Introduction -- The General Structure of Criminal Law in Terms of Ascriptive Moral Principles -- Human Actions at the Root of Moral Wrongdoing and Criminal Law's Actus Reus -- Intention and Belief at the Root of Moral Culpability and Mens Rea -- Further Questions About the Basic Distinction Between Intention and Belief -- The Royal Road to the Criminal Law's Concept of the Psychology of Persons : The Insanity Defense -- The Challenging Data of Neuroscience and the Challenges Mounted From that Data -- The Libertarian, Fictionalist, and Compatibilist Responses to Hard Determinism -- Rescuing the Volitional Excuses from Compatibilism (The Overshoot Problem for Compatibilism) -- The Epiphenomenalist Challenge -- The Initiation of the Epiphenomenalist Challenge in the Work of Benjamin Libet -- The Limited Compatibilism of Epiphenomenalism with Responsibility -- The Reductionist Challenge -- "Nothing But a Pack of Neurons" -- Addiction, Responsibility, and the Potential Contributions of Neuroscience.
Summary:
"This book assays how the remarkable discoveries of contemporary neuroscience impact upon our conception of ourselves and our responsibility for our choices and our actions. Dramatic (and indeed revolutionary) changes in how we think of ourselves as agents and as persons are commonly taken to be the implications of those discoveries of neuroscience. Indeed, the very notions of responsibility and of deserved punishment are thought to be threatened by these discoveries. Such threats are collected into four groupings: (1) the threat from determinism, that neurosciences shoes us that all of our choices and actions are caused by events in the brain that precede choice; (2) the threat from epiphenomenalism, that our choices are shown by experiment not to cause the actions that are the objects of such choice but are rather mere epiphenomena, co-effects of common causes in the brain; (3) the threat from reductionist mechanism, that we and everything we value is nothing but a bunch of two-valued switches going off in our brains; and (4) the threat from fallibilism, (5) that we are not masters in our own house because we lack the privileged knowledge of our own minds needed to be such masters. The book seeks to blunt such radical challenges while nonetheless detailing how law, morality, and common-sense psychology can harness the insights of an advancing neuroscience to more accurately assign moral blame and legal punishment to the truly deserving"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.