Edited by Nicole A. Vincent
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.
1. Nicole A. Vincent: Introduction
2. Stephen J. Morse: Criminal Common Law Compatibilism
3. Anne Ruth Mackor: What can neurosciences say about responsibility? Taking the distinction between theoretical and practical reason seriously
4. Jillian Craigie and Alicia Coram: Irrationality,
mental capacities and neuroscience
5. Paul Sheldon Davies: Skepticism Concerning Human Agency: Sciences of the Self vs. 'Voluntariness' in the Law
6. Leora Dahan-Katz: The Implications of Heuristics and Biases Research on Moral and Legal Responsibility: A Case Against the Reasonable Person
Standard
7. Neil Levy: Moral Responsibility and Consciousness: Two Challenges, One Solution
8. Katrina L. Sifferd: Translating Scientific Evidence into the Language of the 'Folk': Executive Function as Capacity-Responsibility
9. Colin Gavaghan: Neuroscience, deviant appetites and the
criminal law
10. Thomas Nadelhoffer & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: Is Psychopathy a Mental Disease?
11. Jeanette Kennett: Addiction, choice, and disease: How voluntary is voluntary action in addiction?
12. Wayne Hall & Adrian Carter: How may neuroscience affect the way that the criminal
courts deal with addicted offenders?
13. Nicole A. Vincent: Enhancing Responsibility
14. Christoph Bublitz & Reinhard Merkel: Guilty Minds in Washed Brains? Manipulation Cases, Excuses and the Normative Prerequisites of Liberal Legal Orders
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Nicole A Vincent is Research Fellow, Philosophy at Macquarie University Australia and Chief Investigator of the Enhancing Responsibility Project based at Delft University of Technology.
Conscious Will and Responsibility - Edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Lynn Nadel
Memory and Law - Edited by Lynn Nadel and Walter P. Sinnott-Armstrong
Responsibility and psychopathy - Edited by Dr. Luca Malatesti and John McMillan
Law and the Brain - Edited by Semir Zeki and Oliver Goodenough
The Impact of Behavioral Sciences on Criminal Law - Edited by Nita Farahany
