engleski

Some methodological issues in Neuroethics: the case of responsibility and psychopathy.

Legal and moral responsibility is one of the central issues of Neuroethics (Vincent 2013). While neuroscience might force us to rethink our capacity to be responsible, both in ordinary thinking and law (Wegner 2002), it has also less dramatic, but more immediate, practical impact in undermining in legal proceedings the criminal responsibility of specific individuals or a class of individuals. For instance, there is a growing debate about whether psychopathic offenders are criminally responsible, given their neurocognitive peculiarities (Kiehl and Sinnott- Armstrong 2013 ; Malatesti and McMillan 2010). There are some distinct methodological pitfalls for neuroethics when it evaluates neuroscientific results and links them to issues such as moral or legal responsibility. Problems can occur when inferring normative implications from neuroscientific results. Some of these problems arise when it is not recognised that data about brain anatomy or physiology are relevant to the ascription of responsibility only when they are significantly correlated with the psychological capacities contemplated by the legal formulations of responsibility. We will demonstrate this by considering two significant cases concerning psychopathy. Some paradigms that aim at measuring higher order capacities such as moral understanding, have limited validity. More robust paradigms for the study of learning in restricted controlled conditions, on the other hand, have limited ecological validity across individuals and context to be of any use for the law. References Kiehl, Kent A., and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, eds. 2013. Handbook on Psychopathy and Law. Oxford Series in Neuroscience, Law and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malatesti, Luca, and John McMillan, eds. 2010. Responsibility and Psychopathy: Interfacing Law, Psychiatry and Philosophy. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/med/9780199551637.001.0 001. Vincent, Nicole A., ed. 2013. Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility. Oxford Series in Neuroscience, Law, and Philosophy. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press. Wegner, Daniel M. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will. A Bradford Book. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Neuroethics ; psychopathy ; responsibility

nije evidentirano