elephant in the garden,” neurotechnology is interpreted as a disruptive yet unavoidable phenomenon that demands not denial or rigid assimilation, but an expansion of conceptual and experiential frameworks.The proposed ethic replaces notions of objective good with principles of coherent cooperation, autopoietic sustainability, and conflict minimisation between world-constructing systems. In neurotechnological contexts, this leads to novel ethical imperatives concerning co-constructed identity, neural rights, algorithmic participation in cognition, and responsibility distributed across human–machine assemblages.Radical constructivist ethics thus offers a dynamic, self-correcting, and phenomenologically grounded alternative to traditional normativity—one uniquely suited to the ethical challenges posed by emerging neurotechnologies and artificial cognitive agents.