“What is it that you do again?”: thinking about criminal responsibility

Abstract

I study the intersection between contemporary neuroscience and the theory of criminal responsibility. Hanging around disciplinary intersections like this can be fun: people don’t always look where they are going and if you wait long enough you might witness a crash or two. Casting aside the metaphor, my job begins by identifying the problems and tensions that emerge from the different ways in which we view the world. What might those problems be in the case of neuroscience and criminal responsibility? Well, we can divide it into two classic problems. The first is the problem of competing descriptions. Simplifying somewhat, we can say that neuroscientists describe human behaviour from the bottom-up, beginning with chemical and electrical signals between individual nerve cells and working up to the functional processing that takes place within and between different brain regions. These descriptions are mechanistic, deterministic and reductive. By way of contrast, theorists of ...