Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility

Edited by Nicole A Vincent

Oxford Series in Neuroscience, Law, and Philosophy

Provides a thoroughly compatibilist approach to integrating recent findings as well as techniques and technologies derived from the mind sciences into legal responsibility adjudication rather than just moral responsibility
Essays written by legally trained authors and empirical researchers rather than just from philosophers
Includes both theoretical discussions that will appeal to philosophically-minded readers, as well as practical topics and advice about how recent advances bear on the responsibility of drug addicts, psychopaths, those whose minds have been manipulated through direct brain interventions, and cognitive enhancement
Branches out beyond the usual focus on criminal responsibility so prominent in the neurolaw literature to also examine the impact of the mind sciences on negligence and medical competence
A truly international group of authors reflecting perspective from the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Germany and The Netherlands

Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility

Edited by Nicole A Vincent

Oxford Series in Neuroscience, Law, and Philosophy

Description

How should neuroscience, psychology and behavioral genetics impact legal responsibility practices?

Recent findings from these fields are sometimes claimed to threaten the moral foundations of legal responsibility practices by revealing that determinism, or something like it, is true. On this account legal responsibility practices should be abolished because there is no room for such outmoded fictions as responsibility in an enlightened and scientifically-informed approach to the regulation of society.

However, the chapters in this volume reject this claim and its related agenda of radical legal reform. Embracing instead a broadly compatibilist approach - one according to which responsibility hinges on psychological features of agents not on metaphysical features of the universe - this volume's authors demonstrate that the behavioral and mind sciences may impact legal responsibility practices in a range of different ways, for instance: by providing fresh insight into the nature of normal and pathological human agency, by offering updated medical and legal criteria for forensic practitioners as well as powerful new diagnostic and intervention tools and techniques with which to appraise and to alter minds, and by raising novel regulatory challenges.

Science and law have been locked in a philosophical dialogue on the nature of human agency ever since the 13th century when a mental element was added to the criteria for legal responsibility. The rich story told by the 14 essays in this volume testifies that far from ending this philosophical dialogue, neuroscience, psychology and behavioral genetics have the potential to further enrich and extend this dialogue.

Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility

Edited by Nicole A Vincent

Oxford Series in Neuroscience, Law, and Philosophy

Chapter 1
Introduction
Nicole A. Vincent
Chapter 2
Criminal Common Law Compatibilism
Stephen J. Morse
Chapter 3
What can neurosciences say about responsibility? Taking the distinction between theoretical and practical reason seriously
Anne Ruth Mackor
Chapter 4
Irrationality, mental capacities and neuroscience
Jillian Craigie and Alicia Coram
Chapter 5
Skepticism Concerning Human Agency: Sciences of the Self vs. 'Voluntariness' in the Law
Paul Sheldon Davies
Chapter 6
The Implications of Heuristics and Biases Research on Moral and Legal Responsibility: A Case Against the Reasonable Person Standard
Leora Dahan-Katz
Chapter 7
Moral Responsibility and Consciousness: Two Challenges, One Solution
Neil Levy
Chapter 8
Translating Scientific Evidence into the Language of the 'Folk': Executive Function as Capacity-Responsibility
Katrina L. Sifferd
Chapter 9
Neuroscience, deviant appetites and the criminal law
Colin Gavaghan
Chapter 10
Is Psychopathy a Mental Disease?
Thomas Nadelhoffer & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Chapter 11
Addiction, choice, and disease: How voluntary is voluntary action in addiction?
Jeanette Kennett
Chapter 12
How may neuroscience affect the way that the criminal courts deal with addicted offenders?
Wayne Hall & Adrian Carter
Chapter 13
Enhancing Responsibility
Nicole A. Vincent
Chapter 14
Guilty Minds in Washed Brains?
Manipulation Cases, Excuses and the Normative Prerequisites of Liberal Legal Orders
Christoph Bublitz & Reinhard Merkel

Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility

Edited by Nicole A Vincent

Oxford Series in Neuroscience, Law, and Philosophy

Author Information

Edited by Nicole A Vincent, Macquarie Univ

Research Fellow, Philosophy, Macquarie University Australia and Chief Investigator of the Enhancing Responsibility Project based at Delft University of Technology

Contributors:

Nicole A. Vincent
Stephen J. Morse, J.D., Ph.D
Anne Ruth Mackor
Jillian Craigie
Alicia Coram
Paul Sheldon Davies
Leora Dahan-Katz
Neil Levy
Katrina L. Sifferd
Colin Gavaghan
Thomas Nadelhoffer
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Jeanette Kennett
Wayne Hall
Adrian Carter
Christoph Bublitz
Reinhard Merkel