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 |
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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
Cite this
Vincent, N. A. (2011). Neuroimaging and responsibility assessments. Neuroethics, 4(1), 35-49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-008-9030-8