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RESPONSIBLE CHOICES, DESERT-BASED LEGAL INSTITUTIONS, AND THE CHALLENGES OF CONTEMPORARY NEUROSCIENCE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2011

Michael S. Moore
Affiliation:
Law and Philosophy, University of Illinois

Abstract

Neuroscience is commonly thought to challenge the basic way we think of ourselves in ordinary thought, morality, and the law. This paper: (1) describes the legal institutions challenged in this way by neuroscience, including in that description both the political philosophy such institutions enshrine and the common sense psychology they presuppose; (2) describes the three kinds of data produced by contemporary neuroscience that is thought to challenge these commonsense views of ourselves in morals and law; and (3) distinguishes four major and several minor kinds of challenges that that data can reasonably be interpreted to present. The major challenges are: first, the challenge of reductionism, that we are merely machines; second, the challenge of determinism, that we are caused to choose and act as we do by brain states that we do not control; third, the challenge of epiphenomenalism, that our choices do not cause our actions because our brains are the real cause of those actions; and fourth, the challenge of fallibilism, that we do not have direct access to those of our mental states that do cause our actions, nor are we infallible in such knowledge as we do have of them.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2012

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References

1 Those guilty of this sin (and no doubt deserving of serious punishment) include Sapolsky, Robert, “The Frontal Cortex and the Criminal Justice SystemPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London vol. 359 (2004): 1787–96Google ScholarPubMed; Greene, Josh and Cohen, Jonathan, “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London vol. 359 (2004): 1775–85Google ScholarPubMed; Dawkins, Richard, “Let's All Stop Beating Basil's Car,” posted 2006 at http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.htmlGoogle Scholar; Banks, William, “Does Consciousness Cause Misbehavior?” in Pockett, S., Banks, W., and Gallagher, S., eds., Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 253Google Scholar; Clark, Thomas W., “Fear of Mechanism: A Compatibilist Critique of ‘The Volitional Brain,’Journal for Consciousness Studies vol. 6 (1999): 279–93Google Scholar.

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45 Greene and Cohen, “Neuroscience Changes Nothing,” 1776. It is a bit disingenuous of Greene and Cohen to interpret Morse as dealing only at the level of legal doctrine. One of Professor Morse's lifetime projects has been to show that there is no presupposition of free will in the morals and metaphysics that make sense of the legal doctrines we have. See, for example, most recently, Morse, , “Determinism and the Death of Folk Psychology: Two Challenges to Responsibility From Neuroscience,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science, and Technology, 9 (2008): 135Google Scholar.

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48 If the different plane of existence insulates mind from causal influences, that seemingly is purchased by a like inability of mind to do any causing.

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53 Ibid., 369–70.

54 Ibid., 370–71.

55 Ibid., 372–93.

56 See Moore, Act and Crime; Moore, “Renewed Questions.”

57 I am indebted to my MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project Decisions and Intentions Working Group co-chair John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago for much of the information that immediately follows. See Cacioppo, and Moore, , “Decisions and Intentions Working Group,” Working Paper of the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project, Normal Decision-Making Research Network, January, 2008Google Scholar. See also Pockett, Susan, “The Neuroscience of Movement,” in Pockett, , Banks, , and Gallagher, , Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 924CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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“The phenomenology of intention is poorly understood … the phenomenal content of intentions has hardly been studied experimentally. Reliable psychophysical procedures for investigating when and how the effects of an action are represented during preparation and intention would represent a major advance.”

67 Michael Gazzaniga quotes Roger Sperry thusly:

“the centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension that no one I know of has been able to imagine their nature.”

Gazzaniga, , Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 246Google Scholar.

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69 Consider, for example, the large promissory notes issued in this reductionist view of intentions:

“Intentions … are patterns of neural activity; or perhaps patterns of synaptic strength which are eventually played out into patterns of neural activity. Either kind of pattern clearly has both temporal and spatial extension, which means it must be located somewhere.”

