Neuroscientific challenges to free will and responsibility

Roskies, Adina L.

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.07.011

Cited by 146 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Intuitively, they also challenge the assumption that we have free will and that we are, in general, justified in holding each other morally responsible-they challenge free will and moral responsibility, for short. EC1 is most frequently mentioned in this respect, but EC2 -4 are also relevant here, as I will explain in due course (see, most prominently, Libet 1999;Wegner 2002; see also Doris 2002;Nelkin 2005;Roskies 2006;Pockett et al 2006;Baer et al 2008;SinnottArmstrong and Nadel 2011). 1 Obviously, EC1 and EC2 are closely related and there is a potential overlap as the conscious control of action can plausibly be taken to involve the conscious initiation of action.…”

Section: Empirical Challenges: a Brief Summarymentioning

confidence: 88%

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Conscious Will, Reason-Responsiveness, and Moral Responsibility

Schlosser

2013

J Ethics

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Empirical evidence challenges many of the assumptions that underlie traditional philosophical and commonsense conceptions of human agency. It has been suggested that this evidence threatens also to undermine free will and moral responsibility. In this paper, I will focus on the purported threat to moral responsibility. The evidence challenges assumptions concerning the ability to exercise conscious control and to act for reasons. This raises an apparent challenge to moral responsibility as these abilities appear to be necessary for morally responsible agency. I will argue that this challenge collapses once the underlying conditions on moral responsibility are specified in sufficient detail. I will argue, in other words, that the empirical evidence does not support a challenge to the assumption that we are, in general, morally responsible agents. In the final section, I will suggest that empirical research on human agency is nevertheless relevant to various questions about moral responsibility.

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Section: Empirical Challenges: a Brief Summarymentioning

confidence: 88%

“…See Libet 1999;Wegner 2002;Greene and Cohen 2004;Roskies 2006; and many of the contributions to Pockett et al 2006;Baer et al 2008;Sinnott-Armstrong and Nadel 2011. Doris 2002and Nelkin 2005 focus on the challenge to moral responsibility, but their discussion is restricted to the challenge from EC4.…”

Section: Free Will and Moral Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Conscious Will, Reason-Responsiveness, and Moral Responsibility

Schlosser

2013

J Ethics

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“…How much this partial decomposition begins to explain criminality, however, seems still very much open to question because, again, the vast majority of patients with impairments in theory of mind or value-based decision-making are not criminals. In a way this is good news for folk psychology and jurisprudence: our concepts of moral responsibility and free will are not challenged by these data, since neither the brain lesions nor the lesion network maps explain criminality (17).…”

Section: Moral Responsibility and Free Willmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for the neural causes of criminal behavior

Adolphs

Gläscher

Tranel

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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All behavior is proximally caused by the brain, but the neural causes of most complex behaviors are still not understood. Much of our ignorance stems from the fact that complex behavior depends on distributed neural control. Unlike a reflex, where the arc from sensation to action can be traced through a few synapses, most volitional behavior involves a dense causal web through which stimuli, memories, beliefs, and other factors exert their effects. Disruption anywhere in this causal web can produce effects that are difficult to trace back to their origin. Against this background, the finding that focal lesions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex could lead to immoral and even criminal behavior generated considerable surprise and interest (1, 2). While a number of rare cases have now been described in whom a focal lesion caused criminality, these are neither very consistent (the lesions occur in several different anatomical locations) nor at all reliable (only a small fraction of patients, for any lesion location, show criminal behavior). To explain the effects of a lesion on criminal behavior, we need to understand what it is that the lesion does to the rest of the brain, a network-level understanding of lesion effects now provided by the new study of Darby et al. in PNAS (3). A Disconnection ApproachDarby et al. (3) began by searching the literature for cases documenting criminal behavior following a focal brain lesion. They found 17 of these, with lesions predominantly including the prefrontal cortex but also other regions. To estimate the distal effects of such brain damage, lesion network mapping (4) was used, showing which other brain regions, in healthy brains, would normally be functionally connected with the location of the lesion. This approach effectively treats the brain of the lesion patient as equivalent to a healthy brain in which all those regions functionally connected to the lesion site have been instantaneously affected. To do this, Darby et al. (3) leveraged a large reference dataset of restingstate functional MRI (fMRI) data from healthy individuals [from the Brain Genomics Superstruct Project (5)]. From each lesion patient a map was produced showing where, in this resting-state dataset of healthy individuals, the lesion site had strong functional connectivity. Maps of these functionally connected regions were then overlapped across the patients, producing a composite map showing all of the places in a healthy brain that were predicted to be impacted by the lesions. This innovative approach (4, 6) takes seriously the notion of a disconnection syndrome, a term popularized by Norman Geschwind (7) in the 1960s: it is the idea that behavioral impairments can be caused by the disruption of the connections between brain regions rather than by damage to one particular region itself.The composite connectivity map based on positive correlations in the resting-state dataset in fact included many of the regions that, when themselves lesioned, were associated with criminality: the ventromedial and orbi...

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“…As Roskies (2006) argues, neuroscience can show the mechanisms for behaviour, but it does not show that the brain determines behaviour. Fine et al (2013) maintain that over simplified and rigid brain-to-behaviour narratives fail to account for the interplay of social and environmental factors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%