Should offenders with psychopathy or those exhibiting extreme forms of antisocial behav- iour be considered criminally responsible? The current debate seems to have reached a stalemate. Several scholars have argued that neuropsychologi- cal data on individuals with psychopathy might be relevant for determining their criminal responsibil- ity. However, relying on such data has not produced a consensus among legal scholars and philosophers on whether individuals with psychopathy should be excused from responsibility. We offer a diagnosis about why this debate has (...) reached a standoff. We argue that part of the problem is that psychopathy, being a syndrome-based category, is too heterogeneous and thus offers low prospects for being integrated with neuropsychological data that might support significant conclusions about the criminal responsibility of individuals with psychopathy. Moreover, the construct of psychopathy was not originally devised to discriminate criminally accountable from unac- countable antisocial individuals. To overcome these difficulties and advance the debate, we extend a currently less discussed theoretical framework for bridging biopsychology and the law that focuses on neuropsychological constructs, domains, and processes that directly measure capacities of offenders that are relevant for criminal responsibility, without necessarily relying on mediating syndrome-based constructs. The novelty of our contribution is that the biopsy- chological bases of exculpation can be further devel- oped and used for determining more fine-grained cat- egorisations of antisocial personality types. We show how this framework provides guidelines for inter- disciplinary research that can significantly advance our understanding of the preconditions for criminal responsibility and help the legal practice of ascribing or withholding it. (shrink)

One way to interpret the work of Joshua Greene (2001; 2008; 2014) is that the wave of empirical research into moral decision-making is a way for us to become more confident in our ability to gain moral knowledge. We argue that empirical research into moral judgment has shown (both survey-based and brain-based) that the grounds of moral judgment are opaque on several dimensions. We argue that we cannot firmly grasp what the morally relevant/irrelevant features of a decision context are, understand (...) which cognitive system responds to said features, and further know that we are actually basing our judgment upon what we take to be the morally relevant features. That is, we argue that moral judgment is very much like other kinds of judgment: Deeply influenced by facts about the decision-context and the decision-maker. However, if moral judgment is merely the exercise of our general judgment making faculty, we shouldn’t be surprised by this result. We conclude by considering what this means for our practice of making moral judgments. (shrink)