Susan Pockett, “The Neuroscience of Movement,” 22 n. 1.

70 Greene and Cohen, “Neuroscience Changes Nothing,” 1781.

71 Susan Pockett, “Introduction,” 1–4.

72 Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., and Pearl, D. K., “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activities (Readiness Potential); The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act,” Brain, 106 (1983): 623–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These findings are restated in Libet, , “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8 (1985): 529–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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77 Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative,” at 532.

78 Passingham and Lau, “Free Choice and the Human Brain,” 55.

79 Much of the peer commentary in the 1985 symposium in Behavioral and Brain Sciences was on this topic. See, e.g., Latte, Richard, “Consciousness as an Experimental Variable: Problems of Definition, Practice, and Interpretation,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8 (1985): 545–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; James Ringo, “Timing Volition: Questions of What and When About W,” ibid., 550–51. See also Haggard, Patrick, Clark, Sam, and Kalogeras, Jeri, “Voluntary Action and Conscious Awareness,” Nature Neuroscience, 5 (2002): 382–85CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Haggard, Patrick and Clark, Sam, “Intentional Action: Conscious Experience and Neural Prediction,” Consciousness and Cognition, 12 (2003): 695707CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. And the debate continues. Banks, William and Isham, Eve, “We Infer Rather Than Perceive the Moment We Decided to Act,” Psychological Science, 20 (2009): 1721CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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81 Passingham and Lau, “Free Choice and the Human Brain,” 55–56.

82 Haggard, Cartledge, Dafydd, and Oakley, “Anomalous Control.”

83 Fried, Katz, et al., “Functional Organization.”

84 This was when subjects were told to attend to their intention to move. Lau, H. C., Rogers, R. D., Haggard, P., and Passingham, R. E., “Attention to Intention,” Science, 303 (2004): 1208–10CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

85 Haynes, et al., “Reading Hidden Intentions in the Brain.”

86 Haynes, et al., “Unconsciousness Determinants of Free Decision.”

87 Nisbett, R. E. and Wilson, T. D., “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review, 84 (1977): 231–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Bargh helpfully summarizes into ten categories a lifetime of his research on what he has called “the automaticity of everyday life,” (Bargh, , “The Automaticity of Everyday Life,” in Wyer, R. S., ed., Advances in Social Cognition, 10 (1997): 161Google Scholar), in his “Free Will Is Un-natural,” in Baer, J., Kaufman, J., and Baumeister, R., eds., Are We Free?: Psychology and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 128–54, esp. at 136–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These include evidence of “unconscious goal pursuit over time,” “the absence of ability to accurately report on one's intentions,” “the scarcity of conscious self-regulatory capacity,” “the unconscious mimicry of others' behavior,” and other items. Ibid., 148.

89 Ibid., 138.

91 Wegner, Daniel, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

92 In his reply to the open peer commentary on his book, Wegner acknowledges that “people often read much more into ICW than is there,” and that part of the fault for that lies with Wegner's choice of a “fighting” title. Wegner, , “Author's Response,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (2004): 679–88, at 679, 682Google Scholar.

93 Ibid., 682.

94 Ibid., 679.

95 Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will, 96.

96 Ibid., 65

97 Ibid., 4.

98 Ibid., 6.

99 Ibid., 7–8, 100–102.

100 Ibid., 110.

101 Ibid., 103–108.

102 Ibid., 113–16.

103 Ibid., 116–20.

104 Ibid., 120–30.

105 Ibid., 125.

106 Ibid., 130.

107 Ibid., 100

108 On Freudian examples and analysis of unconscious actions, see Moore, Law and Psychiatry, 311–22.

109 Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will, 130.

