A neuroscientific approach to normative judgment in law and justice

Abstract

Developments in cognitive neuroscience are providing new insights into the nature of normative judgment. Traditional views in such disciplines as philosophy, religion, law, psychology and economics have differed over the role and usefulness of intuition and emotion in judging blameworthiness. Cognitive psychology and neurobiology provide new tools and methods for studying questions of normative judgment. Recently, a consensus view has emerged, which recognizes important roles for emotion and intuition and which suggests that normative judgment is a distributed process in the brain. Testing this approach through lesion and scanning studies has linked a set of brain regions to such judgment, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and posterior superior temporal sulcus. Better models of emotion and intuition will help provide further clarification of the processes involved. The study of law and justice is less well developed. We advance a model of law in the brain which suggests that law can recruit a wider variety of sources of information and paths of processing than do the intuitive moral responses that have been studied so far. We propose specific hypotheses and lines of further research that could help test this approach.

Environmental judgment in early childhood and its relationship with the understanding of the concept of living beings

“…From this standpoint, also known as the intuitionism 2004), it is believed that unconscious emotional processing is responsible for the majority of the usual moral judgments and that “most of the action in moral judgment is in the automatic, affectively laden intuitions, not in conscious verbal reasoning theory” (Haidt, 2008, p.70). Therefore, the conscious and verbally expressed evaluations on actions will play a minor role when it comes to examining an individual’s normative judgment and it is thought that right versus wrong evaluative feelings regarding acts or characters happen “without any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of search, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion” (Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008, p. 188).…”

Mode of Effective Connectivity within a Putative Neural Network Differentiates Moral Cognitions Related to Care and Justice Ethics

“…In contrast, deontologists such as Immanuel Kant propose universal moral principles that should be observed despite ‘the greater good’ and determine the moral worth of an action by examining its inherent value (for review [57] ). A study of normative judgments in the law has shown that juries' decisions are not entirely dispassionate and rationally-based but can be strongly influenced by emotion [58] . In economics, emotion has also been found to interfere with the rational motivation of obtaining maximal profit predicted by neoclassical economics and game theory [59] .…”

The Neurobiology of Moral Behavior:Review and Neuropsychiatric Implications

“…Furthermore, Anglo-American jurisprudence distinguishes between reason-based law and a natural law based on what a “reasonable person” would do in like circumstance. 169 Paradoxically, under the law a “reasonable person” is someone who actually responds to intact moral emotions; therefore, the proof that these patients lack the faculties of a “reasonable person” is the sociopathic behaviors themselves. These considerations demand a reappraisal of the how we view culpability and criminal violations among brain-injured patients.…”