Could neuroimaging evidence help us to assess the degree of a person’s responsibility for a crime which we know that they committed? This essay defends an affirmative answer to this question. A range of standard objections to this high-tech approach to assessing people’s responsibility is considered and then set aside, but I also bring to light and then reject a novel objection—an objection which is only encountered when functional (rather than structural) neuroimaging is used to assess people’s responsibility.

In the field of ?neurolaw?, reformists claim that recent scientific discoveries from the mind sciences have serious ramifications for how legal responsibility should be adjudicated, but conservatives deny that this is so. In contrast, I criticise both of these polar opposite positions by arguing that although scientific findings can have often-weighty normative significance, they lack the normative authority with which reformists often imbue them. After explaining why conservatives and reformists are both wrong, I then offer my own moderate suggestions about (...) what views we have reason to endorse. My moderate position reflects the familiar capacitarian idea which underlies much lay, legal, and philosophical thinking about responsibility ? namely, that responsibility tracks mental capacity. (shrink)

This paper argues that John Fischer and Mark Ravizza's compatibilist theory of moral responsibility cannot justify reactive attitudes like blame and desert-based practices like retributive punishment. The problem with their account, I argue, is that their analysis of moderateness in regards to reasons-responsiveness has the wrong normative features. However, I propose an alternative account of what it means for a mechanism to be moderately reasons-responsive which addresses this deficiency. In a nut shell, while Fischer and Ravizza test for moderate reasons-responsiveness (...) by checking how a mechanism behaves in a given time slice across other possible worlds, on my account we should ask how that mechanism behaves in this world over a span of time – specifically, whether it responds to reasons sufficiently often. My diachronic account is intended as a drop-in replacement for Fischer and Ravizza's synchronic account. (shrink)

This article offers an introductory analysis of the philosophical and empirical considerations having to do with the significance of psychopathy, intellectual disability and ADHD regarding one’s moral responsibility. Moral responsibility comes in degrees and is ultimately determined on social grounds. Whether a certain diagnosis and its under­pinning neuro-cognitive impairment affects one’s cognitive, emotional and moral conduct, depends also on social and relational factors.

Thought insertion is a condition characterized by the impression that one's thoughts are not one’s own and have been inserted by others. Some have explained the condition as resulting, in part, from impaired or defective self-knowledge, or knowledge of one’s mental states. I argue that such models do not shed light on the most puzzling feature of thought insertion: the patient’s experience that an introspected thought does not feel like her own. After examining ways in which existing versions of the (...) model might address this worry, I propose a significant modification. I argue that the experience of disownership consists in a rational indifference that one feels towards one’s inserted thought. I further contend that the experience is generated by an underlying absence of an expectation of rational authority towards the inserted thought, such that the patient does not expect her thought to reflect, or be shaped by, her own rational considerations. I defend my proposal using empirical studies from cognitive and social psychology which suggest that we ordinarily have and experience an expectation of rational authority towards a certain subset of our thoughts, and direct analysis of patient reports, which strongly suggest that it is this expectation and the corresponding experience that thought insertion patients lack. (shrink)

Leonard Berlin (2014) reports that neuroscientific data have been presented in court by lawyers wishing to argue that their clients have reduced or absent moral responsibility for their behaviour b...

Over the past few years, a number of authors in the new field of neuroethics have claimed that there is an ethical challenge presented by the likelihood that the findings of neuroscience will undermine many common assumptions about human agency and selfhood. These authors claim that neuroscience shows that human agents have no free will, and that our sense of being a “self” is an illusory construction of our brains. Furthermore, some commentators predict that our ethical practices of assigning moral (...) blame, or of recognizing others as persons rather than as objects, will change as a result of neuroscientific discoveries that debunk free will and the concept of the self. I contest suggestions that neuroscience’s conclusions about the illusory nature of free will and the self will cause significant change in our practices. I argue that we have self-interested reasons to resist allowing neuroscience to determine core beliefs about ourselves. (shrink)

Neuroimaging, psychosurgery, deep-brain stimulation, and psychopharmacology hold considerable promise for more accurate prediction and diagnosis and more effective treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Some forms of psychopharmacology may even be able to enhance normal cognitive and affective capacities. But the brain remains the most complex and least understood of all the organs in the human body. Mapping the neural correlates of the mind through brain scans, and altering these correlates through surgery, stimulation, or pharmacological interventions can affect us in (...) both positive and negative ways. We need to carefully weigh the potential benefit against the potential harm of such techniques. This paper examines some of these techniques and explores the emerging ethical issues in clinical neuroscience. (shrink)