From Ethics to Governance: Why Neurotechnology Requires Institutionally Actionable Concepts

Abstract

Neurotechnology governance confronts a paradox: the proliferation of ethical concepts — cognitive liberty, mental privacy, neurorights, mental self-determination — has expanded normative vocabulary without producing commensurate institutional capacity for enforcement. This article argues that the governance deficit stems not from insufficient ethical ambition but from a structural mismatch between the concepts scholars produce and the operational grammar institutions require. Regulatory authorities cannot process ethical aspirations; they can only act on concepts expressible as observable triggers, evidentiary substrates, competent authorities, and enforceable remedies. To diagnose this mismatch, the article develops the Institutional Actionability Assessment (IAA), a replicable diagnostic framework that evaluates any governance-relevant concept along three indicators — Verification Void, Authority Fit, and Trigger Executability — yielding a bounded composite metric, the IAC-Index. The IAA is applied to four dominant neuroethical concepts and one cross-technology transferability case, revealing that each concept fails on at least two dimensions of institutional readability. The article then demonstrates downward translation by compiling mental privacy into an Institutionally Actionable Proxy specifying trigger, evidence, authority, and remedy. Five design principles for constructing actionable proxies are articulated. A failure-mode typology maps diagnostic score patterns to institutional repair levers, closing the gap between diagnosis and prescription. The framework is deliberately architecture-portable: it evaluates concepts regardless of which regulatory stack is in place, making findings portable across jurisdictions and technology domains. The IAA equips policymakers, regulatory designers, and standards bodies with a replicable diagnostic tool for identifying and repairing institutional actionability failures in any emerging technology domain.