Abstract
Could neuroimaging evidence help us to assess the degree of a person's responsibility for a crime which we know that they committed? This essay defends an affirmative answer to this question. A range of standard objections to this high-tech approach to assessing people's responsibility is considered and then set aside, but I also bring to light and then reject a novel objection-an objection which is only encountered when functional (rather than structural) neuroimaging is used to assess people's responsibility.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 35-49 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Neuroethics |
Volume | 4 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Apr 2011 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Copyright the Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.Keywords
- Automatic functions
- Capacitarian theory of responsibility
- Capacity responsibility
- Capacity-theoretic conception of responsibility
- fMRI
- Legal responsibility
- Mental capacity
- Modal fallacy
- Moral responsibility
- Neuroimaging
- Roper v. Simmons [2005]
- Theory to the best explanation