Past research showed that the ability to focus on one’s internal states positively correlates with the self-regulation of behavior in situations that are accompanied by somatic and/or physiological changes, such as emotions, physical workload, and decision-making. The analysis of moral oriented decision-making can be the first step for better understanding the legal reasoning carried on by the main players in the field, as lawyers are. For this reason, this study investigated the influence of the decision context and interoceptive manipulation on (...) the moral decision-making process in the legal field gathering the responses of two groups of lawyers. A total of 20 lawyers were randomly divided into an experimental group, which was explicitly required to focus the attention on its interoceptive correlates, and a control group, which only received the general instruction to perform the task. Both groups underwent a modified version of the Ultimatum Game, where are presented three different moral conditions and three different offers. Results highlighted a significant increase of Acceptance Rate in those offers that should be considered more equal than fair or unfair ones, associated with a general increase of Reaction Times in the equal offers. Furthermore, the interoceptive manipulation oriented the Lawyers toward a more self-centered decision. This study shows how individual, situational, contextual, and interoceptive factors may influence the moral decision-making of lawyers. Future research in the so-called Neurolaw field is needed to replicate and expand current findings. (shrink)

Under the umbrella of the burgeoning neurotransdisciplines, scholars are using the principles and research methodologies of their primary and secondary fields to examine developments in neuroimaging, neuromodulation and psychopharmacology. The path for advanced scholarship at the intersection of law and neuroscience may clear if work across the disciplines is collected and reviewed and outstanding and debated issues are identified and clarified. In this article, I organize, examine and refine a narrow class of the burgeoning neurotransdiscipline scholarship; that is, scholarship at (...) the interface of law and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). (shrink)

‘Optimistic’ normative theories of criminal justice aim to justify criminal sanction in terms of its reprobative/rehabilitative value rather than its punitive nature as such. But do such theories accord with ordinary intuitions about what constitutes a ‘just’ response to wrongdoing? Recent empirical work on the psychology of punishers suggests that human beings have a ‘brutely retributive’ moral psychology, making them unlikely to endorse normative theories that sacrifice retribution for the sake of reprobation or rehabilitation; it would mean, for example, that (...) we cannot expect people to support such optimistic theories democratically, calling their feasibility into question. Taking the civic republican theory as an exemplar of optimistic theories, we argue that it does not fail this feasibility test. We review recent empirical research, including studies of our own, to support the claim that, far from being brute retributivists, human beings are generally satisfied only with punishment that delivers something other than mere retribution. And we show that this coheres very closely with the goals and policies that civic republicanism would support, as it may be expected to cohere also with other optimistic proposals. (shrink)