How should neuroscience, psychology and
behavioral genetics impact legal responsibility practices? Recent findings from
these fields are sometimes claimed to threaten the moral foundations of legal
responsibility practices by revealing that determinism, or something like it, is
true. On this account legal responsibility practices should be abolished because
there is no room for such outmoded fictions as responsibility in an enlightened
and scientifically-informed approach to the regulation of society. However, the
chapters in this volume reject this claim and its related agenda of radical
legal reform. Embracing instead a broadly compatibilist approach - one according
to which responsibility hinges on psychological features of agents not on
metaphysical features of the universe - this volume's authors demonstrate that
the behavioral and mind sciences may impact legal responsibility practices in a
range of different ways, for instance: by providing fresh insight into the
nature of normal and pathological human agency, by offering updated medical and
legal criteria for forensic practitioners as well as powerful new diagnostic and
intervention tools and techniques with which to appraise and to alter minds, and
by raising novel regulatory challenges. Science and law have been locked in a
philosophical dialogue on the nature of human agency ever since the 13th century
when a mental element was added to the criteria for legal responsibility. The
rich story told by the 14 essays in this volume testifies that far from ending
this philosophical dialogue, neuroscience, psychology and behavioral genetics
have the potential to further enrich and extend this dialogue.