110 Ibid., 143–44.

111 Ibid., 8.

112 Ibid., 80.

113 Ibid., 10.

114 Ibid., 74–78.

115 Ibid., 181–84.

116 Ibid., 149–51.

117 Ibid., 10–11.

118 Crick, Francis, The Astonishing Hypothesis (New York: Scribrer's, 1994), 3Google Scholar.

119 Richard Dawkins, “Let's All Stop Beating Basil's Car.” Dan Dennett recounts how Dawkins later came to regret his inference that retributivism and moral responsibility disappear with the reduction of us to machines. Dennett, , “Some Observations on the Psychology of Thinking About Free Will,” in Baer, J., Kaufman, J., and Baumeister, R., Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 253Google Scholar.

120 Alluded to briefly above, text at nn. 22–24, supra. Churchland, Patriciais a standard example of an eliminative materialist in philosophy. See herNeurophilosophy: Toward a Unfied Science of the Mind/Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

121 Discussed in Moore, Law and Psychiatry, 36–37.

122 Dennett, Daniel, Brainstorms (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, 1978), 63Google Scholar.

123 Quine, W. W. O., Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 100Google Scholar (“many of our causal remarks in the ‘there are’ form would want dusting up when our thoughts turn seriously ontological”).

124 Moore, Michael, “Legal Reality: A Naturalist Approach to Legal Ontology,” Law and Philosophy, 21 (2002): 619705, at 649–53, reprinted in Objectivity in Ethics and Law: Essays in Moral and Legal Ontology (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004, 349–53Google Scholar.

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126 Greene and Cohen, “Neuroscience Changes Nothing,” 1781.

127 Notice that the text phrases the matter comparatively, that is, that indeterministic chance gives us no more control, etc., than does deterministic causation, It may well be that one can imagine an indeterminism that is compatible with there being choice, effort, control, and therefore responsibility. See Kane, Robert, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 8Google Scholar. But such compatibility will have no leg up on a like compatibility of deterministic causation with that same choice, effort, control, and therefore responsibility.

128 Clark, Thomas, “Fear of Mechanism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 (1999): 279–93, reprinted in B. Libet, A. Freeman, and K. Sutherland, eds., The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will (Exeter, U.K.: Imprint Academic, 2004), 279–93, at 281Google Scholar.

129 Pockett, “Introduction,” 5.

130 Haggard, Patrick and Libet, Benjamin, “Conscious Intention and Brain Activity,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8 (2001): 4763, at 47–48Google Scholar.

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132 Libet, Benjamin, “Do We Have Free Will?,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 (1999): pp. 4757, reprinted in Benjamin Libet, Anthony Freeman, and Keith Sutherland, eds., The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will (UK: Imprint Academic, 2004), 52Google Scholar.

133 Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative,” 536–38.

134 Libet, “Do We Have Free Will?,” 52–53.

135 E.g., Brass, Marcel and Haggard, Patrick, “To Do or Not to Do: The Neural Signature of Self-Control,” Journal of Neuroscience, 27 (2007): 91419145, at 9144CrossRefGoogle Scholar:

“Our data identify a clear neural basis for inhibiting intentions and thus identify the neural correlate of the veto process. The hypothesis of a special, non-neural veto process could therefore become unnecessary.”

136 Libet, Benjamin, “Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8 (2001): 5965, at 61Google Scholar.

137 Roediger, Henry, Goode, Michael, Zaromb, Franklin, “Free Will and the Control of Action,” in Baer, J., Kaufman, J., and Baumeister, R., eds., Are We Free?: Psychology and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 208Google Scholar.

138 Daniel Wegner, “Self is Magic,” in J. Baer, et al., Are We Free?, 226.

139 On causal influence going across unchanging states as well as chains of events, see Moore, Michael, “The Nature of Singularist Theories of Causation,” The Monist, 92 (2009): 323, reprinted in Moore, Causation and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 500–501, 510CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

140 As Freud is reported to have said (at an awards ceremony in 1927 celebrating his “discovery of the unconscious”), “My only claim to discovery is by being ill-read.” On Freud's non-psychoanalytic antecedents, see Moore, Law and Psychiatry, 126–34, 250–51, 265, 327.

141 Ibid., 126–42, 249–80, 322–37.

142 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, in the Standard Edition, Vol. 16, 285.

