Neuroscience and the Law: Free will, responsibility and punishment

Recently there has been a huge amount of academic debate about, and public and legal practitioner interest in, the general question of how or whether neuroscientific discoveries should prompt us to reconsider the theoretical underpinnings of, or the actual practice of, the legal system. Developments in neuroscience increasingly uncover the underlying causal mechanisms in the brain that generate our behaviour, thus raising the question whether it is 'us' or instead our brains that are really responsible for what we do. This raises questions both about whether we act freely - something that is central to both the moral and legal notions of responsibility - and about whether the purpose of punishment for criminal acts should be conceived as a matter of retribution or rehabilitation.

However, the academic debate has largely been focussed on specifically philosophical issues (involving neuroscientists and philosophers) or specifically legal issues (involving neuroscientists and lawyers). Philosophy can bring conceptual clarity and a significant body of relevant philosophical discussion to the debate about law and neuroscience; while the law, in turn, brings a practical dimension to philosophical debates about free will, moral responsibility and punishment. This project therefore aims to explore the extent to which three-way collaboration between philosophers, lawyers and neuroscientists can shed additional light on these questions.

Since this is an exploratory project, whose aim is to lay the foundations for future collaborative research, it is not expected to have any direct impact. However, such future collaborative research itself could have a major impact in the following areas:

-- Public understanding of science: neuroscientific discoveries -- sometimes coupled with somewhat overblown claims about their philosophical implications from neuroscientists themselves -- have attracted a good deal of media attention. See for example:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/aug/28/mindovermatter
www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8058541/Neuroscience-free-will-and-determinism-Im-just-a-machine.html
www.newscientist.com/article/dn17835-free-will-is-not-an-illusion-after-all.html,

all of which discuss Benjamin Libet's famous experiments. As articles such as these illustrate, understanding science is not solely about understanding how experiments work, etc.; it is also about understanding the implications of scientific findings for our conception of ourselves. For example, do Libet's results (if valid) really undermine our conception of ourselves as agents with a conscious will that determines how we behave -- as Libet claimed -- or not? This is a question best answered by philosophers rather than neuroscientists; philosophers can therefore help to shed much-needed light on such issues, and can do so within the public domain (see for example newhumanist.org.uk/698/bad-news-for-free-will).

Relatedly, recent research (Schweitzer, N. J. and Saks, M. J. (2011), Neuroimage Evidence and the Insanity Defense. Behavioral Sciences & the Law) suggests that jurors accord much more weight to neuroscientific evidence presented in support of an insanity plea than to psychological or historical evidence. Public understanding of the moral and psychological implications of neuroscientific evidence thus has the potential to have a significant effect on the outcome of jury trials where neuroscientific evidence is presented.

-- Other legal impacts:
In the view of many neuroscientists, legal scholars and philosophers, the existence of a physiological or neurological explanation for behaviour undermines (or perhaps reduces) the agent's culpability. Thus there has been discussion in legal circles about whether scientific advances that demonstrate a defendant's predisposition to violent behaviour might result in unwillingness in the US to sentence murderers to death There has also been discussion about whether the advances in neuroscience that point towards physically-based explanations for behaviour should result in the delivery of criminal punishment that focusses more on rehabilitation than retribution. These are thus issues that might affect the criminal justice system itself, and not merely the way academic lawyers and philosophers theorise about it.

Of course, whether the criminal justice system *should* be changed in these ways depends on the cogency of the argument from the existence of a physically-based disposition to the absence or attenuation of responsibility -- precisely the sort of issue that demands the kind of further interdisciplinary research for which this project aims to lay the foundations. (Of course, the results of that research might be that no such changes are philosophically justified; but that constitutes impact in the sense of delivering a change to what *might* have happened had the research not been carried out and suitably disseminated.)