143 Moore, Law and Psychiatry, 128, 133, 256, 274–75.

144 Dennett, Content and Consciousness, 90–96. The role of consciousness (in the sense of privileged access) is also emphasized by Choudhury, Suparna and Blakemore, Sarah-Jayne, “Intentions, Actions, and the Self,” in Pockett, S., Banks, W., and Gallagher, S., eds., Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 4849Google Scholar as crucial to ownership of actions and self-construction:

“the feeling of agency … is a mark of selfhood … the conscious awareness of unconsciously monitored actions is the means by which our actions are experienced as subjectively real, willed, and owned. Consciousness is thus embodied: it is through action that we become conscious of ourselves as “distinct selves.” (Emphasis in original, citation omitted).

145 Pockett, “The Neuroscience of Movement,” 19–21.

146 Wegner gets the universal claim only by separating what is referred to by “will” into the phenomenal (or conscious) will, and the empirical will. If the claim is that the conscious will (i.e., phenomenology alone, with no physical realization) never causes movement, all can agree (for this would be a dualism). But Wegner's data on what he calls the illusion of control cases is much more interesting than this; the data suggest that in such cases, willing as such (the deep reference being to its essentially physical nature) does not cause the behavior. The only point in the text is that this more interesting point is also limited to the data explored by Wegner, viz, the illusion of control cases.

147 As Wegner notices in his discussion of Libet's findings. Wegner, Illusion of Conscious Will, 49–55; Wegner, “Author's Resopnse,”684: “The idea of ICW is not dependent on Libet's finding … this is because ICW … is not about whether thought causes action. It is about whether the experience of conscious will reflects such causation.”

148 Wegner, “Self Is Magic,” 233.

149 Freud, Sigmund, “The Unconscious,” Collected Papers, IV, Strachey, J., ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 102Google Scholar.

150 Moore, Law and Psychiatry, 142–52.

151 Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative,” 536.

152 Haynes, “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions,” 543.

153 Ibid., 545. Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 68–72, collect numerous other examples of neuroscientific animizing of the brain.

154 David Hume, section 8.20 of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “Liberty and Necessity.”

155 Sturgeon, Nicholas, “What Difference Does It Make Whether Moral Realism Is True?,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 24 (1986): Supplement, 115–41, at 136 n.1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

156 Greene and Cohen, “Neuroscience Changes Nothing,”

157 De Baigard, Felipe, Mandelbaum, Eric, and Ripley, Davidhave a go at testing these sociological speculations of Greene and Cohen. See theirResponsibility and the Brain Sciences,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Springer Science on-line publishing, 24 December 2008Google Scholar.

158 Danto, Arthur, “Consciousness and Motor Control,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8 (1985), 540–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

159 The beginnings of my answers to some of these challenges may be found in Moore, , “Libet's Challenge(s) to Responsible Agency,” in Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter and Nadel, Lynn, eds., Conscious Will and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 207–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in lecture form, at http://www.cas.illinois.edu/Events/ViewPublicEvent.aspx?Guid=8A6A6DD2-699A-478F-8651-C8C2C6D1F389, (Nineteenth Annual Center for Advanced Study Lecture, September, 2009), and http://www/nmc.uni-freiburg.de/video/Videoaufzeichnungen/rechtswissenschaften/recht-ws-2009-10, (Lecture to the Institute for Legal Philosophy and Public Affairs, Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany, March, 2010). My colleagues Al Mele, Adina Roskies, and Stephen Morse have also done recent work that tracks some of these concerns. See Mele, Alfred, Free Will and Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mele, Alfred, Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roskies, Adina, “Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Responsibility,” Trends in Cognitive Science, vol. 10, no. 9 (2006), www.sciencedirect.comCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Morse, Stephen, “Determinism and the Death of Folk Psychology: Two Challenges to Responsibility from Neuroscience,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science, and Technology, 9 (2008): 135Google Scholar.